UK government failed public on Covid response,
says Dominic Cummings
Boris Johnson’s former aide says ministers ‘fell
disastrously short’ of standards public had right to expect
Heather
Stewart Political editor
Wed 26 May
2021 10.30 BST
Dominic
Cummings has apologised for the mistakes Boris Johnson’s government made during
the Covid-19 pandemic, conceding that he and his colleagues disastrously failed
the British public.
The prime
minister’s former chief adviser was giving evidence to the cross-party health
and science and technology committees, chaired by the former Conservative
cabinet ministers Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt.
Striking
what appeared to be a deliberately humble tone, Cummings began his evidence by
claiming that he and other advisers and ministers had failed to grasp the
seriousness of the situation in January and well into February.
“The truth
is that senior ministers, officials, advisers like me, fell disastrously short
of the standards the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis
like this,” Cummings told Clark, the committee’s chair.
“When the
public needed us most, we failed. And I’d like to say to all the families of
those who have died unnecessarily, how sorry I am for the mistakes that were
made, and my own mistakes.”
Cummings’
evidence on Wednesday was being closely watched across Westminster, after a
string of highly critical tweets in recent days in which he has criticised the
decisions made by his former boss, and the preparedness of Whitehall for a
crisis.
He claimed
he had realised the potential seriousness of the situation in Wuhan, China in
January, and read out texts he sent to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, on
25 Janurary, asking about the government’s pandemic preparedness.
He said
Hancock reassured him the government had a regularlyupdated pandemic plan ready
– and that other institutions, including Public Health England and the World
Health Organization, had at that time been reassuring.
But he
conceded he had then not pressed the issue – and said Johnson had continued not
to realise the scale of the problem. “In February, the prime minister regarded
this as just a scare story,” he said, suggesting Johnson had compared it to
swine flu.
Cummings
made the extraordinary claim that he and other officials deliberately kept the
prime minister away from meetings of the government’s emergency Cobra meetings
during the early days of the crisis, because they thought Johnson would make
light of the virus.
“Certainly,
the view of various officials inside No 10 was if we have the PM chair Cobra
meetings, and he just tells everyone ‘don’t worry about it, I’m going to get
[England’s chief medical officer] Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with
coronavirus, so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of’, that would
not help, actually, serious planning.”
He said
much of Downing Street’s attention in the early part of February was focused on
other issues, including carrying out a cabinet reshuffle, and that in
mid-February several key figures were “literally skiing”.
He added:
“We didn’t figure this out until the back end of February.”
Cummings
described it as “sort of tragic” that someone who had spent as much time as he
had urging people to avoid groupthink, that he had not sounded the alarm more
loudly.
Clark
pressed Cummings about why he had not attended meetings of the key
decision-making and advisory committees, Cobra and Sage, during the early days
of the pandemic.
Cummings
said he had sent colleagues, including his ally Ben Warner, to some meetings
and claimed it was not helpful for him to attend all Sage meetings because they
involved technical briefings.
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