Covid-19 Inquiry: Cummings comes to London

Dominic Cummings came to London from Northumberland yesterday to explain to the UK’s official Covid Inquiry why he considered so many of the ministers and civil servants with whom he worked through the pandemic to be “morons” and worse.

So what? People who were paying close attention at the time may feel they didn’t learn much that was new. But a lot of people weren’t, and they will.

This was a critically important part of the UK’s answer to whether it can

• agree on the basic facts of a Covid narrative;
• identify what went wrong to prevent it happening again; and
• hold anyone accountable. 

A long session with Cummings and a shorter one with Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former communications chief, put on record strong evidence that far from getting “the big calls right”, as Conservative Central Office would have it, Johnson was more often wrong, heartless, indecisive, unserious and ill-advised. 

Wrong. On 15 October 2020 Johnson sent a WhatsApp message to colleagues noting the median age of men and women dying from Covid was above life expectancy.

• Johnson concluded that the public health message was “Get Covid and live longer”. This may have been facetious; it was also nonsense. Life expectancy improves as you get older so most old people who died of Covid were robbed of years of life. 
• More seriously and with catastrophic consequences, Johnson said the policy message of the age-at-death numbers was not to go for a second national lockdown. He had to call one in the end, but too late for tens of thousands who died.

Heartless. Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life,” his chief scientific advisor wrote in his diary. Sir Patrick Vallance also noted Johnson saying his chief whip and backbenchers thought “we should let the old people get it” and adding: “I must say I agree.”

Indecisive. Cain told the inquiry Johnson would “oscillate” and “take a decision from the last person in the room”. Cain said all the PM’s senior advisors had backed a lockdown by 14 March 2020 but it was not announced until 23 March – a delay Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson later said may have cost 20,000 lives.

Unserious. “Get in here he’s melting down,” Cummings wrote in a message to Cain written on 19 March 2020 and shown to the inquiry. “He’s back to Jaws mode wank.” Cummings said Johnson endlessly likened his position defending the UK economy to that of Mayor Larry Vaughn of Amity in the film Jaws, keeping the beaches open as a killer shark lurked offshore.

Ill-advised. Cummings’s contempt for Johnson is famously matched by that for many of his advisors, including…

• Matt Hancock, the former health minister, whom he accuses of spreading a lethal lie about Covid in 2020 and to the inquiry. He said Hancock “sowed chaos” by repeatedly claiming it was unlikely people had the virus if they didn’t have symptoms when asymptomatic transmission was in fact one of its defining features. Cummings said this was clear to all in Downing Street by 11 March 2020, and “Patrick Vallance made extremely clear to me and to others in Number Ten that what Hancock was saying was factually wrong”.
• Mark Sedwill, the then cabinet secretary, who urged Johnson to go on TV and say Covid was like chicken pox – until told to stop it by an expert who noted “chicken pox doesn’t spread exponentially and kill thousands and thousands of people”.

There were no plans, Cummings said. There was no “grand debate”, only “fuckpigs” in a “terrifyingly shit” cabinet office, and what Johnson himself called a “disgusting orgy of narcissism” in place of competent government. 

Cummings tried to pretend he was above the fray. In fact he was on the payroll at the heart of government presuming to lecture the prime minister like a latter-day Rasputin. His profanity (and misogyny) will stay in the record – Hugo Keith KC read it slowly for the stenographers – but it may not linger as long in the public mind as a searing sense of dithering in Downing Street while the virus spread at an eventual cost of 231,332 lives.