The Cummings Inquiry

Three years after acrimoniously parting ways with his former boss Boris Johnson, a vengeful Dominic Cummings appeared in front of the Covid Inquiry this afternoon and gave testimony every bit as damning as anticipated.

Some of the same themes emerged as yesterday – namely, Johnson’s utter inability to stick to a clear direction when it came to pandemic decision-making. The PM was described as an indecisive trolley by “pretty much everyone”, claimed his former top advisor. 

In characteristic style, Cummings offered a harsh critique of the machinery of government, describing the Cabinet Office as a “bomb site” when he took up his role as advisor to Johnson in 2019. 

A foul-mouthed Whatsapp exchange revealed at the inquiry today between Cummings and Lee Cain, Johnson’s former head of communications, laid bare his views on the calibre of cabinet ministers in charge during Covid. In August 2020, Cummings expressed the desperate need for a reshuffle to remove the “useless f***pigs in charge.” Gavin Williamson, the former Education secretary, and Matt Hancock, then health secretary, get a special mention.  

On what should have been tackled differently, Cummings expressed dismay today that borders stayed open for so long. Around the New Year, the UK should have closed down flights to China, he insisted – a measure which, alongside a functioning test and trace system, would have not only reduced the UK’s death toll but also allowed Britain to keep the economy open. Yet at the time, “the reaction from a lot of people was that closing the borders is racist”.

Cummings also offered up the damning verdict that there was no government plan to protect Britain’s vulnerable. The complete absence of a shielding plan for the older and vulnerable population by mid-March was “crackers”, he declared.

Other evidence surfacing at the inquiry today suggests this fed into Johnson’s wider attitude towards the elderly during the pandemic. 

Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life”, according to a 2020 diary entry revealed today, written by then chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.

The former PM’s allegedly blasé pandemic attitude towards the fate of Britain’s elderly population is something which has already been exposed in prior leaks, resulting in public shock at such “callousness” . Yet what is perhaps much more revealing today is that Vallance was not necessarily opposed to such a way of thinking.

Another diary entry from Vallance indicates this observation about Johnson’s stance was not necessarily intended as a criticism. The concluding line is telling: “[Johnson] says his party thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them.”

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