What Dominic Cummings told Boris Johnson
Dominic Cummings said civil servants wanted to delay the stay-at-home announcement at the start of the pandemic because they didn't work on weekends.
In messages published by Covid Inquiry, Boris Johnson's former chief adviser also said Sir Mark Sedwill, then head of the civil service, “isn't Scooby.”
In March 2020, Cummings advised Johnson to chair daily meetings in the Cabinet Room and avoid interference from devolved administrations in Cobra crisis meetings.
Messages Reaching Us was published in full and revealed that Mr Cummings also criticized Sir Mark and seemed to suggest that civil servants were negligent.
The message on the morning of March 12, 2020, the day the country moved from the containment phase to the delay phase of the fight against the pandemic, said: “Big challenges await us. CABOFF is terribly shitty, has no plans, is completely behind the pace.”
He said he and other policy and public affairs advisers, including Lee Cain and James Slack, “had to lead and lead “.
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Another message read: “Mark is out for lunch – has no idea what's going on and his own officials know he doesn't know. We need to announce TODAY, not next week, “if you have a cold/flu, stay home.”
“Some CABOFF want an extension because they didn't get work done and don't work on the weekends. We must pick up the pace today. We are looking at 100-500 thousand deaths between the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. For comparison, in 1918 there were 250 thousand.”
In two subsequent messages that same morning, Mr Cummings called on the Prime Minister to hold daily meetings with his Cabinet team without the participation of the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland governments.
You are required to chair daily Cabinet meetings ministers, not COBRA, on this issue from tomorrow. I'm going to tell the system this… NOT with DA (Decentralized Administrations) on the phone all the time so people can't tell you the truth”
Later that day, the UK announced it was moving from the containment phase to a delayed response to the pandemic and had raised the country's risk from moderate to high.
The public were told the most important thing they could do was wash their hands and self-isolate if they have symptoms.
In his witness statement, Mr Johnson said he often kept Michael Gove as chairman of four… Cobra Nation meetings partly because he was the “target of nationalist rage” and did not want to provoke the SNP.
“Firstly, it is optically incorrect for the UK prime minister to hold regular meetings with other DA [devolved administration] first ministers, as if the UK were some kind of mini-EU of four countries and we met as a council” in a federal structure .
“In my opinion, this is not how devolution is supposed to work. More importantly, I am afraid that I was aware that I was prone to become a particular target of nationalist rage. Instead of provoking the SNP, I wanted to relent and get agreement. I had faith that Michael would do a good job.”
The investigation also reported tensions surrounding the data collection operation at the start of the pandemic.
On 25 March 2020, he complained that “NHS figures remain a mess” and “none of them are consistent”. “The amount of reporting seems crazy, different every day. Using WTF is a 9am number which is then loaded retrospectively etc,” he wrote. “I am truly amazed that even after a few weeks we are having such a hard time getting these basic things… Am I being unreasonable?”
Many mistakes
On Tuesday the inquiry was heard by Lord O'Donnell, who heads the civil service from 2005 to 2011. He said lockdown parties in Downing Street had damaged public confidence.
“Can you imagine – there were a lot of mistakes this time – if you tried to do it again, would you get the same level of compliance?” He said. “You really need as much trust as possible. So yes, it was damaging and damaging to the future ability of governments to deal with behavioral problems.”
Hugo Keith CC, the inquiry's lead lawyer, referred to a diary entry written by Sir Patrick Vallance. , the government's then chief scientific adviser, where he quoted Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, as saying Downing Street was “at war with itself.”
Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Case spoke “to all my predecessors as Cabinet Secretary, and no one had seen anything like it.” When asked about this, Lord O'Donnell confirmed that he had been consulted and said it reflected an unprecedented crisis.
“In my view, this means that Simon Case was dealing with a much , a much more complex situation than I have ever encountered.”
The investigation continues.
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