Thread by @IanDunt

What a day. Four straight hours of of testimony from a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood challenging the record of a self-interested narcissist who has weaponised falsehood.

The real poetry will come when the self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood realises he cannot inflict damage on the other self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood, because he undermined truth-telling as a functional quality in political discourse.

It's like Aesop's Fables for cunts.

And we're off. Four hours, dear Jesus.

Greg Clark starts questions. In your Rose Garden statement, you said you warned of pandemics for years. Did you get alarm bells ringing when covid first broke out?

Cummings may well be wearing the same white shirt he had on in that Rose Garden press conference. "When the public needed us most, the government failed." Cummings apologises personally for the mistakes made.

"When it started in January, I did think in part of my mind: Is this it?" Says organisations across the West were not ringing great alarm bells about it though. In retrospect "many institutions failed".

On Jan 25th he spoke to health secretary Matt Hancock to see where they were with prep. He has the exact words of the text he sent him. "To what extent have you investigated preparations for something terrible."

Hancock said they had four plans prepped, it was "top tier risk register".

Cummings: "It is true that I did this but I did not follow up on this and push it the way that I should have done."

This is a very different Cummings to the one in that Rose Garden. Emphasising his personal contrition and mistakes, rather than arrogantly disdaining any criticism or questioning. Goes without saying this version of him is more convincing.

When did he first talk to the PM? The first half of January.

"Retrospectively it was the most important issue. But in no way shape or form did the govt act like it was the most important thing. It didn't act that way in Feb, let alone Jan."

By roughly last ten days of Feb, it was over 90% of what Cummings was spending his time on.

"But it was certainly not... the govt itself and No.10 was not operating on a war footing in Feb on this in any way shape or form. Lots of key people were literally skiing in the middle of Feb."

Oooph on the skiing line.

"In retrospect I should have been hitting the panic button much more than I was in Feb. Like most people I was wrongly reassured by things like WHO and what we were told internally." Clarke says WHO declared emergency, they weren't giving reassurance.

Absolute deafening silence over Brexit in all these things the govt was so occupied by.

Procurement, HS2, reshuffles - sure. That small project Cummings helped force through, that we know took up all emergency planning capacity in the years running up to covid, and literally took place in Jan/Feb? Not so much.

Cummings confesses he didn't go the Cobra meetings on covid in Feb, or can't remember that he did - sent a couple of his people instead. Neither did he advise the PM to go to the meetings.

Clark is impressive.

Cummings: "Bear in mind one of the huge problems we had was things leaking and causing chaos in the media."

Clark: "Leaking from Cobra?"

Cummings: "Leaking from Cobra. Leaking from practically everything."

Clarke: "You're saying that the most secure meeting in Whitehall - where you have to leave your phone outside, it's swept for bugs - that meeting was so insecure you did not feel you could speak candidly?"

Cummings: "Certainly."

Clarke: You said that if we had competent people in charge, we could have avoided lockdown one. But you clearly didn't consider that you had to go to the meetings. So were you not the competent people?

Cummings struggling.

Cummings the FULL CAPS keyboard warrior now undermining the efforts of sober contrite expert Cummings at the committee.

Cummings says Johnson thought covid was a scare story. "The view of various officials in No.10 was, if we have the PM chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone it;s swine flu... that would not help actually serious planning."

Incredible statement from Cummings there. Not that the PM was useless, but that he was so useless his presence would have actively undermined a government response.

"I am not a technical person, I am not a smart person, I couldn't understand a lot of the models that were being discussed." Incredible. He said this.

From his mouth, from the hole in his face those are the words that emerged.

"A lot of it was over my head." This is really happening.

Why did Cummings change his 2019 bog between April and May 2020 to refer to covid?

Cummings: "Those stories were all false. Not a single letter of what I wrote in 2019 was ever changed."

He says the only change was to add a much longer section of a piece he was citing. It's an extremely contorted explanation. But ultimately he did change the blog.

Clark fucks him up quite comprehensively. "So you changed the blog by adding to it things you thought were of current interest?"

Cummings: "Correct."

Clarke points out that when he was in the heart of government during a pandemic, which he now criticises others for not handling correctly, he was post-hoc editing his blog posts.

Now on herd immunity. Monday March 9th. What happened that week?

Cummings explains herd immunity. The plan from the Dept for Health was: This disease will spread, vaccines won't be relevant in 2020. If it's unconstrained there'll be a sharp peak. Logical therefore to delay the peak arriving and push it down below capacity of health system.

This is all true and on the record, incidentally.

Why didn't UK govt learn from what ie Chinese were doing in Wuhan and try to suppress completely? They thought people wouldn't do that here and it would anyway lead to a worse second wave.

"It was seen as an inevitability." That's why in week of March 9th people from Sage and govt started to talk publicly about herd immunity. Again, this is all true and documented.

When Hancock said on March 15 that herd immunity wasn't part of the plan, was that wrong?

Yes, Cumming says.

"That was the plan. I'm completely baffled by why No.10 has tried to deny that. You can see it in the Cobra documents I've brought along."

Jeremy Hunt asking about a Sage meeting on March 5th. We now knew we were in a major global pandemic. The minutes say the only measures recommended were shielding vulnerable and elderly.

Did you advise the PM that Sage was wrong?

Cummings: "No, I didn't. I was ringing increasing alarm bells in first half of March. But..." Long pause.

He says he was starting to listen to experts say they had to lock down. "But official view through first half of March and into the week of the 16th was would "be more dangerous." He says he was "really torn".

He later demanded they change the original plan. But on March 5th he was still torn. He didn't advise that ie Cheltenham was cancelled. He was told that they weren't a risk and it would anyway push people into pubs.

No-one asked the obvious point: Why not close the pubs?

Cummings says he was told on March 7th by someone he trusted that "this plan could easily be mad, it could be incredibly destructive".

On the night of the 11th, he texted Pm and chief scientific adviser saying sensible people were saying risks of delay were higher than going too soon.

Did anyone in Sage share his view? C: "Most people in Sage thought this fundamental logic was still operative on the 11th and 12th."

So the 11th is the key date when Cummings said he raised the alarm over the strategy. Then there was push back in the system against advising people to stay home if you have symptoms.

That's when he realised "the system is basically announcing all these things because there's not a proper plan in place." That is damning.

Incidentally this timeline is extremely convincing. It tallies, almost day by day, with what we know. And Cummings in this case (unlike his idiot blog edits) is offering a realistic appraisal of his own thought process at the time.

And it is tragic, because of the reality of exponential growth. The decisions he's talking about cost thousands of lives.

"Me & others were literally pointing at the TV screen of Lombardy and saying: look what;s happening. We're getting text messages from our own family asking what;s going on. This assumption the public aren't frightened and don't want a lockdown is false and we should abandon it."

March 16th: PM advised change. People advised to socially distance, but pubs etc not closed. Did you advise we go further?

Cummings backtracks to the 12th. Reads out a message he sent to PM at 7:48am. "We've got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly shit. We must advise today if you feel ill stay home."

That morning theTimes had run a story about the PM, is girlfriend and their dog. She was angry and we had to deal with that. "The prime minister had his girlfriend going crackers over something completely trivial." This is amazing.

There was also pressure from Trump to join in a bombing campaign btw.

Friday 13th they finally pick through graphs and realise they would "smash through capacity of the NHS". In the evening he's in the PM's study and says they're heading for disaster.

Dep Cabinet secretary walks in and says official in charge of coordinating with Dept for Health. He said: "I've been told for years there was a whole plan for this. There is no plan. We're in huge trouble."

The Dep Cab sec added: "I think we are absolutely fucked. This country is heading for disaster. We're going to kill thousands of people."

I just...... No words.

That meeting was on 14th, Hunt says. On 16th, we still didn't close the pubs. What was Cummings advice? Did he say they should close? Cummings evades, then says: "Yes and no."

He says he showed the PM a graph showing what happens in various plans. Said we had to lockdown as soon as possible. But "thee is no lockdown plan, it doesn't exist, Sage haven;t modelled it, we are going to have figure out a plan."

Cummings sort of saying PM was kind of convinced, but they needed plan to put together a lockdown plan.

He references Independence Day "with Ben Warner in the Jeff Goldblum role". Usually that reference would occupy me for hours, but there's no time to dwell on it now.

Hunt: You didn't advise him to change tack until it was too late.

Cummings: "It was a huge failure of mine. In retrospect there;s no doubt I was wrong not to" push the panic button.

He says he questioned himself about what if he was wrong, and he pushed for change, and that was a disaster. I have to say I get that. It has the ring of truth.

Jesus Christ. He says on the 12th, the Cabinet Secretary was telling the PM that they had a herd immunity plan "like the old chickenpox parties".

Jesus fucking Christ.

This is March 12th. They'd had weeks by this stage, of seeing what happened in China, of seeing what was happening in Italy. And that's the conversation they were having. About chickenpox parties.

When we talk about when we mention competence in government, about having people in charge who have the intellectual and emotional suitability for the role. This is what it means. This is what happens when you decide that kind of shit doesn't matter.

"I should have done this in Jan, is the reality of it. You read about these things in history books. It was a classic historical example of group think in action."

Cummings: Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly."

"There's no doubt that many senior peop'e performed far below the standards the public has the right to expect." He told Johnson several times to fire Hancock and so did many other senior people.

It's a bonfire of bastards going down in that room right now.

Each second another shocker.

"The shielding plan was literally hacked together in 2 all-nighters after Thursday 19th. There was no plan for shielding.There wasn't even a helpline. There wasn't a plan for financial incentives. There wasn't a plan for almost anything in any kind of detail at all."

I need coffee and the loo but I can't step away.

"On the day the PM tested positive, we were told by officials that the Dept of Health had been turning down ventilators because the price had been marked up. it completely beggars belief. "

Clark tells Cummings that accusing Hancock of lying is a serious charge. What's the evidence?

"In summer he said everyone who needed treatment got the treatment they required...

He knew that was a lie because he'd been briefed by the chief scientific adviser himself about the first peak and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved and people were left to die in horrific circumstances."

"In mid-April, the sec of state told us everything is fine with PPE. When I came back [after getting covid] almost the first meeting I had in the Cabinet room was about the disaster with PPEand how... hostpials all over the country were running out."

Hancock blamed others, including the chancellor. Cummings asked the Cabinet secretary to investigate. The Cab sec said: "It's completely untrue, I have lost confidence in the secretary of state's honesty in these meetings."

That is.... quite a thing to say. The Cabinet secretary had no confidence that the secretary of state for health would tell the truth during a pandemic.

Course it could all be bollocks, because the person saying it is himself someone who doesn't care about truth. Haha! What fun. A festival of bullshitters.

It's like a murder mystery directed by David Lynch. Who knows what the fuck is true, or what's going on, or if it means anything.

Cummings says "all the stories" about Rishi Sunak trying to stop lockdowns "are wrong". Er, really? This is very well documented by respected journalists with a track record for telling the truth.

It's notable that Cummings has attacked Johnson, absolutely savaged Hancock, but so far has gone out of his way to protect Sunak.

Ok mark this shit down because it is one for the ages.

"In any sensible rational govt, it is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position."

"I'm not smart, I've not built great things in the world. It's completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there just the same as it's crackers that Boris Johnson was in there."

Let me be the first to say: I agree with Dominic Cummings.

Clark: Did you ever engage in unauthorised briefings?

Cummings: What do you mean by unauthorised briefings?

Clarke: Briefings that weren't authorised.

In the end he says that yes he did, but there was a lot of chatter about Laura Kuenssberg beforehand which the nuttier parts of Twitter will presumably eat up for some time to come.

Cummings is currently being asked if he'll pass over the communication he had with journalists. Can I just state here: fuck that. No-one who knew the first thing about journalism would request such a thing.

Made an error earlier when I said Clark was impressive. Man's off his tits. No-one would ever talk to a journalist again.

"What is the problem with publishing that so people can see it?" Clark asks. Christ's guts man get a hold of yourself.

His line of questioning is so deranged he has turned Dominic Cummings, a man who blacklisted critical media outlets, into a defender of press freedom.

"You know that spider-man meme with all the spider-mans pointing at each other". I can't it's all too much. It's hitting every point of interest I have at the same time.

Quick reminder that this session is called 'Coronavirus: lessons learned' and Cummings' chief conclusion is that people like him and Johnson should never be allowed in politics.

I have this book I wrote called How To Be A Liberal, which makes very similar arguments, perhaps I should send it to him.

He's fucking in it, and does not play a praiseworthy role.

Not enough flags Katherine. Look at your failure of patriotism. You've barely covered the interior walls of the house. Bet you don't even sleep in Union Jack sheets.

I haven't watched TV this hard since Avengers Endgame.

He now regularly refers to one ofthese key meetings as "The Independence Day Jeff Goldblum meeting".

Want to know something funny? We're only halfway through.

Cummings asked asked about his point that there was no plan on March 13th. But his wife wrote in the Spectator that he already knew there was no plan two weeks earlier. So what was he doing in the meantime? Cummings said he was having "meeting after meeting".

I am kind of sympathetic to this. Even as a journalist, when you write about covid you feel this sense of responsibility, because if you get something wrong it's not crazy to say that it could threaten the life of the reader.

Cummings' account of the Sage/govt view etc is correct on herd immunity. it would have been very difficult at that stage to strike out against it. Going against what felt like an expert consensus in govt would have caused anyone severe anguish.

"Your previous attitude towards select committees has previously been quite literally contempt. Are you here today to help us learn lessons or settle scores for yourself?"

Cummings: "I was invited here to come and give, to explain the truth about what happened. The families of all the thousands of people who died deserve the truth. That's why I'm here."

Cummings said he went into got to prevent Corbyn and a second referendum on Brexit. "I thought I could help solve that problem."

You get a sense of how different this new contrite Cummings is by his comments on Brexit. "Reasonable people can agree or disagree about Brexit. It's perfectly reasonable to have the view that Remain should have won."

Rather significant change there from the ENEMIES OF PEOPLE YOU HATE BRITAIN shit we got from him earlier. Still, welcome aboard.

In a purely psychological level, this is gripping.

Clark: "We were embarked on a policy that doesn't require fancy modelling. If you have an adult population of 60 million and two thirds get covid and 1% of the people that get it die, then you've got 400,000 people that are going to die."

And yet Sage for six weeks until March 14th was recommending the flatten-the-curve strategy. Either this is group think "that you were part of" or you "knew what was going on but felt too junior" to call it out. Which is it?

Cummings says it was a combination of both. "It as obviously going to be terrible, but terrible as that looks it's better than the alternative."

"The fundamental group think problem was being trapped in the idea that there was only a choice between herd immunity by Sept or by Jan. Whereas the right way of looking at it was: We can avoid both."

15 minute break now. Thank God.

Starmer is currently savaging Johnson in the Commons on the basis of the Cummings testimony.

Johnson says Starmer is "fixated on the rear view mirror". What an appalling disdain given what we've heard today.

He then desperately tries to talk vaccines.

Johnson denies that the Cabinet secretary told him he lad lost faith in the truthfulness of Hancock. Cummings said he did. So either he or Johnson is lying. About Hancock lying.

Starmer also asked Johnson if he said that "covid was only killing 80 year olds". Johnson gave lots of blather in response, but did not actually deny saying it. Which is... notable.

OK, Cummings is back.

You get a good sense for how fucked we are as a country by the fact that Jeremy Hunt, who looks like a frightened rodent caught in the headlights at night, is basically an elder statesman in this session.

Cummngs is gunning for Hancock again.

Dunno what Hancock did to him man, but he fucking pissed this guy off.

Basically blaming him for single-handedly undermining test-and-trace. "Completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say 'look at me and my 100K target'. It was criminal disgraceful behaviour which caused serious harm."

"We've got to get a grip of Hancock" lol.

By the end of May, when test-and-trace was set up, Hunt says, there were about 2,000 daily infections. "That was too high to have an effective test-and-trace system." You can't track down that many people to get them to isolate. Cummings says that's "85% correct".

Cummings: "It took too long to get set up, the system was hugely distracted in April by the Hancock pledge, but fundamentally this should have been happening in January."

Cummings talks about this idea at the time that the country wouldn't stand for lockdown. What strikes me about this assumption is its incredibly despairing view of human nature.

It presumed that people would not be willing to stay at home in order to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. Or even to protect themselves. It's incredible to me that this was treated as consensus.

Ad it's quite a pleasant thought that, bar a few lunatic columnists and talk radio DJs, it was so wrong. People are better than we think they are.

Amazing. "I blame myself for many many things in this crisis, but one thing can say completely honestly is: I said repeatedly from Feb/March, if we don't fire [Hancock], we are going to kill people and it;s going to be a catastrophe."

"I wasn't the only one telling the PM that. The Cabinet sec said directly to the PM: 'PM the British system is not set up to deal with a secretary of state who repeatedly lies in meetings'."

Reminder that Johnson just said explicitly in the Commons that this did not happen. Either he is misleading the House or Cummings is misleading the select committee.

You'd never have guessed that by electing liars who hired liars we'd find ourselves completely incapable of discovering the truth.

Interesting that Cummings seems to live in a very black and white universe. Everyone he mentions is either a hero or villain. Hancock is basically Skeletor. "Mark Warner", though, "is one of the smartest and most ethical people that I've ever met in my life".

I've learned from his repeated references to Independence Day and Spider-Man that we share many cultural references. But he seems to view the world entirely through that basic hero/villain lens.

But notable of course that Cummings himself is not portrayed as hero or villain. He made these mistakes, he learned, he lacked courage sometimes, but other times showed it. He is the only grey thing in this black and white world.

PM "came close to removing [Hancock] in April but fundamentally wouldn't do it... pretty much every senior person in No10 said you can;t go into the autumn with the same system in place or we'll have another catastrophe on our hands.

Cummings visited Johnson at the end of July. "You need to know I'm going to leave by... December. I think it;s best if you and I part ways. He said: 'Why?' I said because this whole system is chaos. This building is chaos."

"You know perfectly well from having worked with me that I can get great teams together and manage them but you are more frightened of me having the power to stop the chaos than you are of the chaos."

It's like a mixture of Judge Dredd and David Brent.

Says Johnson said he agreed. "Chaos isn't that bad," he said, apparently. "It just means everyone has to look to me to see who is in charge."

That line also carries kind of a ring of truth about it, it;s the kind of nonsense he might say, and it corresponds to the character of his administration.

But then again: who knows? Nothing means anything. It's all a squelch of mendacious nonsense.

Hancock also responsible for the deaths in care homes, apparently. In April, when they realised what happened, PM asked what had happened? Hancock had apparently said in Cabinet room that people would be tested before they left hospital and went back to care homes.

"We only subsequently found out that hadn't happened. The govt rhetoric was we'd put a shield around care homes. Complete nonsense. Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with covid back to the care homes."

Read that last sentence and take it in. The scale of the irresponsibility. The scale of the failure.

And that operates regardless of whether Hancock was responsible. Important to note that, given I'm pretty sure that if someone asked who killed JFK in this session, Cummings would say that Hancock did it.

Ok, the failure to close the borders. Two phases, Cummings says: before and after April. Before April, the advice to the PM was that closing the border would have no effect. Claims people said it was "basically racist". Mm.

After April, when they'd switched to lockdown, test and trace etc, "fundamentally there was no proper border policy because the prime minister never wanted a proper border policy".

What the fuck.

"His basic argument was.... he was back to 'lockdown was a terrible mistake, I should have been the mayor of Jaws, we should never have done lockdown one, the travel industry will be destroyed'."

"We should never have done lockdown one". Dear lord.

Says Johnson was affected by the Telegraph's anti-lockdown coverage. Again, that has a strong ring of truth to it.

Worth mentioning that Cummings' basic blame narrative - you can't blame PM for what happened until mid-March, but you can thereafter - corresponds to the investigative journalism we've seen, ie in Failures of State.

A friend texts...

Btw @BestForBritain is tweeting out the key video snippets of what's going on if you can't watch TV.

"Some of the people working on communications were some of the best in the world. Fundamentally the reason for all these problems was bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning, bad operational capability."

"It doesn't matter if you have great people doing comms, if the PM changes his mind ten times a day, calls up the media and contradicts his own policy day after day after day. You're going to have a communications disaster zone."

This is gold.

"With [Marcus] Rashford, the director of comms said to the PM - twice - don't pick a fight with Rashford. The PM decided to pick a fight and then surrendered twice."

"After that people said comms is stupid. No. What's stupid is picking a fight with Rashford over school meals. And what should have happened is getting the school meals policy right."

Fair play, that seems a pretty water-tight analysis to me.

Oh dear lord we;re on Barnard Castle.

It was " major disaster for the got and covid policy" he admits.

In autumn 2019, he moved out his house cos of security threats for six weeks. On Feb 28 2020, his wife said there was a gang outside that were threatening to break in & kill everyone. Cummings spoke to PM and Cab sec. It was suggested he move into govt accommodation or to family.

Eventually they decided they needed to get out of he house, move the family from London, "regardless of covid rules". They kept it quite even in No.10, so the same problem didn't happen at his parent's place.

The news reports misreported things so that chat with the police, which were about this, were in fact on breaking covid rules. They decided to stonewall everything and the story would go away.

Eventually, PM decided the line wouldn;t hold. "At this point I made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake."

"We had a chaotic situation in No.10. I said I'm not explaining these security things or I'll have a mobs outside my house. I ended up giving the whole Rose Garden thing where what I said was true but we left out a crucial part of it all."

This is all weird.

It's weird because a) it does nothing to address the lunatic explanation of testing your eyesight by driving. And b) he mentioned these security arrangements at the time didn't he? I'm sure I remember that.

Also: It doesn't explain Barnard Castle at all, does it?

Hunt: "One thing I don't understand in your narrative. If you were moving your family out of London for security reasons, why did you move them back?"

Cummings says he was so ill he thought he might die. His wife was worried about him. The medical advice was not to go back to work. But the PM had nearly just died. People told him govt was in freefall. So he went back and his wife decided to go back with him.

Please someone ask him abut Barnard Castle. We might as well get another comedy moment of testing eyesight in here for old times' sake.

HUNT STRIKES! Hunt asks the Barnard Castle question. "Do you stand by that account?"

"If I was going to make up a story, I'd have come up with a hell of a lot better story than that one right? It;s such a weird story." Would you Dom. Would you though.

Hunt: "Did it not seem crazy to... be testing your eyesight with your wife and your child in the car with you?"

Cummings: "It didn't seem crazy at the time. It was like: OK lets get in the car, drive up and down the road, if it feels bad, come home. See how I feel as I get going."

This also used to be my thought process back when I took drugs.

This has been going on a terribly long time now. How long has it been. Three days? Four? When will it end.

On delay to the inquiry: "The longer it's delayed, the more people will rewrite memories, the more documents will go astray, the more the whole thing will become cancerous."

Cummings is very confused about how parliament works.

A moment ago he said how disastrous it would be if we'd had a hung parliament during the pandemic. Just now he said MPs should have taken control to force the inquiry to act faster. But it was precisely a hung parliament which allowed MPs to wrestle control from govt before 2020.

Cummings says he had "zero to do with any of that nonsense" about culture war. Riiiiiight.

Interesting how keen he seems to be to stay on right side of Remainers, or at least liberal-mined critics of the government. I guess that's the natural demographic for the criticism he's making. But it's... quite the change.

I find it extraordinary, given how long this has all gone on for, that we've talked so little about Johnson's delay in the second and third lockdown. Unlike the first, there are no excuses for that. And the price we paid in human life was terrible.

They're adjourning for 20 minutes.

Incredibly, they're not done yet. The reconvene after 3pm for the final session.

Please someone make them stop.

Sorry, have had to drop out of this - ran out of time. Will have a piece up on what's happening today on @theipaper shortly and we'll have an episode of @OhGodWhatNowPod on it tonight.

Also, if you're interested in finding out about other way of doing politics that involve old fashioned things like truthfulness, empiricism and objectivity, you might like to read my book canburypress.com/collections/fr…