I feel like I might be in a minority but I’m approaching the Cummings hearing like this: he’s a super-whistleblower offering us a dress rehearsal for the full public inquiry
Huge admission right at start: “the truth is senior ministers, senior officials senior advisers like me tell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most the government failed”
“I’d like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that we made and for my own mistakes at that”
DC says on Jan 25 he asked Hancock where Govt was on planning for the pandemic. Says he is sorry he didn’t “follow up and push it in the way that I should have done”.
Virus was first raised with PM in first half of January. The Govt “in no way shape or form” acted like it was most important thing in February let alone January. Took up more than half his time in last half of February
Govt was “not operating on a war footing” in Feb and “people were literally skiing”
People in Govt were reassured in Feb, he says. He says even WHO were reassuring. Greg Clark picks him up by saying WHO had declared it a concern in January
Follow the latest breaking lines @theipaper here
https://twitter.com/theipaper/status/1397473925433630721
Cummings said he didn't attend the early Cobra meetings, neither did the PM. He sent Ben Warner and PM's personal secretary Imran -?- along. He didn't advise PM to go to the Cobra meetings
Thoughts so far after 20 minutes: DC opened session with admission of failure by govt and himself. Humility and willingness to be transparent from the start. V different to last year's Barnard Castle shenanigans
Cummings says he was concerned about leaks from Cobra. Clark is slightly incredulous - it's supposed to be one of the most secure environments in govt
(Another side point: Greg Clark and his co-chair Jeremy Hunt are probably two of the level-headed, even-handed MPs in Parliament)
DC says "in February the Prime Minister just regarded this as a scare story, he regarded it as the new swine flu". Cummings said he told him it wasn't. They didn't want PM to chair Cobra because he wasn't taking it seriously. Extraordinary!
Cummings says, incredibly, he wanted Chris Whitty to inject him with coronavirus live on TV to show it was nothing to worry about.
Clark asks DC why he changed the blog from 2019 to add coronavirus. DC says this is all false
He says in May last year he thought a lab leak claim was going to be a "massive issue". He says he added a section on a lab leak because it might be of interest
Cummings is scathing about Sage's behavioural sub-committee SPI-B, who said the public wouldn't go for lockdowns and that it was too central to government thinking
12 March 2020, DC says it was a "completely surreal day". 0748 he sent a message to the PM: "We've got big problems coming, the Cabinet Office is terrifyingly shit. No plans, totally behind the pace, we must announce today not next week if you feel ill with cold or flu stay home
Some around the system want a delay because they haven't done the work. We must force the pace. We are looking at 100 to 500k deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios."
The thing is: you can accuse Cummings of being "captain hindsight", or trying to portray himself in a good light, but *this was a contemporaneous text message from the time*
Also on 12 March, DC says the White House wanted the UK to join in a bombing campaign in the Middle East and Carrie Symonds was going "completely crackers" over a Times story about their dog Dilyn, so the focus wasn't on the Cobra/Covid issue (!)
Eventually the Attorney General persuaded the PM not to join in the bombing campaign and that evening Cummings met with Ben Warner and his brother who worked in NHS to crack fact that they needed to get quarantining in place or else NHS would collapse
Fri 13 March said he agreed with the Warners and PM's private secretary that they would have to sit down with the PM and tell him the country was "heading for the biggest disaster since 1940"
Mark Sweeney No10 official in charge of coordinating with DH had told Helen McNamara, another official "I've been told for years there is a whole plan for this, there is no plan. We are in huge trouble."
DC said McNamara said: "I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people."
(this was 14 March) DC said he agreed with McNamara.
Hunt asks DC did you advise that pubs restaurants should shut? DC says yes and no. They said to the PM on 14th we will have to lock down and get there as soon as we possibly can. BUT there is no lockdown plan. Sage haven't modelled it.
My analysis so far: inews.co.uk/news/politics/… @theipaper
Hunt asks did he not make a huge failure in not persuading the PM to lock down sooner, because the PM knew he was interested in science. DC says yes it was a massive failure on my part. "I was incredibly frightened about the consequences of me pulling a massive emergency string"
"What if I am wrong?" DC says he thought. What if we lockdown and it's worse in winter?
Mark Sedwill the Cabinet Secretary had said, based on advice to him from DH, there should be Covid "chicken pox" parties to encourage herd immunity. Ben Warner said "chicken pox isn't rising exponentially and killing thousands of people"
Cummings says he was essentially up against a huge establishment of people arguing a different track.
Pretty clear that Ben Warner is emerging as a hero in this
Cummings, whose evidence in a select committee is privileged and protected from defamation, accuses Matt Hancock of lying on multiple occasions including in the Cabinet room
The good follow-up question from Rosie Cooper, who asked the question, would be: What did he lie about? Also, Cooper mentioned in passing the "let the bodies pile high" comment but didn't ask it directly. You would hope another MP presses this...
(I'm 10 minutes behind, but she's now asked it!)
He didn't answer it.
Greg Clark says DC has made a serious allegation about Hancock lying. Can he back that up. DC says Hancock said in summer everyone had treatment they required, they did not. Hancock said everything was fine with PPE, DC says. MH blamed Sunak and Simon Stevens for PPE
Cab Sec Sedwill went away and came back and said what Hancock said was not true and he had lost confidence in Hancock's trustworthiness
DC says choice between Johnson and Corbyn is a sign of a system that's gone "terribly wrong" (!) and "it's completely crackers that someone like me should've been in there and crackers that someone like Johnson should've been in there". Says it was "lions led by donkeys"
Clark asks Cummings to publish texts he sent to journalists. This would mark a dangerous intrusion into a free press and protection of sources.
Fair play to Cummings, who has made his hatred of the media clear over the years, he says publishing messages to and from journalists would be against a "free society" that we have in the UK
Cummings talking about concerns re solar flares and anthrax on the risk register. One of those moments where I'm glad I don't work in the heart of government as I would lie awake at night worrying about everything
Laura Trott asks who is responsible for flagging up future threats. Is it the civil contingencies secretariat? Cummings says the problem is that there is no one person
DC says the civil contingencies secretariat "completely collapsed" and "imploded" through this. He says there were "lots of great officials there" but "the wiring was wrong"
DC says there should've been household isolation in February, masks from January. "All of us would say we got a lot of things wrong". Even the most competent people in the world, eg Bill Gates "would've had a complete nightmare" because there was a "system failure"
Clever question from Aaron Bell, what is your motivation for being here? You've taken serious swipes at major figures. So what can we read into why you went to work for PM before election?
DC says he wanted civil service reform, to push science and tech agenda inside Govt. Also in committee to help explain what happened
Clark ends the first session saying it was long but hoping the next 3 (!) will be briefer.
Clark points out for six weeks it was known that a tiny percent of lots of people eg 400k would die under flatten the curve and why didn’t he do more? Was he too junior to speak out or was it groupthink?
DC says there was worst case if suppress then worst crisis in winter. There was groupthink.
“You’re like a whistleblower but did you forget to blow the whistle?” Clark says. DC says he tried to do press emergency button and it was a “disaster” that he did it too late. “The fundamental reason was I was really frightened of acting”. The official plan, all the Sage advice,
The cabinet office the cabinet secretary everyone saying we’ve got to do this and if we don’t do it and do something different to stop it now it’s going to be many times worse in the winter - I was asking myself in that 2 week period if I hit the panic button and persuade the PM
To shift and it all goes completely wrong I’m going to have killed god knows how many hundreds of thousands of people”.
Marc Warner and others telling him forget the complicated figures, sage groupthink is wrong, do what you can now. “I apologise for not acting earlier and if I had acted earlier lots of people might still be alive”
Clark says McNamara did do the thing that he shied away from. DC says she deserves enormous credit for that. 7-8pm Friday 13th March
I was on a time lag but thanks to the break now caught up. The 2nd session is on test and trace. Hunt asking about the decision to stop testing in the community on 12 March
DC says this was same reason as not pushing for vaccines because it was “herd immunity by September”
DC mentions former SAS guy Alex Cooper to build a test and trade team. The whole of Govt “basically collapsed” when the PM got ill and people thought he might die
It should be noted that despite one question on whether DC heard the PM say “let the bodies pile high” he hasn’t answered and there wasn’t a follow-up. This was allegedly in November. Presuming @Jeremy_Hunt or @GregClarkMP will follow this up before the end
DC says senior people didn’t understand asymptomatic and airborne transmission. Even today Govt are over stressing hand washing and under stressing airborne/ventilation
DC says PM “came close to removing” Hancock in April 2020
Missed this quote as was reading about that AZ study but what a quote:
https://twitter.com/pippacrerar/status/1397522584841953282
BREAKING: Cummings says he heard the PM say let the “bodies pile high” in the PM’s study
He doesn’t answer the 80-year-olds question, probably should be followed up
DC says the BBC version of this is true. Reminder: Keir Starmer asked the PM at the despatch box earlier this month whether he had said that “or words to that effect” and the PM said “no”. So either DC is lying to a select committee, or the PM has lied/misled parliament
Whoever is not telling the truth, it would be contempt of parliament. Worse for the PM, it would be also potentially a breach of the ministerial code
Just realised my daughter has had a whole day at school all the while Cummings has been giving evidence
Cummings refers to Carrie Symonds repeatedly as “the prime minister’s girlfriend” - not cool
He says CS tried to interfere in the process for a job (presumably the TV spokesperson) and says this was “clearly illegal”. He says the prime minister was “not fit for the job”
“Your world only sees heroes and villains, is it really that black and white?” asks Tory MP Paul Bristow. Good question
An MP seems to be asking questions from... a train concourse?
Asked whether his defence of Sunak is because he has his eyes on a future Sunak administration, DC says his wife and everyone in Westminster and Whitehall would agree the less people hear of me the better
MP Sarah Owen says “do you think the prime minister is a fit and proper person to handle this pandemic”. DC says “no”
Hunt asks was he a fit and proper person to do the job. Cummings says it is “unarguable” that “many thousands of people in this country who could’ve done my job better than me”
And that’s that, after 7 hours and 6 minutes. The longest select committee testimony of a single witness that I can remember
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