Thread by @BestForBritain

Short thread with reflections on the committee session today.

1. This isn't about Cummings's rehabilitation. You don't have to like him and he clearly has an agenda. HOWEVER, there are things we know went wrong - we just didn't know why. On that, Cummings was devastating. 1/ ~AA

Those are the things on which the government will be badly damaged. For instance, we KNOW we were too late into the March lockdown. This is uncontroversial. The picture of behind-the-scenes chaos is damaging, because it rings completely true. It passes the sniff test. 2/ ~AA

We KNOW the gov't failed to protect care homes. The notion that they had done absolutely no work on the effect releasing untested older patients would have, is very easy to refute. They can just publish it. They won't, because I suspect, it doesn't exist. 3/ ~AA

And, most damning, we KNOW that the gov't repeated the same pattern, the same mistakes in the autumn. Only this time it was against the scientific evidence and - now we know - against the advice of most advisors and ministers. That is simply unforgivable. 4/ ~AA

We know what Downing Street will attempt - we've seen it enough times now. They will stonewall on the issue and say there's an inquiry some time between next year and never, so we all have to wait for that. Hancock is already briefing that it is "beneath him to comment". 5/ ~AA

What Cummings did was to dislodge a number of hanging threads. It's now up to the opposition, tory backbenchers with a conscience and journalists to pull at them. Accountability, transparency, the need to fix failed systems, should override allegiances. I hope they do. 6/6 ~AA