Cummings told Johnson NHS risked imploding like 'zombie apocalypse'
Cummings is shown a message from
March 2020, in which he tells then PM Boris Johnson that the NHS is in
danger of imploding like a "zombie apocalypse film".
He says he was referring to the crisis
coming “much faster than we had been told”, and to the fact that there were
NHS graphs showing how bad things could become. But Cummings adds that the official system for dealing with this, in the Cabinet
Office, did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation.
Senior civil servant 'wanted PM to encourage chicken pox-style parties'
Nick Eardley
Political correspondent
Some of the evidence
we've just heard has been highly critical of top people in government around
March 2020.
Then Health Secretary Matt Hancock told cabinet that you were unlikely to have Covid without a temperature or a cough.
But Cummings says Hancock was told by scientists this wasn't true - and
that it helped sow chaos.
Likewise, we've just
heard from Cummings that Mark Sedwill, then the most senior civil servant in
the country as cabinet secretary, wanted the PM to encourage chicken pox-style parties.
'Obviously laughable' that I was pushing for herd immunity, Cummings says
Cummings says that by the week of 9 March, he had growing doubts "on an hourly basis".
He recalls "suddenly overhearing people having phone calls about whether local authorities could book out ice rinks and get trunks to carry massive numbers of bodies and store them in ice rinks".
He calls it a "growing cascade" of nightmares as they realised the system was "out of control".
Hugo Keith, the inquiry's lawyer, refers to a text exchange between then Health Secretary Matt Hancock and his media adviser Damon Pool.
Hancock writes in the message, from May, "herd immunity was never the government strategy, but it's what [Cummings] was pushing" until early March.
Asked if this is a fair assessment, Cummings says "well it's obviously laughable".
Cummings pressed on why extent of crisis was not seen earlier
The inquiry's lawyer continues questioning Cummings about how the government could have believed that a global pandemic was "not fully certain" in the week of 9 March.
According to Cummings, even up until 23 March, there were still documents coming through from places including the emergency committee Cobra and the Cabinet Office that showed the crisis peaking at the end of May to the beginning of June.
"The fact that that was still on graphs in the week of the 26th is genuinely astonishing in retrospect because of course it's completely false," Cummings says.
At this point, he says, No 10 started to short-circuit the Cabinet Office because of information coming in directly from the NHS, which showed the crisis was almost upon them.
'Contain, delay, mitigate' strategy was a 'joke' - Cummings
Cummings says by the time the government published a coronavirus action plan on 2 March - with the strategy “contain, delay, mitigate” - the plan was already pretty much a “joke”.
The inquiry’s lawyer asks for emails in which he says this, but Cummings says he doesn't know if they exist.
“At that time there was an exponential curve of the virus but there was also an
exponential curve of alarm in the PM’s office and elsewhere in the system," Cummings adds.
Why didn't you push for Johnson to return from holiday, Cummings asked
There's been a lot of back and forth
between the inquiry lawyer and Cummings about what the latter calls "the
system".
Cummings says "the system" didn’t
regard Covid as a crisis, and wasn’t pushing Boris Johnson to frame Covid as a
crisis, but Hugo Keith points out that Cummings himself was part of the system.
Asked why he did not push for
Johnson to return from his holiday and “take a grip” on the crisis, he says he
felt it would have been “highly counterproductive” for Johnson to chair meetings on Covid at a time when he - and others - didn't feel it was as big a threat as it was fast becoming.
What we've heard from Cummings so far
Covid inquiryCopyright: Covid inquiry
The chief adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has given a scathing assessment of the government's response to the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.
Here's what Dominic Cummings has told the inquiry so far:
'No plan': Cummings said there was "essentially no shielding plan at all" for those most at risk of severe disease, as well as victims of domestic abuse, before the March 2020 lockdown
'Dumpster fire': He said the Cabinet Office was a "dumpster fire" and "bomb site", when he took up his role as chief adviser in 2019
Expletives: Text messages from Cummings, who was sacked in late 2020, were shown to the inquiry, many of which contained what he called "appalling language" about ministers. However, he said his judgement of a lot of senior people was "widespread"
Indecision: Cummings reiterated past descriptions of Johnson as a broken shopping "trolley" that would veer in all directions on issues, most notably Covid
'Fatalistic': He argued that borders should have been closed earlier, explaining that the combination of "serious border control" and an effective test and trace system would have been better than a national lockdown in early 2020. The attitude was "fatalistic" in government about suppressing the virus, he said
How could you have possibly thought there was no crisis, Cummings asked
The inquiry's lawyer continues the same line of questioning, asking: "You knew, and No 10 knew, that the virus had exploded in Italy and you knew there were already cases in the UK, how could it possibly have been thought that there was no crisis?"
Cummings says when the prime minister went away on holiday in mid-February, things evolved quickly afterwards.
He tells Hugo Keith: "It was indeed pretty insane that so many of the senior people were away on holiday at that time."
However, he says people weren't asking Johnson to come back. The lawyer asks why Cummings wasn't telling people to come back.
He says he was talking to people, however they "did not think that asking the PM to come back... would've been productive."
Cummings adds he thought it would've been counter-productive as he thought Johnson would downplay how serious the situation was, and would focus on damage to the economy instead.
Keith asks if there is a record of this debate, but Cummings says he doesn't know.
Covid seen as a 'distant problem' in mid-February 2020 - Cummings
We are back after a short break, and Cummings is being asked why the tempo of government
work “declined notably” between 14 and 24 February in 2020 – which coincided with half-term in the UK.
Cummings replies that this is down
to a combination of things – he says there was a general perception from senior
people in the Cabinet Office and Department for Health that Covid was a “distant problem” and not an emergency.
He also adds that while he did not
go on holiday, many senior figures did.
Watch: 'No plan' for vulnerable groups, says Cummings
A little earlier, Boris Johnson's former closest aide Dominic Cummings told the Covid inquiry that providing for vulnerable groups was "appallingly neglected by the entire planning system" in government.
Watch what he had to say in this 78-second clip:
Video content
Video caption: Covid inquiry: 'No plan' for vulnerable groups, says CummingsCovid inquiry: 'No plan' for vulnerable groups, says Cummings
'Why didn't you tell PM containing the virus had failed?'
Just before the break, the inquiry's lawyer asked Cummings about various meetings of the emergency Cobra committee in February 2020.
He highlights a WhatsApp message at a similar time when Cummings said he had been told by the government's chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, that Covid was now "probably out of control" and would "sweep the world".
The inquiry's lawyer suggests this is in contrast to the issues discussed in Cobra meetings at the time, including repatriation of British nationals and planning for a reasonable worst-case scenario.
Cummings says that nobody in Whitehall really thought the country was going to be in "the biggest crisis the country had seen since 1945" in just a month's time and the system was "not in emergency mode".
The inquiry's lawyer presses Cummings on why he did not tell the prime minister the strategy of containing the virus had failed, but Cummings insists he did, even if this is not recorded in documents.
A quick break
Now's your chance to grab a cup of tea as the inquiry is having a short break.
Afterwards, the inquiry's lawyer will continue questioning former senior adviser to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings. Stick with us.
Covid plans arrived in 'dribs and drabs' - Cummings
The lawyer for the inquiry is showing a text now from 23 January 2020.
It shows Cummings texted then Health Secretary Matt Hancock about the existence of pandemic plans, and was reassured there were "full plans" that were "prepped and refreshed".
By the middle of March, the inquiry's lawyer Hugo Keith KC asks if No 10 had been provided with plans from departments and the Cabinet Office about dealing with a coronavirus pandemic.
"Essentially no," Cummings says. "Dribs and drabs came in."
They gradually became aware in February 2020, he says, that the plans Hancock referred to "fundamentally didn't exist".
Attitude was 'fatalistic' about supressing the virus, Cummings says
Nick Eardley
Political correspondent
We've heard today that
No 10 believed a lockdown was inevitable from 14 March. The government
announced lockdown nine days later on 23 March.
But Dominic Cummings is
arguing that up to the week of 9 March - the assumption was that locking down
would be impossible in countries like the UK.
Government advisers believed that a
second wave in winter was the real danger - so the aim should be herd immunity
by September.
The attitude was "fatalistic" in government about
suppressing the virus, the inquiry hears, but Cummings says that
started to change after others argued their current course would be a catastrophe.
Lockdown was thought of as 'crazy idea' - Cummings
There have been a few instances where Cummings has accused the inquiry's lawyer of misunderstanding him - or has suggested that he has not understood the questions.
We are seeing that now - as Hugo Keith KC asks Cummings why the debate about mitigation and suppression of diseases like Covid - and about putting in place test and trace systems - did not happen sooner.
Cummings says that there was no debate - in the way Keith is suggesting - at all.
"There was no plans for lockdown at all in the week of the 9 March," he says. "The whole point of the problem... was that the whole system fatalistically thought there was no way you could possibly do a lockdown in Britain.
"It was thought of as a completely crazy idea. So, of course, no one was thinking, 'let's do lockdown and then we'll build up test and trace'."
Cummings argues that borders should've been closed
Nick Eardley
Political correspondent
Should the government have closed borders in early 2020 to stop the virus getting in?
Cummings has told the inquiry that No 10 was basically told it couldn't happen.
There wasn't, he says, the infrastructure. Nor was there the strong desire to do it.
But Cummings is now arguing, albeit with hindsight, that a strong system from December 2019 could have been effective.
Would earlier testing have stopped a lockdown, Cummings asked
Cummings is asked whether he believes that if there had been a sophisticated test and trace system in early 2020, it would not have been necessary to mandate a national lockdown.
He suggests that around New Year Eve's in 2019, the UK should have immediately closed down flights to China and there should have been a massive testing infrastructure.
He adds that the combination of "serious border control" and a test and trace system would have been "a much better approach", not just in terms of reducing deaths but also being able to keep the economy open.
'We didn't think we could scale up testing to millions of people'
The inquiry's lawyer puts it to Cummings that the government spent a great deal of time trying to get to grips with the problems on testing in April to June 2020.
Cummings agrees with this.
Keith asks when the penny dropped that the absence of a significant test and trace system effectively meant there was no way of controlling the virus once it reached the UK.
Cummings says there were conversations about needing to do more testing early on, but at the end of February and beginning of March it wasn’t conceived of as being able to be scaled up to hundreds of thousands and then millions of people.
Cummings asked why borders weren't closed earlier
The hearing is now exploring the question of closing the UK's borders during the pandemic. The inquiry's lawyer asks what officials were told by scientific advisers about whether that would be effective.
Cummings says the reasoning not for closing the borders was threefold:
He argues Britain hasn't been able to control the borders "for many years", saying it doesn't have data or infrastructure to do it
He says they were told it would only delay Covid problems by a "relatively trivial amount"
He says at that time, "the reaction from a lot of people was 'closing the borders is racist'"
Cummings add: "If you're going for a single-wave 'heard immunity by September' fundamental strategy, then faffing around at the borders wasn't regarded as relevant or coherent."
'When did you learn of Covid's long-term health consequences?'
The inquiry’s lawyer asks Cummings when was it first understood
there could be long-term health consequences as a result of Covid-19.
He says it was discussed in January 2020 in general terms,
in the context of not knowing what the long-term implications could be.
But the subject “really bubbled up” in May, he says.
He also asks Cummings when it became apparent that black and minority ethnic communities were hit by disproportionate numbers of deaths from Covid.
Cummings says he thinks the data that came out of the first wave made this clear, but that he cannot remember when this was first discussed.
Live Reporting
Edited by Dulcie Lee and Sam Hancock
All times stated are UK
Cummings told Johnson NHS risked imploding like 'zombie apocalypse'
Cummings is shown a message from March 2020, in which he tells then PM Boris Johnson that the NHS is in danger of imploding like a "zombie apocalypse film".
He says he was referring to the crisis coming “much faster than we had been told”, and to the fact that there were NHS graphs showing how bad things could become. But Cummings adds that the official system for dealing with this, in the Cabinet Office, did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation.
Senior civil servant 'wanted PM to encourage chicken pox-style parties'
Nick Eardley
Political correspondent
Some of the evidence we've just heard has been highly critical of top people in government around March 2020.
Then Health Secretary Matt Hancock told cabinet that you were unlikely to have Covid without a temperature or a cough.
But Cummings says Hancock was told by scientists this wasn't true - and that it helped sow chaos.
Likewise, we've just heard from Cummings that Mark Sedwill, then the most senior civil servant in the country as cabinet secretary, wanted the PM to encourage chicken pox-style parties.
'Obviously laughable' that I was pushing for herd immunity, Cummings says
Cummings says that by the week of 9 March, he had growing doubts "on an hourly basis".
He recalls "suddenly overhearing people having phone calls about whether local authorities could book out ice rinks and get trunks to carry massive numbers of bodies and store them in ice rinks".
He calls it a "growing cascade" of nightmares as they realised the system was "out of control".
Hugo Keith, the inquiry's lawyer, refers to a text exchange between then Health Secretary Matt Hancock and his media adviser Damon Pool.
Hancock writes in the message, from May, "herd immunity was never the government strategy, but it's what [Cummings] was pushing" until early March.
Asked if this is a fair assessment, Cummings says "well it's obviously laughable".
Cummings pressed on why extent of crisis was not seen earlier
The inquiry's lawyer continues questioning Cummings about how the government could have believed that a global pandemic was "not fully certain" in the week of 9 March.
According to Cummings, even up until 23 March, there were still documents coming through from places including the emergency committee Cobra and the Cabinet Office that showed the crisis peaking at the end of May to the beginning of June.
"The fact that that was still on graphs in the week of the 26th is genuinely astonishing in retrospect because of course it's completely false," Cummings says.
At this point, he says, No 10 started to short-circuit the Cabinet Office because of information coming in directly from the NHS, which showed the crisis was almost upon them.
'Contain, delay, mitigate' strategy was a 'joke' - Cummings
Cummings says by the time the government published a coronavirus action plan on 2 March - with the strategy “contain, delay, mitigate” - the plan was already pretty much a “joke”.
The inquiry’s lawyer asks for emails in which he says this, but Cummings says he doesn't know if they exist.
“At that time there was an exponential curve of the virus but there was also an exponential curve of alarm in the PM’s office and elsewhere in the system," Cummings adds.
Why didn't you push for Johnson to return from holiday, Cummings asked
There's been a lot of back and forth between the inquiry lawyer and Cummings about what the latter calls "the system".
Cummings says "the system" didn’t regard Covid as a crisis, and wasn’t pushing Boris Johnson to frame Covid as a crisis, but Hugo Keith points out that Cummings himself was part of the system.
Asked why he did not push for Johnson to return from his holiday and “take a grip” on the crisis, he says he felt it would have been “highly counterproductive” for Johnson to chair meetings on Covid at a time when he - and others - didn't feel it was as big a threat as it was fast becoming.
What we've heard from Cummings so far
The chief adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has given a scathing assessment of the government's response to the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.
Here's what Dominic Cummings has told the inquiry so far:
'No plan': Cummings said there was "essentially no shielding plan at all" for those most at risk of severe disease, as well as victims of domestic abuse, before the March 2020 lockdown
'Dumpster fire': He said the Cabinet Office was a "dumpster fire" and "bomb site", when he took up his role as chief adviser in 2019
Expletives: Text messages from Cummings, who was sacked in late 2020, were shown to the inquiry, many of which contained what he called "appalling language" about ministers. However, he said his judgement of a lot of senior people was "widespread"
Indecision: Cummings reiterated past descriptions of Johnson as a broken shopping "trolley" that would veer in all directions on issues, most notably Covid
'Fatalistic': He argued that borders should have been closed earlier, explaining that the combination of "serious border control" and an effective test and trace system would have been better than a national lockdown in early 2020. The attitude was "fatalistic" in government about suppressing the virus, he said
How could you have possibly thought there was no crisis, Cummings asked
The inquiry's lawyer continues the same line of questioning, asking: "You knew, and No 10 knew, that the virus had exploded in Italy and you knew there were already cases in the UK, how could it possibly have been thought that there was no crisis?"
Cummings says when the prime minister went away on holiday in mid-February, things evolved quickly afterwards.
He tells Hugo Keith: "It was indeed pretty insane that so many of the senior people were away on holiday at that time."
However, he says people weren't asking Johnson to come back. The lawyer asks why Cummings wasn't telling people to come back.
He says he was talking to people, however they "did not think that asking the PM to come back... would've been productive."
Cummings adds he thought it would've been counter-productive as he thought Johnson would downplay how serious the situation was, and would focus on damage to the economy instead.
Keith asks if there is a record of this debate, but Cummings says he doesn't know.
Covid seen as a 'distant problem' in mid-February 2020 - Cummings
We are back after a short break, and Cummings is being asked why the tempo of government work “declined notably” between 14 and 24 February in 2020 – which coincided with half-term in the UK.
Cummings replies that this is down to a combination of things – he says there was a general perception from senior people in the Cabinet Office and Department for Health that Covid was a “distant problem” and not an emergency.
He also adds that while he did not go on holiday, many senior figures did.
Watch: 'No plan' for vulnerable groups, says Cummings
A little earlier, Boris Johnson's former closest aide Dominic Cummings told the Covid inquiry that providing for vulnerable groups was "appallingly neglected by the entire planning system" in government.
Watch what he had to say in this 78-second clip:
Video content
'Why didn't you tell PM containing the virus had failed?'
Just before the break, the inquiry's lawyer asked Cummings about various meetings of the emergency Cobra committee in February 2020.
He highlights a WhatsApp message at a similar time when Cummings said he had been told by the government's chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, that Covid was now "probably out of control" and would "sweep the world".
The inquiry's lawyer suggests this is in contrast to the issues discussed in Cobra meetings at the time, including repatriation of British nationals and planning for a reasonable worst-case scenario.
Cummings says that nobody in Whitehall really thought the country was going to be in "the biggest crisis the country had seen since 1945" in just a month's time and the system was "not in emergency mode".
The inquiry's lawyer presses Cummings on why he did not tell the prime minister the strategy of containing the virus had failed, but Cummings insists he did, even if this is not recorded in documents.
A quick break
Now's your chance to grab a cup of tea as the inquiry is having a short break.
Afterwards, the inquiry's lawyer will continue questioning former senior adviser to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings. Stick with us.
Covid plans arrived in 'dribs and drabs' - Cummings
The lawyer for the inquiry is showing a text now from 23 January 2020.
It shows Cummings texted then Health Secretary Matt Hancock about the existence of pandemic plans, and was reassured there were "full plans" that were "prepped and refreshed".
By the middle of March, the inquiry's lawyer Hugo Keith KC asks if No 10 had been provided with plans from departments and the Cabinet Office about dealing with a coronavirus pandemic.
"Essentially no," Cummings says. "Dribs and drabs came in."
They gradually became aware in February 2020, he says, that the plans Hancock referred to "fundamentally didn't exist".
Attitude was 'fatalistic' about supressing the virus, Cummings says
Nick Eardley
Political correspondent
We've heard today that No 10 believed a lockdown was inevitable from 14 March. The government announced lockdown nine days later on 23 March.
But Dominic Cummings is arguing that up to the week of 9 March - the assumption was that locking down would be impossible in countries like the UK.
Government advisers believed that a second wave in winter was the real danger - so the aim should be herd immunity by September.
The attitude was "fatalistic" in government about suppressing the virus, the inquiry hears, but Cummings says that started to change after others argued their current course would be a catastrophe.
Lockdown was thought of as 'crazy idea' - Cummings
There have been a few instances where Cummings has accused the inquiry's lawyer of misunderstanding him - or has suggested that he has not understood the questions.
We are seeing that now - as Hugo Keith KC asks Cummings why the debate about mitigation and suppression of diseases like Covid - and about putting in place test and trace systems - did not happen sooner.
Cummings says that there was no debate - in the way Keith is suggesting - at all.
"There was no plans for lockdown at all in the week of the 9 March," he says. "The whole point of the problem... was that the whole system fatalistically thought there was no way you could possibly do a lockdown in Britain.
"It was thought of as a completely crazy idea. So, of course, no one was thinking, 'let's do lockdown and then we'll build up test and trace'."
Cummings argues that borders should've been closed
Nick Eardley
Political correspondent
Should the government have closed borders in early 2020 to stop the virus getting in?
Cummings has told the inquiry that No 10 was basically told it couldn't happen.
There wasn't, he says, the infrastructure. Nor was there the strong desire to do it.
But Cummings is now arguing, albeit with hindsight, that a strong system from December 2019 could have been effective.
Would earlier testing have stopped a lockdown, Cummings asked
Cummings is asked whether he believes that if there had been a sophisticated test and trace system in early 2020, it would not have been necessary to mandate a national lockdown.
He suggests that around New Year Eve's in 2019, the UK should have immediately closed down flights to China and there should have been a massive testing infrastructure.
He adds that the combination of "serious border control" and a test and trace system would have been "a much better approach", not just in terms of reducing deaths but also being able to keep the economy open.
'We didn't think we could scale up testing to millions of people'
The inquiry's lawyer puts it to Cummings that the government spent a great deal of time trying to get to grips with the problems on testing in April to June 2020.
Cummings agrees with this.
Keith asks when the penny dropped that the absence of a significant test and trace system effectively meant there was no way of controlling the virus once it reached the UK.
Cummings says there were conversations about needing to do more testing early on, but at the end of February and beginning of March it wasn’t conceived of as being able to be scaled up to hundreds of thousands and then millions of people.
Cummings asked why borders weren't closed earlier
The hearing is now exploring the question of closing the UK's borders during the pandemic. The inquiry's lawyer asks what officials were told by scientific advisers about whether that would be effective.
Cummings says the reasoning not for closing the borders was threefold:
Cummings add: "If you're going for a single-wave 'heard immunity by September' fundamental strategy, then faffing around at the borders wasn't regarded as relevant or coherent."
'When did you learn of Covid's long-term health consequences?'
The inquiry’s lawyer asks Cummings when was it first understood there could be long-term health consequences as a result of Covid-19.
He says it was discussed in January 2020 in general terms, in the context of not knowing what the long-term implications could be.
But the subject “really bubbled up” in May, he says.
He also asks Cummings when it became apparent that black and minority ethnic communities were hit by disproportionate numbers of deaths from Covid.
Cummings says he thinks the data that came out of the first wave made this clear, but that he cannot remember when this was first discussed.