Image source, HoC

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has taken over for the next section of questioning.

He asks, in the Sage meeting on 5 March, it was five weeks after the pandemic emergency was declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO). He asks if he advised the PM that Sage was wrong by only advising to protect the elderly.

"No I didn't," Cummings says, but adds "I was ringing increasing alarm bells" around that time.

He says in February "very smart people were saying to me America is screwing this up... we're going to have to lock down".

He says the official view even in to the 16 March was "that was going to be more dangerous" than letting the virus spread.

"I was also really, really worried about smashing my hand down on a massive button" that would have stopped the official plan, "around about the 5th, I was still reluctant to do that".

He says no-one was "drawing the obvious conclusion" that pubs and leisure facilities needed to close.

On the morning of the 12 March, he says he texted the PM and Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, "there's going to be massive pushback" asking why more rules were not being introduced earlier.

Image source, HoC

Image source, HoC

Cummings also adds that Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been "completely wrong" in suggesting that achieving herd immunity was never part of the government's original plan.

He adds that "of course no one wanted it to happen" - but nevertheless achieving herd immunity without vaccination "was regarded as an unavoidable fact" in the official planning.

The "only question" posed at the time, he adds, was what they could do to affect the timing of this.

He adds that he is now "completely baffled" why ministers have denied it was part of the strategy, suggesting it might be down to a "semantic" difference in their interpretation.

Image source, HoC

Greg Clark asks about what happened during the "key" meeting of 9 March and the thinking behind "herd immunity" - the point at which a population is protected from a disease.

Cummings says the "logic" of the official plan drawn up by the health department was that the disease would spread, and a vaccine would not be available during 2020.

So, he says, the "assumption" was that the only choice was between achieving herd immunity by September after one "sharp peak" earlier in the year, or in January 2021 after a "delayed peak" during the winter.

But he says officials were worried that delaying the peak to the winter would be "even worse," and assumed the British public would not tolerate a Wuhan-style lockdown.

The news lines have been coming thick and fast from Dominic Cummings this morning - here's his key points so far:

• He began the session by saying he is sorry for the "mistakes that were made" for those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic.
• Cummings says ministers, officials and advisers "fell disastrously short" of what the public expects during a crisis.

• He apologises for the fact he did not "follow up" and "push" on his initial concerns about the virus in January.
• Claims of government preparedness to deal with the pandemic were "completely hollow", he said.
• There was "no sense of urgency" in government until the end of February because “lots of key people were literally skiing".
• Cummings says he did not advise the PM to attend cabinet office emergency meetings on the virus.
• He says in February 2020, the PM regarded Covid as a “scare story” and said he would get Prof Chris Whitty to inject him with it on TV.

The prime minister’s former chief adviser has admitted that "senior advisers like me fell disastrously short" in dealing with coronavirus in the UK.

Dominic Cummings is giving evidence to an MPs' inquiry on the government's handling of the pandemic.

He apologised to those who lost relatives, and said: "When the public needed us most, the government failed."

Clark asks why Cummings changed his blog, in retrospect, to refer to the danger of coronaviruses.

Mr Cummings says "those stories are all false, not a single word of what I wrote in 2019" was changed.

He says a piece he quoted in 2019 on viral threats, which referred to pandemics, actually had a much better section on viral labs in Wuhan. He says he took over more quotes from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Mr Clark asks why these changes were made in April/May 2020 during a pandemic which was becoming a greater threat in the UK.

Mr Cummings says "I went back and re-read" the post. He says in No 10 at the time, there were discussions on whether or not the virus had escaped from a lab.

"Pasting over text from a blog takes 90 seconds," he adds.

Reality Check

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) is a panel of experts convened during national emergencies.

Throughout the Covid crisis it has brought together NHS leaders, academics and civil servants, passing on research and advice to ministers.

Sage has had a number of sub-groups during the pandemic, including one focussing on public behaviour (called SPI-B).

The membership of the group is not fixed and depends on the nature of the emergency.

Sage held its first meeting to discuss Covid on 22 January 2020, chaired by Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty.

You can find links to minutes of every meeting here, external

"The whole Number 10 building is completely hopeless as a working environment," Cummings says.

Greg Clark asks if Cummings attended any Sage meetings.

Cummings says he attended "some of them" but not routinely. He says he got Ben Warner to attend all of the meetings.

Mr Clark asks if it was more important to attend these meetings "as an outsider".

Mr Cummings says that's why he sent Ben to attend to attend such meetings.

Image source, HoC

Mr Cummings tells the committee that in February, Boris Johnson regarded the coronavirus as a "scare story" and "the new swine flu".

He adds that several officials thought it would "not help serious planning" to have the PM expressing such views at meetings of Cobra.

Reality Check

Dominic Cummings said that he employed a data scientist called Ben Warner.

But who is he?

Mr Warner joined Boris Johnson's team at Downing Street after the general election in December 2019.

He had run the Conservative Party's private election computer model and had predicted that the Conservatives would win 364 seats. They went on to win 365.

In 2016, Warner worked on the campaign to leave the European Union, where he worked alongside Mr Cummings.

When the pandemic struck, Warner and Cummings started attending meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

When this was first reported in April 2020, Downing Street issued a statement, saying, "it is not true that Mr Cummings or Dr Warner are "on" or members of Sage".

Mr Warner has mentioned as an "observer" in the minutes of twelve Sage meetings between February and April last year.

Greg Clark asks about meetings of the government's Cobra emergency committee, which met several times during February - and asks Mr Cummings if he attended.

He tells the committee he is "not sure now" but he doesn't think he did, instead sending a government data scientist to sit in on the meetings, or instead holding smaller meetings with officials.

He says he hired a data scientist in No 10 - Ben Warner - who would attend the meetings along with the prime minister's personal secretary.

He says that a lot of Cobra meetings involve "going though Powerpoint slides and are not massively useful," adding that he did not advise the prime minister to attend either.

He also adds that he did not attend the meetings because he feared that information would be leaked to the media.

Cummings starts with a contrite tonepublished at 09:55 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

09:55 BST 26 May 2021

Leila Nathoo
BBC political correspondent

Dominic Cummings struck a contrite tone at the start of his evidence.

He was straight out with an apology for what he described as government failures and with a message to those who have lost loved ones.

He’s already reflecting on his own role, saying he should have followed up on pandemic planning back in January 2020 and ‘hitting the panic button more’ in February 2020.

Holding his hands up for his own shortcomings will make it easier for him to point the finger of blame at others later on..

Committee chair Greg Clark asks how interactions between Cummings and Johnson played out.

Mr Cummings says: "I would just pop in and out of his office" and would "sometimes write notes" but most interactions were talking.

He says he wrote notes to Johnson in February about Covid, which were texts and WhatsApp messages.

Cummings continues, "the government itself, and Number 10, were not on a war footing with this" until the end of February.

He says he "spent more and more" of his time dealing with the pandemic in February while the prime minister was on holiday.

"After the 30th January, it was not at all seen that there was going to be a pandemic," he states.

In January and February, he says he was "working very much on the science and technology agenda" and he spent a lot of time "trying to get to grips with the procurement system" which he describes as a "nightmare".

Cummings tells MPs he first raised coronavirus with the PM in the first half of January last year, but there was not “any sense of urgency" about the pandemic until the last week of February.

He adds that “lots of key people were literally skiing" during the middle of February.

He says that looking back, he “should have been hitting the panic button much in February than I was".

Image source, HoC

Continuing, Cummings says he would also like to apologise for the fact he did not "follow up" and "push" on his initial concerns about the coronavirus in January.

He says people in Downing Street were told at the time that a pandemic had been repeatedly planned for and "everyone knows what to do".

He adds that it is "sort of tragic in a way" that although he was running teams to question received wisdom - red teams - on other topics, he did not do it in this area.

He says if he had, the government would have "figured out much earlier" that claims of great preparations being made were "completely hollow".

When it started in January 2020, "I did think, oh my goodness, is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time?" but he says the WHO and in other health organisations across the world, alarm bells were not ringing.

"I think it's obvious that many, many organisations failed," he says the Taiwanese government closed the borders and enacted a plan on New Years' Eve.

"The western world, including Britain, completely failed to see through the smoke."

He says he asked Matt Hancock where the country was in terms of scanning for the virus, resource operations planning for a pandemic on 25 January 2020.

Science and Technology Committee chair Greg Clark starts by asking about Dominic Cummings' blog from March 2019 explained the risks of viruses in labs in Asia being able to kill people. He asks if, when China was sealing off its country, Mr Cummings was "alarmed".

Mr Cummings says "senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short" of what the "public expects during a crisis like this".

He says he is sorry for the "mistakes that were made" for those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic.

Image source, HoC

The inquiry is likely to want to know how decisions were made and whether delays in decision-making resulted in more or avoidable deaths. They are likely to pick up on Mr Cummings’ suggestion that the government pursued a strategy of “herd immunity” – a claim ministers have denied – as well as reports that Boris Johnson delayed the second lockdown against scientific advice.

But the session is expected to be wide ranging and will cover all aspects of the government's response to coronavirus, including its decision-making in the early months of the pandemic; the level of scientific evidence available to the government; its border policy; and the effectiveness of its public health messaging and communications.

The timing of lockdowns and other restrictions, procurement processes, and decisions about community testing and contact tracing are among other issues expected to be addressed.

Image source, HoC

And we're off.

Chair of the Science and Technology committee Greg Clark has started his opening remarks explaining how the session will pan out.

It's expected to last as long as four hours.

Do stay with us for updates. We'll be fact checking and publishing the most notable exchanges here.

You can also watch a live stream of the committee using the player options towards the top of the page.

Image source, HiC