Cummings is asked whether the prime minister was focused on the job.

He says the PM had various distractions back in February 2020 in his personal life - he was finalising his divorce, his girlfriend was pregnant and he had his engagement.

Moving on to the health secretary, he says Matt Hancock used Sir Patrick Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty as "shields" for himself.

He said the attitude was "if things go wrong, blame the scientists".

He is asked again why Hancock was not sacked and he says the PM was told to keep him in his role "because he is the person you fire when the inquiry comes along".

Cummings says he argued this would cause another set of disasters in the autumn and he advised "we have got to get rid of this guy now".

Conservative Paul Bristow asks if there are some people "who may be brilliant" but are "impossible to satisfy".

Cummings says "you have to try and get the best talent this country has to offer" as the leading team for the country, "you need people who can make decisions effectively," he adds.

"I am not putting myself in the category of people who are brilliant who should be promoted," he says he saw his job as a "quirk" and he believed it was important for him to hire others who were more capable than him.

Mr Bristow says it has been alleged that Mr Cummings did not work well with other people.

"I think I work well with some people... different people have different kinds of temperaments," he states.

"The media stories... are 99% nonsense," he says, on reports about his work in government.

Cummings says that before leaving post, he had decided to stay to "stop any many people dying as I could do" - but it was "obvious" after the second national lockdown "that I was going to be gone within days".

But he says he "terribly regrets" that during the period when the PM was considering whether to have an autumn lockdown, he did not threaten to resign within 48 hours.

He says he should have offered to go "quietly" if the PM agreed to impose another lockdown, or if not to call a press conference and tell the public the PM was making a "terrible decision".

"I should have gambled on holding a gun to his head, essentially".

Cummings says his relationship with the prime minister "took another terrible dive" after the second national lockdown in October, because the PM "knew I blamed him for the whole situation."

He says Boris Johnson's girlfriend, Carrie Symonds "wanted rid of me".

But "relevant, but not the heart of the problem", he says, was that by this point he regarded the PM as "unfit for the job", and he was trying to "push other things through, against his wishes".

Asked about his departure from Downing Street late last year, Cummings says it was "definitely connected to the fact that the prime minister's girlfriend was trying to change a whole bunch of different appointments in No 10 and appoint her friends to particular jobs".

"In particular, she was trying to overturn the outcome of an official process about hiring a particular job in a way which was not only completely unethical but which was also clearly illegal".

"I thought the whole process about how the prime minister was behaving at that point was appalling, and all of that was definitely part of why I went."

PM faces questions on 'bodies piled high' remarkpublished at 15:53 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

15:53 BST 26 May 2021

Nick Eardley
Political correspondent

Downing Street and the government are facing some really serious allegations.

Among them, are whether the PM made comments about seeing "bodies pile high" rather than take the country into a third lockdown.

The BBC reported the comments in April - but the prime minister denied making them in Parliament.

Cummings - however - has told MPs he DID hear the prime minister make the comments.

"I heard that in the prime minister's study" he said.

Boris Johnson is now likely to face more questions about whether he made the remarks - and if he misled Parliament by denying them.

Cummings says he advised against students going back to university in September.

He says he had "no view" on whether the Eat Out to Help Out scheme was a good idea because his main view was that the PM's overall strategy was wrong.

In reply to Jeremy Hunt, Cummings says he advised that the weekly testing of NHS staff should be brought forward because it was clear that it was "technically possible" to do so.

But he said there was an "incredibly conservative attitude" within the civil service to doing anything new.

He says he and the cabinet secretary advised "this is a war" and "any rules, forget".

Procurement and HR rules needed to be thrown away, he says, but there was a whole "general resistance" to things like PCR tests.

Asked whether he disagreed with the government's Eat Out to Help Out scheme over summer 2020, Cummings says he was opposed to the PM's "general strategy" at that time.

Pressed further, he says he can't remember the specifics of conversations he had about that scheme - but it was "part of a plan" to reopen the economy that he thought was wrong.

"At that point, I'd lost the argument on the approach," he adds.

He does say, however, that he advised the PM against students returning in the autumn.

Image source, HoC

What would David Cameron have done? asks Carol Monahan.

Cummings says if you took any random person from the top 1% of people in the country "they'd have behaved differently to how the prime minister" did.

"After the first lockdown, he was cross with me and the others for basically pushing him in to the first lockdown," Cummings says of Boris Johnson.

He says that in the summer, Boris Johnson still believed that the first lockdown shouldn't have been done.

The PM "took the view that economic harm" by dealing with Covid was "more damaging" than not worrying about the virus, he states.

Ms Monahan asks if the PM was concerned about the death figures.

Cummings says the quote attributed to the PM on letting bodies "pile high" was incorrect in the newspapers, but reported correctly by the BBC.

"The scale of the disaster is so big that people need to understand how the government failed them," Cummings adds.

Image source, HoC

The SNP's Carol Monahan refers back to Dominic Cummings' earlier comment that he "should have been hitting the panic button," and she asks if he was "hitting the panic button in September".

"Yes," replies Cummings, "all credible, serious people in my opinion were essentially saying the same thing," he states.

"He wasn't taking any advice, he was making his own decisions," Cummings says of the prime minister in September.

"I've been very critical of Hancock, but I think Matt Hancock agreed with me in September about acting then," he adds.

On the September lockdown, Cummings says all decisions were entirely down to the prime minister.

"The chancellor's view was the Department for Health... have no plan, there is no plan for what to do," he says.

He says there was "no coherence to anything" which is what led to people being told to go back to offices, before then encouraging people to stay at home more again.

Image source, HoC

Cummings has resumed his evidence.

He says back in September, the government "careened around all over the shop trying to do local lockdowns".

Cummings says UK Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty suggested a two week "or possibly longer lockdown", because they advised it was "over 50% likely" that the R rate - the infection rate - would be over one when the schools went back.

He says he and others told the PM not to tell people to return to their offices but he says Johnson's main focus was the economy.

The PM had started listening to people, Cummings says, who were advising that there was already a degree of herd immunity in the population.

All the data, however, was showing that the government needed to act now, says Cummings, "but the PM wasn't persuaded".

Explosive claims leave serious questions for the PM to answerpublished at 15:18 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

15:18 BST 26 May 2021

Nick Eardley
Political correspondent

The explosive claims made by Dominic over the last few hours cannot be ignored.

He was around the table when some of the key pandemic decisions were made – and his analysis is devastating for the Government.

He has painted a picture of a Downing Street which was too slow to act on Covid.

He has launched an extraordinary attack on the health secretary – accusing him of failing to tell the truth and not being fit to do his job.

He has rubbished the claims a protective shield was put around care homes as “complete nonsense”.

He has even suggested it was crackers he and Boris Johnson were in charge of the country.

Cummings is a controversial figure around Westminster, not least because of the impact on his lockdown trip to Durham.

But this is first full, public account of what went on in No 10 during this crisis. It leaves Boris Johnson and his ministers with a number of serious questions to answer.

Image source, HoC

Dominic Cummings and the MPs are back in the room for the final sprint to the end of this marathon session.

Here we go....

It's certainly a marathon committee session. If you are just tuning in here's a summary of all the main points so far:

• Dominic Cummings has said Matt Hancock should have been sacked - he accused the Health Secretary of "holding back" tests during April 2020 so he could reach a target of 100,000 tests per day by the end of the month
• He said he called government officials to tell them not to pay attention to what Hancock was telling them to do
• Downing Street has said the PM has full confidence in the Health Secretary
• The PM’s official spokesman said the PM and Matt Hancock had worked closely together during the whole course of the pandemic and continue to do so
• Cummings said care home testing was "complete chaos" during the pandemic, which he described as a "cascading series of crises"
• Cummings said he was "extremely sorry" for moving his family from London to County Durham when they were unwell with Covid
• He said he and PM Boris Johnson "fundamentally" disagreed over Covid policy early on in the pandemic. He said he was urging for mandatory mask rules and a more restrictive border policy
• Cummings likened Boris Johnson to "a shopping trolley" changing directions on what policy should be
• He said he believes the timeline for having a Covid public inquiry next year is "completely terrible" and "there is absolutely no excuse" for delaying it

After more than five hours of testimony, the committee has decided to take another break after concluding its section on the vaccination strategy.

Chairman Jeremy Hunt says they will return at 15.05 BST, when they will begin a final section of today's session focused on the second nationwide lockdown in November.

Stay with us.

Asked whether lessons from the success of the UK Vaccine Taskforce can be applied across the rest of government, Dominic Cummings says they certainly could.

"The British state is set up almost by design to create a dysfunctional system because you have to go out and potentially resign over things that have been done and you can't fire a single person except for your spads [special advisers] or assistant," he says.

He says no-one knows who is in charge and one of the strengths of the taskforce was everyone knew Kate Bingham was in charge.

"She picked the team, she did a good job of picking the team and everyone knew they were working for her," he says.

Dominic Cummings says "the situation was so overwhelming" in government that he didn't make the changes he wanted to to things like procurement and data gathering in Whitehall.

In September 2019 he says people told him the system was "creaking" and people were going to "stop obeying orders" from the PM.

He says the problem was he only had about six weeks at the start of 2020 before Covid overtook everything.

Building the analytical private office in No 10 had been a great success he said and "no-one in their right mind would get rid of it".

"Pretty much all" the good officials and sensible people supported him on creating that and helped him do it because it was "a huge gap" in Whitehall capability.

Greg Clark asks about Kate Bingham's role and the briefings against her as head of the UK Vaccines Taskforce.

Cummings says he was aware of this and officials told him they thought it was coming from the Department of Health.

It was "people in the system feeling their noses were put out of joint" or who were jealous that "trashed" people in the press and "Kate got caught in the crossfire".

No 10 was "always supportive" of her and the vaccine taskforce, he says, but he himself tried to "keep out of the way" and not get involved in the conversations.

Dominic Cummings says Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance was among those calling for a vaccine taskforce to be set up outside of the Department of Health.

Vallance had worked in the private sector on vaccines, Cummings says, so he understood what was needed and also made sure the contracts were sorted out.

"Patrick deserves absolutely enormous credit for his role" in the vaccine taskforce Cummings says, and "he deserves enormous credit from the country for doing it".

When it comes to vaccines, "it is unarguable what should have happened" he argues.

People should have been paid to take part in vaccine trials - and their families compensated if they died or things went wrong.

"We would have hugely cut the time" and possibly got people jabbed by September he argues.

"We have got to think now" about what we do in the future if there is another crisis he says.

Image source, HoC

Zarah Sultana asks about contract awarding during the pandemic, particularly over firms linked to Conservative donors.

Cummings says that, initially, "all of our concern was just this disaster coming at us" and says his concern was over all the blocks to the procurement system preventing signing contracts with firms to ramp up testing.

He says later on there were concerns as stories began to come out into the media "and we started hearing about VIP channels" but says that did not cross his radar until "probably May".

Cummings says the procurement system is "completely unfit for purpose" and that trying to address that problem was something he was doing in January and February but did not have time to sort it out before the pandemic hit.