"I did talk to people unauthorised," he says, "pretty rarely did I speak to the prime minister before speaking to the media".

"I did everything I could to limit the conversations the prime minister had about the media".

He says the scientific advice given to the government at the time "should be published".

But, he says he is not going to hand over every private conversation he's had, but says he will look over what he's said to various journalists at the time.

Chair Greg Clark asks Mr Cummings if he ever gave "unauthorised briefings" about the government.

He says after the election was called, he stopped speaking to journalists, and after January he "stopped talking to all journalists," and this "drove the media mad" because no-one in his position had stopped talking to the media in "decades".

He adds he would "occasionally talk to people, the main person I really spoke to in the whole of 2020 was Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, because the BBC has a special position in the country during a crisis."

He says he gave "guidance to her on specific stories".

He says on 18 March pictures were circulated of tanks and "huge rumours spread that there was going to be a London-only lockdown" and he advised her it was not going to happen. This meant the BBC did not report it as a story, "but that was really very occasional". He says he spoke to her once every three or four weeks.

Image source, HoC

Rebecca Long Bailey's final question is about whether the wrong people were in the wrong jobs to deal with the pandemic.

Cummings says the crisis raises profound questions about a political system that gives people a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson.

He says any system that gives a choice between two people like that is obviously a system that has gone "terribly wrong".

There are so many people who could have done a better job than those two he says.

He found himself it "completely crazy" that he himself was in such an important position because he is "not smart".

It is "completely crackers" that he and Boris Johnson were in these prominent positions.

It was "lions led by donkeys" with great people on the ground but the leadership let people down on the front line.

Greg Clark asks Cummings to substantiate his assertion earlier that Health Secretary has "lied" - Cummings says there are "numerous examples".

He claims Matt Hancock said last summer that everyone who needed treatment got the treatment they required, when "he knew that was a lie".

He says Hancock had been part of a briefing from officials, where it was explained "explicitly" that during the first peak people did not get the treatment they deserved and "many people were left to die in horrific circumstances".

He also claims that Mr Hancock told the cabinet, just before Cummings and the PM fell ill with Covid themselves, that "everything is fine" on getting hold of personal protective equipment.

But he says when he returned from his illness, it became clear "we were completely short".

Cummings claims that Matt Hancock sought to blame the shortages on Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England, and Chancellor Rishi Sunak, by suggesting they had "blocked approvals on all sorts of things".

"I said to the cabinet secretary please investigate this and find out if it’s true," Cummings says.

"The cabinet secretary came back to me and said it's completely untrue, I have lost confidence in the Secretary of State [Matt Hancock]’s honesty in these meetings."

Rebecca Long Bailey moves on to what economic advice the government was getting at the time.

Cummings says Sunak and his team were "completely competent" so he left them to get on with it.

He said he focused all his time on shielding and the Department of Health because it was clear the system was "broken".

There was no economic document "floating around", he adds, although the Bank of England was warning about the consequences of a lockdown.

All stories saying the chancellor tried to stop the lockdown are wrong he insists. Sunak "completely supported" his view.

Image source, HoC

Labour's Rebecca Long Bailey asks if anyone in government wanted to "trade off lives" in favour of economic activity.

Cummings says quite a few people thought the real danger was economic, including the prime minister himself.

The PM had this view all the way through, he says, that the economy would be destroyed.

"Fundamentally the prime minister didn't think this was the big danger" he says.

Cummings says there were reports that Chancellor Rishi Sunak was to blame for the lockdown delay - but that was "completely wrong" he says.

Image source, HoC

Cummings criticism of government 'groupthink'published at 11:10 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

11:10 BST 26 May 2021

Leila Nathoo
BBC political correspondent

We’ve already heard a flavour of Dominic Cummings’ criticism of Boris Johnson – saying, extraordinarily, because of the PM’s apparently lax attitude to Covid, that he wasn’t involved in key emergency meetings early on in 2020.

Boris Johnson likened Covid-19 to Swine Flu and a scare story, according to Cummings – and would say things like he wanted to be injected with the virus live on TV to prove it wasn’t dangerous.

He’s also mentioned the PM’s holiday in February 2020 – clearly accusing the prime minister of not taking Covid seriously enough at what was a crucial time in the early days of the pandemic.

But interestingly the PM isn’t being singled out for blame - Cummings has repeatedly described ‘groupthink’, a lack of planning, how systems were not in place for dealing with this sort of pandemic, false assumptions and the dawning realisation that the situation was far worse than anyone had realised.

He said the then Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill wanted to advocate Covid ‘chicken-pox parties’ so more people could catch the virus.

And Cummings pulled no punches in his criticism of the Health Secretary Matt Hancock, saying he told the Prime Minister repeatedly that he should have been fired and that his department was overwhelmed.

Rosie Cooper asks why Cummings described the Department for Health as "a smoking ruin".

"The procurement system we were dealing with was just completely hopeless," states Cummings.

"We were told the Department for Health had been turning down ventilators because the price had been marked up," he adds.

He says he was shocked that PPE was not seen as "an emergency fast track process" which is why he described the department as "a smoking ruin".

He says the Americans were escorting PPE to America, while the UK was not ensuring shipments arrived.

He says it was like "wading through treacle," it was "completely and utterly overwhelmed".

Rosie Cooper asks why the system for supporting people financially through self-isolation are so weak.

"Like on testing, like on shielding, there was no plan," Cummings states.

He says he asks for what the formal plan was, and he was told the government press release on "suppress, contain, mitigate" was the plan.

"The shielding plan was literally hacked together in two all-nighters" after Thursday 19 March, "there wasn't a plan for shielding" or financially helping those shielding.

Image source, HoC

Labour's Rosie Cooper asks why all the scientific papers were not published so the public could know what was going on?

Cummings says there was no push back from Vallance or Whitty but the problem was the country was already in a crisis or "dangling over a cliff" as he says.

Cooper then asks how would Cummings rate the performance of the Department of Health?

Cummings says there were some brilliant people who were let down by those in senior leadership positions.

He says the health secretary, Matt Hancock, "should have been fired for 15-20 things", including "lying" to people and he says he told the PM to sack him.

Cummings suggests chaotic approach inside No 10published at 10:54 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

10:54 BST 26 May 2021

Leila Nathoo
BBC political correspondent

Cummings is painting an extraordinary picture of what he sees as chaotic decision making in Number 10 in the second week of March 2020.

He describes scenes of officials realising the true scale of what the country was facing – even comparing it to the film Independence Day, when the US government is told that aliens are arriving.

Clearly it’s only his version of events – but he’s providing a rare insight into how the government was functioning as the crisis was escalating.

Reality Check

Dominic Cummings has held up Taiwan as an example of a country that acted decisively early on in the pandemic.

He said: "They did a whole bunch of things right off the bat in January".

So, what did they do?

Taiwan closed its borders to all visitors from China on 23 January 2020 – as soon as China said there was evidence of human-to-human transmission of Covid-19.

It also imposed mandatory quarantine for all Taiwanese citizens returning home. These measures are still in place.

The island's 23 million people were also proactively wearing face masks, even before they were required to do so.

However, this month, Taiwan has seen a sudden rise in cases, after it relaxed its testing regime and reduced quarantine for non-vaccinated airline pilots from 14 to three days.

Cummings says "the truth was even more bad than the reasonable worst case scenario," when they were looking at graphs at how Covid could spread in the UK after considering the data from northern Italy.

He says the view from everyone was that the UK would not tolerate a lockdown like those being imposed in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He says this was a mistake, because people could see and read about what "a highly competent country" like Taiwan was doing in English.

"The default mode was this country is not East Asia" and wouldn't tolerate a lockdown, he states.

Mr Cummings also tells the committee that Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary at the time, suggested in March that Boris Johnson should go on TV to explain the herd immunity plan, and suggest that people should hold "chicken pox parties" to spread the disease and therefore spread immunity.

He says that at the time, Mr Sedwill was simply reflecting official advice that had been given by health officials.

Cummings says he said coronavirus was not like chicken pox, it was spreading exponentially, and thousands of people were dying.

Apologising for his strong language for using a four letter word, Cummings says the whole situation was "almost surreal".

It seemed like an "out of control movie" he says.

He says, in retrospect it is clear that the government should have acted earlier.

With his hands on his head he says at the time, the government "just didn't act" when it needed to.

Continuing, Dominic Cummings tells the committee about various meetings that took place around the time in March when the government, he says, pivoted towards a more aggressive strategy to combat the virus.

He says at the time that officials thought the country was "in huge trouble" and without a change in course there could be hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Jeremy Hunt asks Cummings whether he advised the PM to close pubs and restaurants around this time. The PM's former adviser replies: "yes, but it's more complicated than that".

Cummings adds that he "bitterly regrets" not advising stronger action until around the 11 or 12 March.

But he adds that he was also fearful at the time that his plan would be worse, and it would have been a "huge deal" for him to essentially say the official advice was wrong.

Reality Check

Dominic Cummings has disputed the government’s claims that herd immunity was not part of the plan for dealing with the pandemic.

“It is not that people are thinking this is a good thing and we actively want it, it is that it is a complete inevitability,” he said.

“The only real question is one of timing - it’s either herd immunity by September or it’s in January after a second peak.”

Herd immunity is a scientific term describing the point at which a population is protected from a disease, either by enough people being vaccinated or by people having developed antibodies by having the disease.

Early in the pandemic, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said: "It's not possible to stop everybody getting it and it's also actually not desirable, because you want some immunity in the population, we need to have immunity to protect ourselves in the future."

Other advisers made similar comments.

But the government later denied that herd immunity was its policy. Imperial College modelling had suggested that a "mitigation" policy of just trying to prevent a massive peak in cases while protecting the most vulnerable would lead to 250,000 deaths and the NHS being overrun.

You can read more about herd immunity here.

Image source, HoC

Cummings tells an extraordinary story.

He says on the morning of 12 March, the "national security people came in" and said "Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight".

He says this "totally derailed" meetings on coronavirus and household quarantines.

He says, at the same time, "the prime minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers" over having the No 10 press office deal with stories in the press about the Downing Street dog.

Part of the building was talking about bombing Iraq, part was talking about household restrictions, and "the prime minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about something trivial," he states.

UK plan was based on the wrong viruspublished at 10:34 British Summer Time 26 May 2021

10:34 BST 26 May 2021

Nick Triggle
Health Correspondent

Dominic Cummings is right to suggest there was a misplaced confidence that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.

As it was unfolding, officials were publicly speaking about how strong our infectious disease surveillance and protection systems were.

That’s not surprising. Just a few months before, the UK had been ranked as the second best prepared country globally, external. That confidence, as he says, turned out to be “completely hollow”.

Some of that is because that plan was based on the wrong virus - flu not coronavirus.

It meant assumptions about the level of infectiousness and the risk of transmission before symptoms develop or among those who do not have symptoms was massively underestimated.

Nor was the right type of personal protective equipment available.

It is also clear from the official pandemic plan that there was only one plan – mitigating the spread of a pandemic virus rather than suppressing it.

It is why, in the early days, government ministers and scientists were talking about flattening the peak rather than trying to stop it.

The UK though was not alone in this. Most of Europe had a similar approach – unlike Asian countries the continent had not had to deal in any real sense with outbreaks of Sars and Mers.

Hunt asks if there were people in Sage who shared Cummings' view that the government was going in the wrong direction or was there a "group think" about how the virus would unfold?

Cummings says the fundamental view among the scientists remained that lockdown and suppression was not the right approach because it would just mean a second peak happening later.

Cummings said it became clear that contrary to expectations, all sorts of things people "thought were in train" were not. He said he was realising there was not a proper plan in place.

He says he wanted to push through the stay at home message and stop household mixing he said but there was "push back within the system".

The problem was it was fundamentally too late when this approach changed and things had already gone fundamentally wrong, he says.