game. November 16, 2023
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By Sam Blewett, David Hughes, Josh Payne and Sophie Wingate, PA
Two of Boris Johnson’s closest aides laid bare the chaos and disorder as the coronavirus presented the biggest crisis the UK has experienced since 1945.
Dominic Cummings told the official inquiry on Tuesday that there was no coverage plan in place at the start of the pandemic and that vulnerable teams were being “terribly neglected” as a “fatalistic” strategy took hold.
The prime minister’s former senior adviser at the time said strict border controls and immediate expansion of testing could have had “much better” end results in saving lives and the economy than lockdowns.
Lee Cain, No 10’s communications director, continually cited Johnson “oscillating” between decisions to delay the response, saying it was the “wrong crisis” he had to face as prime minister.
The inquiry also saw entries in Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary showing that Johnson had advised him to conceive of the pandemic as “the natural way of treating the elderly” while resisting lockdowns.
Cummings, who was Johnson’s most level-headed adviser, took aim at much of the government for the “nightmare” of the pandemic while testifying at the British Covid-19 inquiry.
Appearing in an unironed shirt, he had to do so for calling ministers “useless, stupid pigs, f**,” but said his language only “underestimated” his competence.
He described the Cabinet Office as a “bomb site” and a “dumpster fire”.
Cummings argued that a “globally dysfunctional formula” was in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting that the only component of the formula he didn’t blame was the special forces.
Strict border controls from China with a “very, very strict” formula at airports and the immediate expansion of testing as soon as the virus became known may have had “much better” end results than the national lockdown, he argued.
But he said a “fatalistic” strategy has taken hold of the government, which has no plans to try to create new systems to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
“Nobody imagined it would be practical to get out of the problem,” he said.
“The basic change we took to get out of this instead of fatalistically accepting it. “
Cummings argued that concerns about the effect of the lockdown on vulnerable groups, such as ethnic minorities and victims of domestic violence, were “totally overlooked throughout the planning system. “
He said “one of the most appalling things” is the lack of a coverage plan in March 2020 “and that the Cabinet Office is seeking to prevent us from creating a coverage plan. “
Cain has cited that Johnson “oscillates” between decisions to delay the reaction to the crisis.
The leader of the investigation, Hugo Keith KC, asked Mr. Cummings if the term wagon was used to describe Mr. Johnson’s propensity to replace the address.
“I almost call it a car, yes,” Mr. Cummings said.
Cain, a longtime adviser to Johnson who worked with him on the Brexit campaign, said his former boss’s erratic decision-making was “quite exhausting”.
The messages between him and Mr. Cummings allow them to vent their frustrations on WhatsApp.
“Come here, it’s melting,” Cummings wrote on March 19, 2020, days before the first lockdown, adding that Cummings is “melting. “Johnson “back in Jaws w*** mode. “
“I’ve literally said the same thing 10 times and he still hasn’t sunk it in,” she added.
Explaining the Jaws reference, Cain said at the inquest that Johnson is reportedly referring to the mayor from Steven Spielberg’s film “who was looking to keep the beaches open. “
“I think he had a previous regimen in his career where he used this as a joke in one of his after-dinner speeches,” he said.
“The mayor had every right to keep the beaches open because it would have caused long-term damage to the network, so that’s kind of an underreference to that. “
Cain is more cautious than Cummings about avoiding saying that his former best friend isn’t up to the job of prime minister.
“I think at this point, and that’s a pretty strong thing to say, what would be transparent with Covid is that it wasn’t the right crisis for this prime minister’s abilities,” Cain said.
Explaining his flawed theory of the crisis, Cain said his former boss “often delayed decision-making” and “changed his mind on certain issues” after seeking advice from sources.
Cain criticised then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s “eat out to help” plan.
He said it made “no sense” to inspire the public to dine in restaurants and pubs in the run-up to an extended lockdown and that it was “a cause of wonderful frustration”.
A message from Mr Cummings sent on March 3, 2020 indicated that Mr Johnson did not believe Covid was “a big problem and did not believe anything could be done”.
He wrote to Mr. Cain that “his attention is elsewhere, he thinks it will be like swine flu, and he thinks his danger is to push the economy into a recession. “
Twenty days later, on March 23, Johnson ordered the United Kingdom to shut down to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Mr Cain’s written testimony showed that Mr Johnson and others agreed at an assembly on 14 March that a full lockdown was the only way to save the NHS from collapse.
When asked if there was a longer wait than desired until the lockdown was announced, he replied: “Yes, but I think it’s also quite a vital task to confine the whole country. “
Sir Patrick, the government’s chief clinical adviser on Covid-19, wrote in his diary about his own frustrations with Mr Johnson.
The adviser wrote in August 2020 that Johnson “was obsessed with getting older people to accept their fate and letting young people continue to live and run the economy. “
“A set of crazy exchanges,” he said, referring to the “PM WhatsApp group. “
Then, in December 2020, Sir Patrick wrote that Johnson had said he believed he had “acted early” and that “the public was with him (but not with his party)”.
“He says his party ‘thinks it’s all pathetic and that Covid is just nature’s way of treating older people, and I’m not entirely sure I disagree with them. ‘A lot of other moderate people think it’s too much. “
Read our most recent diary by downloading our app from the link below.
The Gibraltar Chronicle is a daily newspaper published in Gibraltar since 1801. It is one of the oldest English-language newspapers in the world that has been permanently printed. Our print and electronic edition is published every Sunday.
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