By Ben Kerrigan-
Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former top adviser, is preparing to expose many of the mistakes he claims the government made as the Covid pandemic hit Britain last year.
Cummings will be quizzed on Wednesday by two committees of senior MPs conducting an inquiry into lessons to be learned from the crisis.
Some Conservative figures fear Cummings might deliver damaging bombshell evidence, while others believe Cummings can be distrusted by the public for his lockdown-breaking trips, who is clearly out for revenge against his former boss.
Prime minister Boris Johnson finally announced the independent public inquiry into ministers’ handling of the pandemic, to begin in spring 2022, but Cummings pushed for parliament to set up an investigation of its own toto learn lessons more quickly.
On the morning of the evidence session, Cummings continued to add to a 65-tweet long thread posting a picture appeared to be dated 13 March 2020 of a whiteboard in Downing Street sketched with details of a Covid response “plan B”.
It said there would be “no vaccine in 2020” and that “to stop NHS collapse we will probably have to ‘lockdown’”. Crucially, the scribbles show that “our current ‘plan’ means 4/k p/d dying @ peak”. At the bottom is a note that says the new plan would mean “no 2 weeks (?) before we catch up with Italy”.
Unanswered questions are also seen written on the whiteboard, including: “Who do we not save?” and “who looks after the people who can’t survive alone?”
He also indicated that Downing Street had planned to push for “herd immunity”,
On Wednesday morning, the government attempted to question Cummings’ credibility. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’ll leave it to others to decide the reliability of the witness.”
He also told Sky News ministers were “making decisions under unprecedented situations” and that there was “no textbook to open to see how to deal with a pandemic”.
He added: “It’s easy to be the professor of hindsight. For certain, there are things we could have done differently … but I’ll leave it to others to determine how reliable a witness he is.”
Downing Street has not denied claims the Daily Mail reported Cummings would level at Johnson that the outset that the prime minister considered getting infected with the virus live on TV and called it the “kung flu virus”.
A No 10 spokesperson said: “There is a huge task for this government to get on with. We are entirely focused on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the roadmap and distributing vaccines while delivering on the public’s priorities.
“Throughout this pandemic, the government’s priority has been to save lives, protect the NHS and support people’s jobs and livelihoods across the United Kingdom.”
Last month, Cummings, who left Downing Street in November after a power battle, made clear his disdain for Johnson, writing that the prime minister had fallen “so far below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserves” and denying he was the source of a series of leaks.
He has also promised to provide a “crucial” document on Covid decision-making to the health and science committees chaired by two Tory MPs, Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark.
A vendetta from someone in a position to have facts about a situation is food for any inquiry. Information supplied could easily be accurate or falsified, but cannot be as easily dismissed out of hand as some political figures believe can easily be don in this case because of Cummings past breach of lockdown guidelines.
The credibility of Cummings testimony will depend on how he comes across with his information, and how convincing his claims are. They will be a matter of journalistic analysts and the public to conclude upon.