By Tony O’Riley-
The credibility of Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has taken a hit after Cummings revealed that several government officials called for Hancock’s sacking due to lying and incompetence during the height of the pandemic.
Dominic Cummings told Mps that the Health Secretary overplayed the UK’s readiness for a massive infectious disease outbreak early last year.
Accusing Mr Hancock of lying, Boris Johnson’s former adviser said the Health Secretary should have been fired a long time ago, emphasising that many officials called for him to go. The public statement is a terrible dent on the reputation of Mr. Hancock who has some explaining to do, even with the known fact that Cummings is on a vengeful mission.
Some government officials had thought the fact Mr Cummings had breached lockdown regulations would make him untrustworthy, but the details of his claims and the manner of his delivery has so far had its worst effect on Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwell who apparently encouraged the prime minister to compare the virus with chicken pox, and Matt Hancock who Cummings says should have been sacked long ago.
How the public can trust a health secretary after publicly being described as a serial liar, is anybody’s guess.
‘I think the Secretary of State for Health should’ve been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly.
‘There’s no doubt at all that many senior people performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect. I think the Secretary of State for Health is certainly one of those people.
‘I said repeatedly to the Prime Minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people.
When asked to provide evidence of the Health Secretary’s lying, the former chief aide to the Prime Minister told the Commons committee: ‘There are numerous examples. I mean in the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment that they required.
‘He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak, and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.’
Mr Cummings said that assurances given to him by Mr Hancock in January last year that pandemic preparations were brilliant ‘were basically completely hollow’.
The former chief aide to the Prime Minister told the Commons committee he received a response from Health Secretary Matt Hancock assuring: ‘We’ve got full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepared and refreshed, CMOs and epidemiologists, we’re stress testing now, it’s our top tier risk register, we have an SR bid before this.’
Mr Cummings told the committee: ‘I would like to stress and apologise for the fact that it is true that I did this but I did not follow up on this and push it the way I should’ve done.
‘We were told in No 10 at the time that this is literally top of the risk register, this has been planned and there’s been exercises on this over and over again, everyone knows what to do.
‘And it’s sort of tragic in a way, that someone who wrote so often about running red teams and not trusting things and not digging into things, whilst I was running red teams about lots of other things in government at this time, I didn’t do it on this.
‘If I had said at the end of January, we’re going to take a Saturday and I want all of these documents put on the table and I want it all gone through and I want outside experts to look at it all, then we’d have figured out much, much earlier that all the claims about brilliant preparations and how everything was in order were basically completely hollow, but we didn’t figure this out until the back end of February.’
Dominic Cummings said scientists on Sage and officials in the Department of Health were ‘completely wrong’ to assume the British public would ‘not accept the lockdown’ or a test and trace system.
He said: ‘Those two assumptions were completely central to the official plan and were both obviously, completely wrong.’
He said this was raised with the Prime Minister and Boris Johnson was told: ‘This assumption that the public won’t… basically aren’t that frightened and don’t want to have a lockdown is false, and we should abandon it”.
Cummings said he should have been ‘hitting the panic button’ in mid-February but he had been ‘wrongly reassured’ by messages from the WHO and others about the situation in China.
‘Lots of key people were literally skiing in mid-February,’ Cummings said of many senior figures at the time..
In a detailed timeline from March 12, which he described as a ‘crazy day’, Mr Cummings said he was urging moving faster towards ordering people to stay at home.
At 7.48am he said he texted the PM and said the Cabinet Office was ‘terrifyingly sh**’ and the response should be stepped up immediately.
Having a Health Secretary who is a perpetual liar has to be a serious concern for the British government and the British public.
Matt Hancock will need a spectacular defence against the allegations of lying stated by Mr.Cummings.