Cummings accuses Matt Hancock of misleading colleagues about PPE and protections for people in care homes
Keith says he will not go into care home policy, and PPE now, because future modules will look at this.
Q: But did you say you had been misled by Matt Hancock, and the health department, about what was being done to protect people in care homes and to procure PPE.
Cummings says multiple people told him what Hancock was saying in morning meetings was not true.
Keith shows an extract from a message sent by Cummings to Johnson in May 2020 saying Hancock was unfit for his job.
Key events
Cummings says Boris Johnson’s decision to tell Mark Sedwill he had to go was a mistake.
Keith points out that Cummings had contributed to this, by denigrating him to Johnson. He says Cummings had insulted Sedwill, and put poison in Johnson’s ear.
Cummings does not contest this, but he says removing Sedwill in this way was a mistake.
Cummings accuses Matt Hancock of misleading colleagues about PPE and protections for people in care homes
Keith says he will not go into care home policy, and PPE now, because future modules will look at this.
Q: But did you say you had been misled by Matt Hancock, and the health department, about what was being done to protect people in care homes and to procure PPE.
Cummings says multiple people told him what Hancock was saying in morning meetings was not true.
Keith shows an extract from a message sent by Cummings to Johnson in May 2020 saying Hancock was unfit for his job.
Keith says Cummings says in his witness statement to the inquiry that, if a proper test-and-trace system had been in place, lockdown would not have been necessary. But lockdown became necessary to stop the NHS being overwhelmed.
Q: The lockdown could have been decided upon earlier?
For sure, says Cummings.
Q: From 9 March onwards the government tried to change course. But lack of planning made that hard.
Cummings accepts that.
Q: Later Boris Johnson said “thank God we changed course – it would have been a catastrophe”.
Correct, says Cummings.
Here is the text of the WhatsApp message sent by Dominic Cummings on 12 March 2020 referring to Mark Sedwill and chickenpox. (See 4pm.)
Sedwill babbling about chickenpox god fucking help us …
In the conversation the cabinet secretary said to the PM, ‘PM you should go on TV and should explain that this is like the old days with chickenpox and people are going to have chickenpox parties. And the sooner a lot of people get this and get it over with the better sort of thing’.
And this had been mentioned before this analogy and I said ‘Mark, you should stop using this analogy of chickenpox parties and the cabinet secretary said why. And Ben Warner said ‘because chickenpox doesn’t spread exponentially and kill thousands and thousands of people’.
And the look on people’s faces when Ben said this, that was quite a crystallising moment because it made us (a) think who on earth is briefing the most important official in the country along these lines. This is terrifying.
But also other officials obviously heard this exchange and some of them came to us and said essentially ‘something has gone terribly wrong in the Cabinet Office’.
Keith says around this time there is a reference to Mark Sedwill, the then cabinet secretary, saying the government should describe this as like chickenpox, and remind people about chickenpox parties.
Cummings says Sedwill was told that this comparison was wrong, because chicken pox does not spread exponentially and kill thousands of people. But he says this was a “crystallising moment” because it showed that the most senior civil servant in the country was being wrongly briefed.
Keith presents a minute from a cabinet meeting on 11 March at which Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said that if someone did not have a cough and a temperature, they were unlikely to have coronavirus.
Cummings says at that point people in No 10 knew this was not true. He says Hancock had been repeatedly told by Sir Patrick Vallance that this was not true, but he kept saying it anyway.
Asked why the government allowed the Cheltenham festival to go ahead, Cummings says at this point the PM was being told that, if the government banned mass sporting events, people would just watch them in pubs instead – which might be even worse.
At this point no one thought a full lockdown was a realistic alternative.
And he says at this point No 10 was being told that, if restrictions did have to be imposed, they should not be introduced too early – because people would get tired of complying.
Cummings says No 10 was told this was the advice from Sage and SPI-B (the Scientific Pandemic Insights groups on Behaviours). But later Sage and SPI-B said this had not come from them.
Cummings says Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, were referring to this idea.
Keith asks Cummings about minutes from a government meeting in early March saying a global pandemic was “increasingly likely”. He asks Cummings why people were saying that, if by then it had become obvious to the scientists that a pandemic was inevitable.
Cummings says that it was around this point that he realised the system was behind the curve.
Keith asks where the emails are showing Cummings telling Johnson that the Covid action plan presented by the government (see 10.28am) was a joke.
Cummings says he does not know if those emails exist.
Cummings says by the end of February the media were starting to treat Covid as a crisis. That affected the way Whitehall responded, he says.
Keith says Cummings keep saying “the system” did not regard this as a crisis in mid February. But he asks Cummings why he did not make this a crisis?
Cummings says, if Johnson had come back in mid-February, he would have told people not to worry about things.
He cites handshaking as an example. At this point he tried to get Johnson to cut back on handshaking. But Johnson ignored this, he says.
Cummings is referring to this incident.
Cummings says bringing Johnson back from holiday in mid February 2020 to deal with Covid would have been counter-productive
Back at the Covid inquiry Hugo Keith KC, counsel for inquiry, says by 17 February Sage members were saying sustained transmission was already happening in the UK. Yet the pace of work on Covid slowed down. Why was that?
Dominic Cummings says there was a perception that the problem was months away. And people were on holiday – although Cummings says he personally did not go on holiday.
Q: For 10 days he did not receive any papers relating to Covid?
Cummings questions that. He says there may have been a gap in the paperwork seen by the inquiry.
He says thinks evolved a lot between mid-February and late February.
Cummings accepts that it was “pretty insane” that so many people were away.
But he repeats the point about people thinking the crisis was not imminent.
Q: Why weren’t you banging the door, and telling the PM he had to come back?
Cummings says he was working. But he says he did not think having Johnson there would be productive. It would be counterproductive, because Johnson was likely to warn against the danger of over-reacting, and describe Covid as being like swine flu.
Q: Did you discuss bringing him back?
Yes, says Cummings.
Q: But there is no evidence of that.
Cummings says he was sitting next to Martin Reynolds and Imran Shafi, and discussed it with them. There was no need to write it down.
Gillian Keegan says she hopes much-delayed trans guidance for schools in England to be out before Christmas
Sally Weale
The long-awaited transgender guidance for schools in England will be published before Christmas, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, has promised.
It was originally expected earlier this summer but has been dogged by delay and disagreement, to the frustration of headteachers, who are struggling to negotiate complex issues with pupils and parents without adequate support.
Asked by reporters at an AI hackathon to test how artificial intelligence can reduce teacher workloads and drive up standards in schools, Keegan said she did not want teachers to spend Christmas worrying about the still unpublished guidance. She said:
I have been working on this for a long time, but yes, I very much hope it will be there by Christmas. I know it’s much awaited and I know everybody’s very keen to get it. We’ve been working so hard … It’s very tricky. It is very difficult.
It is for consultation because we’re sure there’ll be lots of opinions around this as well. But you know, we will get it out before Christmas and then we’ll have a long consultation because I don’t want teachers to spend their Christmas worried about it.
The guidance is expected to advise on issues relating to transgender, non-binary and gender-non-conforming pupils, addressing what schools should do if a child wants to change their name or use different pronouns, and advising on issues like sport, toilets and changing rooms.
Cummings claims he told Johnson in early February containing Covid impossible – but accepts there’s no written record of this
Keith says Boris Johnson received a note about Covid on 30 January. And he got an update on 3 February.
There was an update on 8 February, and a meeting on 10 February, Keith says. After that Johnson went to Chevening.
Keith says at that point, if what the chief medical officer and the chief scientific officer were right, it was obvious the virus was going to spread around the world. Why was the PM not told?
Cummings says no one in Whitehall thought that the UK would be in the biggest crisis since the war within a month.
People thought it would take much longer for the crisis to hit the country, he says.
They thought this was a problem for May/June, not March, he says.
Q: But on 6 February you told people in a WhatsApp group that, according to the chief scientist, the virus was going to sweep the world?
Cummings says people thought at that point the future was murky. People were not ringing alarm bells. They were going skiing.
Q: Why did you not tell the PM containment has failed and the virus is coming?
Cummings says he did tell Johnson that.
Q: But there is no record of it.
Cummings says not everything is written down.
Q: Do you accept that there is no written record of anyone telling the PM at this point that containment has failed?
Cummings implies he does, saying Keith has access to the documents.
Cummings says during February he began to realise that the pandemic plans that Matt Hancock had told him existed did not actually exist.
In No 10 they were told on 16 March that the civil contingencies secretariat did not even have these plans centrally. That message was such a shock that people thought it was a spoof, he says.
Cummings says until March 2020 people did not even think that lockdown would be an option for a country like the UK.
He says originally the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Sage were saying the real danger was a second peak hitting the country in the autumn. That was what was also known as the “herd immunity” approach.
Cummings says UK could have avoided lockdown if massive test and trace capacity had been in place by March 2020
Q: At what point did people in government realise that without an effective test and trace system, there was no point trying to control the spread of the virus?
Cummings says at the end of February and the beginning of March people were not anticipating test and trace on a mass scale.
Around 12 March test and trace was in effect stopped.
Q: If an effective test and trace system had been put in place in January, February and March, could a lockdown have been avoided?
Cummings agrees.
He says from the end of December flights to and from China should have been stopped.
He says there should have been a hardcore testing system at airports, and a massive ramping up of testing infrastructure, with millions of tests available, and strict border controls.
If that had happened, there would have been less need for lockdown, he says. He says that would have been a better approach – although he accepts that it would not have been possible to produce this testing capacity “out of thin air”.