Live: Matt Hancock 'should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying' - Dominic Cummings

Hunt interjects, says on the 16th March we did not close pubs and restaurants or stop public events for another week. He asks whether Cummings advised that?

“Yes and no,” says Cummings.

He says he advised the PM on 14th March that lockdown would be needed, but, he says, there was no lockdown plan.

He says the situation in Downing Street was like “a scene from Independence Day with Jeff Goldblum saying the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken and you need a new plan”.

Mr Cummings said on March 14 Boris Johnson was told that models showing the peak was “weeks and weeks and weeks away” in June were “completely wrong”.

He said the PM was warned: “The NHS is going to be smashed in weeks, really we’ve got days to act.”

Asked if he should have acted earlier to convince the PM to change tack, Cummings strikes a fairly regretful tone.

He says: “There’s no doubt in retrospect that yes, it was a huge failure of mine and I bitterly regret that I didn’t hit the emergency panic button earlier then I did.

“In retrospect there’s no doubt I was wrong not to.

“All I can say is my worry was, my mental state at the time was, on the one hand you can know from the last week of February that a whole many things were wrong.

“But I was incredibly frightened, I guess is the word, about the consequences of me kind of pulling a massive emergency string and saying the official plan is wrong and it’s going to kill everyone and you have got to change path because what if I’m wrong?

“What if I persuade him to change tack and that’s a disaster?”

Cummings: “We are sitting in the Prime Minister’s office, the Cabinet were talking about the herd immunity plan.

“The Cabinet Secretary said ‘Prime Minister you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity plan and that it’s like the old chicken pox parties, we need people to get this disease because that’s how we get herd immunity by September’.

“I said ‘Mark (Sedwill), you have got to stop using this chicken pox analogy, it’s not right’ and he said ‘why’ and Ben Warner said ‘because chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people’.

“To stress, this wasn’t some thing that Cabinet Secretary had come up with, he was saying what the official advice to him from the Department of Health was.”

Cummings says he “didn’t pay enough attention early enough” to the pandemic.

Says it is obvious in retrospect that he left it too late.

“It was a classic historical example of groupthink in action, because the process was closed, that’s what happens in closed groupthink bubbles, everyone just reinforces themselves, and the more people from the outside attacked, the more people internally said they don’t understand because they don’t have access to this information.”

He says part of his job was to challenge things, and although he did it on other things and on this eventually, he feels he didn’t do it soon enough.

He says: “At this time, not just the Prime Minister but many other people thought that the real danger is not the health danger but the overaction to it and the economy.

“The Prime Minister said all the way through February and through the first half of March the real danger here isn’t this new swine flu thing, it’s that the reaction to it is going to cripple the economy.

“To be fair to the Prime Minister, although I think he was completely wrong, lots of other senior people in Whitehall had the same view, that the real danger was the economic one.

“There was a fundamental misunderstanding about how far this already was in the country, how fast it was spreading in the country.

“The lack of testing data was an absolutely critical disaster because we didn’t realise early enough how far it had already spread.

“The testing data was wrong, the graphs we were shown and the models were all wrong because they were all pushed out to the right, and that massively contributed to the whole lack of urgency.”

Asked about procurement and the performance of the department of health, including secretary of state, Matt Hancock, Cummings says: “Like in much of the Government system, there were many brilliant people at relatively junior and middle levels who were terribly let down by senior leadership.

“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.”

Cummings is asked why the financial incentives for people to self-isolate were “so fundamentally weak”.

He says that the Chancellor did an “outstanding job” on furlough, but that his team had to create it out of thin air in just a few days.

He says there should have been a plan for financial incentives, but there wasn’t.

The shielding plan was “literally hacked together in two all-nighters” after March 19.

“There wasn’t any plan for shielding, there wasn’t even a helpline for shielding, there wasn’t any plan for financial incentives. There wasn’t any plan for almost anything in any kind of detail at all.”

Procurement system in Department for health was “completely hopeless” says Cummings.

Says Department for Health had been turning down ventilators because the price had been marked up.

Describes plans to ship PPE from China which would take months when a peak was expected within weeks.

“The whole system was like wading through treacle,” he says.

Asked to clarify his claim that the Health Secretary lied, Cummings says he can evidence the allegation and says there are “numerous examples”.

“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.”

Continuing his assault on Hancock, Cummings says he lied about PPE procurement being under control.

“In mid-April, just before the Prime Minister and I were diagnosed with having Covid ourselves, the Secretary of State for Health told us in the Cabinet room everything is fine with PPE, we’ve got it all covered, etc, etc.

“When I came back, almost the first meeting I had in the Cabinet room was about the disaster over PPE and how we were actually completely short, hospitals all over the country were running out.

“The Secretary of State said in that meeting this is the fault of Simon Stevens, this is the fault of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it’s not my fault, they’ve blocked approvals on all sorts of things.

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

“The cabinet secretary came back to me and said it’s completely untrue, I’ve lost confidence in the Secretary of State’s honesty in these meetings.

“The cabinet secretary said that to me and the cabinet secretary said that to the Prime Minister.”

“There have been lots of reports and accusations that the Chancellor was the person who was kind of trying to delay in March. That is completely, completely wrong.

“The Chancellor was totally supportive of me and of other people as we tried to make this transition from plan A to plan B.”

Also says he had complete faith in Sunak’s team to handle the economic side of the issue.

Cummings says any political system which ends up giving people a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson - as at the last general election - is “obviously a system that has gone extremely, extremely badly wrong”.

“There’s so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two. And there’s obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties if that’s the best that they can do.

He also said he believed this applies to himself.

“I’m not smart. I’ve not built great things in the world.

“It’s just completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there, and that the choice at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn.

“It’s also the case that there are wonderful people inside the Civil Service, there are brilliant, brilliant officials all over the place. But the system tends to weed them out from senior management jobs.

“And the problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys over and over again.”

Cummings says he had a lot of dealing with the media prior to the 2019 general election, but from January onwards effectively stopped speaking to them.

Says he did speak to BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg on a few occasions. He said he did give unauthorised briefings but this was only to rarely speak to journalists without telling the Prime Minister first.

“Yes, I did talk to people unauthorised in the sense of actually pretty rarely did I speak to the Prime Minister before I spoke to any journalists.

“I just got on with things because because my view was the Prime Minister already is about a thousand-times too obsessed with the media in a way which undermines him doing his own job.”

“It’s true that I hit the panic button and said we’ve got to ditch the official plan, it’s true that I helped to try to create what an official plan was.

“I think it’s a disaster that I acted too late. The fundamental reason was that I was really frightened of acting.

“If you’ve got an official plan, you’ve got all the Sage advice, you’ve got the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Secretary, everyone saying you’ve got to do this and if we don’t do it and if we try and do something different and stop it now it’s going to many times worse in the winter, I was asking myself in that kind of two-week period if I hit the panic button and persuade the Prime Minister to shift and then it all goes completely wrong, I’m going to have killed god knows how many hundreds of thousands of people.

“I only had the confidence to do that once I knew that people who are much smarter than me had looked at it and said basically the Sage groupthink is wrong, the DH groupthink is wrong, we’ve got to change course.

“I apologise for not acting earlier and If I had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive.”

Cummings said there needed to be a thorough review of the country’s risk register programmes and that he had concerns plans to protect against an anthrax attack were robust enough.

“I thought that many of the plans seemed to me to fall very short of what was actually needed.

“A lot of things are just power points and they lack detail.

“But most importantly, I think, I think the process around them as with the pandemic plan is just not open, there’s is not a culture of talking to outside experts.

“I was talking to some people who said ‘did you ever go read the plan on solar flares’ and I said ‘no’, and they said ‘if you get some expert advice to that you will see that the current Government plan on that is just completely hopeless, if that happens we are all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.

“One thing that I did say to the Cabinet Secretary last year in the summer, and which I ardently hope is actually happening, is there ought to be an absolutely thorough, total review of all such risk register programmes, there ought to be an assumption of making this whole process open and only closed for specific things.

“For example, one of the other things very high on risk register is the anthrax plan, what happens if terrorists attack with anthrax.

“Personally, I would be extremely concerned that the plan is as robust as it should be.”

“One of the fundamental problems that we find in this whole thing, it is a general problem in Whitehall but it was very, very clear and disastrous during Covid, is you have this system where on the one hand ministers are nominally responsible in various ways for a, b, c.

“But ministers can’t actually hire and fire anybody in the department. The officials are actually in charge of hiring and firing a, b, c.

“So, as soon as you have some kind of major problem you have kind of that Spiderman meme with both Spidermans pointing at each other, it’s like that but with everybody.

“So, you have [Matt] Hancock pointing at the permanent secretary, you have the permanent secretary pointing at Hancock, and they are both pointing at the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Office is pointing back at them and all the different Spidermans are all pointing at each other saying ‘you are responsible’ and the problem is that everyone is right and everyone is unhappy.”

Cummings says No10 denied him access to his official diary and emails from when he worked for the government.

“I have been critical of the Prime Minister.

“But… if you dropped, you know, Bill Gates or someone like that into that job on the 1st of March, the most competent people in the world you could possibly find, any of them would have had a complete nightmare.

“There is no doubt that the Prime Minister made some very bad misjudgments and got some very serious things wrong.

“It’s also the case, there’s no doubt, that he was extremely badly let down by the whole system. And it was a system failure, of which I include myself in that as well, I also failed.”