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

At a SAGE meeting on 5 March, when the only measures recommended were ‘shielding the vulnerable and elderly’, Jeremy Hunt asks whether Cummings advised PM that SAGE was wrong?

“No, I didn’t. I was ringing increasing alarm bells in the first half of March, but... I had a sort of... my thought process was, I started getting people coming to me from around the 25th February saying, very smart people, saying ‘America is completely screwing this up, you should be really aggressive, don’t listen to the people saying there’s no alternative to this, I personally am starting to take preparations and buying things, we’re going to have to lockdown’” Cummings says he was “torn” because in the first 10 days of March he was being told it was going wrong, but he was concerned about ‘ditching the official plan’ and was reluctant to do so.

Says official advice at the time of Champions League match in Liverpool and Cheltenham - which both had large numbers of fans in attendance - was that it wouldn’t make a difference to stop mass-events, or that doing so might even have a negative impact as it “might push people into pubs”.

He says: “No one in the official system in the department for health drew the obvious conclusion, which was, shouldn’t we be shutting the pubs as well?”

Here’s the full passage of Cummings giving background on the herd immunity question,

“Essentially the logic of the official plan from the Department of Health was that this disease is going to spread, vaccines are not going to be relevant in any way, shape or form over the relevant time period, we were told it was essentially a certainty that there would be no vaccines available in 2020, something else which turned out to be completely wrong because, as I think we’ll come onto, it actually turns out we could’ve done vaccines much faster than happened.

“But at the time the whole plan was based on the assumption that it was a certainty that there would be no vaccines in 2020. So the logic was you can either have … if it’s unconstrained it will come in and there will be a sharp peak like that, and it will completely swamp everything and huge disaster.

“The logical approach therefore is to introduce measures which delay that peak arriving and which push it down below the capacity of the health system.”

He said that in response to questions over the lockdowns being enforced across Wuhan and Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, it was assumed the measures “won’t work for them and they will all have second peaks later on”.

“Secondly, it’s inconceivable that the British public are going to accept Wuhan-style measures here,” he added.

“Even if we therefore suppress it completely all you’re going to do is get a second peak in the winter when the NHS is already every year under pressure, so we only actually have a real choice between one peak and herd immunity by September – terrible but then you’re through it by the time the next winter comes – if you try and flatten it now the second peak comes up in winter time that’s even worse.

“So, horrific as it looks in the summer, the numbers will be even worse if this happens in October, November, December-time.”

Dominic Cummings said he is “completely baffled” as to why No 10 has tried to deny that herd immunity was the official plan early last year.

Cummings: “One of the critical things that was completely wrong in the whole official thinking in SAGE and Department of Health in February and March was, the British public will not accept a lockdown, secondly the British public will not accept what was thought of as an East-Asian style track and trace type system and the infringements of liberty around that.

“Those two assumptions were completely central to the official plan and were both obviously completely wrong.

“In the first half of March this was raised sometimes in the PMs office and me and others were literally pointing at the TV screen of Lombardy, saying ‘Look at what is happening in Lombardy, we are getting text messages on our phones from out own families saying what’s going on? This assumption that the public aren’t that frightened and don’t want to have a lockdown is false and we should abandon it’.”

Cummings says he sent a message to the PM at 7:28 on Thursday 12 March, saying “We’ve got big problems coming, the cabinet office is terrifyingly shit, no plans, totally behind the pace, we must announce today not next week, if you feel ill with cold or flu stay home. Some around the system want delay because they haven’t done the work. We must force the pace. Looking at 100,000 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. You’ve got the chair the daily meeting in the Cabinet Room not COBRA” - because the COBRA system, Cummings explains, “didn’t work”.

He says on 12 March the preparations for COVID were completely derailed because Donald Trump wanted the UK to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East that evening.

He then adds, saying it sounds “so surreal it couldn’t possible be true,” that “that day, the Times had run a huge story about the PM, his girlfriend and their dog. And the PMs girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the Press Office deal with that.

“So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying ‘are we going to bomb Iraq’ part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not, the prime minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial.

“So we had the meeting on Covid and we decided to push ahead with household quarantine pretty quickly. Fortunately, thank god, the attorney general persuaded the PM not to go along with the whole bombing campaign. And then at the end of all this, at roughly 9pm that night I sat down with Ben Warner and Mark Warner and that’s essentially when they hit the total panic button with me.”

Cummings holds up a printout of an image he has shared on Twitter, of what he claims was ‘Plan B’ which was drafted up on Friday 13 March at 8pm.

“Essentially what’s happening at this point is, we’re thinking what do we do on this, at this point the second most powerful official in the country, Helen MacNamara is the deputy cabinet secretary, she walked into the office while we’re looking at this whiteboard, she says “I’ve just been talking to the official, Mark Sweeney, who is in charge of coordinating with the department for health, he said, quote, “I’ve been told for years that there’s a whole plan for this. There is no plan. We’re in huge trouble.”

“’I’ve come through here,’ Helen MacNamara says, “I’ve come through to the prime minister’s office to tell you all” quote, “I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we’re going to kill thousands of people. As soon as I’ve been told this I’ve come through to see you and it seems from the conversations you’re having that that’s correct.’”

“And I said, ‘I think you’re right, I think it is a disaster, I’m going to speak to the prime minister about it tomorrow. We’re trying to sketch out here what plan B is”.

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?”