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

The first session of questioning - which dealt with the first two phases of the inquiry - has finished.

However, there’s no rest for the wicked, nor this journalist, and session two is now underway.

We’re going to be here for some time longer.

In case you were wondering, here’s the Spiderman meme referenced by Dominic Cummings towards the end of that first session.

Of the many, many things Cummings has targeted for criticism today, himself included, health secretary Matt Hancock is by far coming off the worst so far.

Cummings says: “In my opinion, disastrously, the Secretary of State had made, while the Prime Minister was on his near death bed, his pledge to do 100,000 by the end of April.

“This was an incredibly stupid thing to do because we already had that goal internally.

“What then happened when I came back around the 13th was I started getting calls and No 10 were getting calls saying Hancock is interfering with the building of the test and trace system because he’s telling everybody what to do to maximise his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month.

“We had half the Government with me in No 10 calling around frantically saying do not do what Hancock says, build the thing properly for the medium term.

“And we had Hancock calling them all saying down tools on this, do this, hold tests back so I can hit my target.

“In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.

“It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”

He continues: “That was one of the reasons why the cabinet secretary and I agreed that we had to essentially take testing away from Hancock and put it in a separate agency.

“There was all this bureaucratic infighting in April and remember the Prime Minister wasn’t back then either, Dominic Raab was doing a brilliant job chairing the meetings, but this was a huge call and very difficult for him to basically start carving up the Department of Health in April.

“So, essentially, we never really got to grips with it until the Prime Minister was back in the office and the cabinet secretary and I could say to him we’ve got to do the track and trace thing in a completely different way.”

He says he told them PM, “if we don’t fire the Secretary of State (Matt Hancock) and we don’t get the testing in someone else’s hands, we are going to kill people and it will be a catastrophe”.

Ouch.

Asked why Hancock is still in his role, Cummings says Johnson came close to removing the health secretary in April but “fundamentally, wouldn’t do it”.

He says there were several senior figures who agreed Hancock had to go, but falls short of explaining why the prime minister kept him on.

He says it would be “speculation” to try and describe Johnson’s reasoning, but says there certainly aren’t “any good reasons” to have done so.

Cummings says he thought about threatening to resign publicly in order to change the prime minister’s approach at several points.

Speaking to the PM at a later date, Cummings says he said: “This whole system is chaos, this building is chaos. You are more frightened of me having the power to stop the chaos than you are of the chaos. And this is a completely unsustainable position for us both to be in. And I’m not prepared to work with people like Hancock anymore, I’ve told you umpteen times you’ve got to remove him and you won’t, it’s going to be a disaster in the autumn, and therefore its time that I should go.”

He said that Johnson agreed that he was more afraid of him having the power to stop the chaos than the chaos.

“He said ‘chaos isn’t that bad, chaos means everyone has to look to me to see who is in charge’”

Cummings says Hancock “categorically” told both himself and Boris Johnson that people would be tested before being put into care homes from hospital, but this didn’t happen.

He said: “While the Government rhetoric was ‘we have put a shield around care homes and blah blah blah,’ it was complete nonsense.

“Quite the opposite of putting a shield around them, we sent people with Covid back to the care homes.”

Cummings says before April, the advice on borders was not to close them as it would have no effect.

After April he said, “fundamentally there was no proper border policy because the prime minister didn’t want a border policy”.

He says Boris Johnson was influenced by a Telegraph campaign and Conservative MPs.

“As of today, we still don’t have a proper border policy in my opinion.”

Asked if it is fair to say that the economy was prioritised over people’s lives in allowing borders to remain open, Cummings said it would not be fair to blame the PM for what happened before March.

However, after April, “he was prioritising the economy”.

“Repeatedly in meeting after meeting I and others said all we have to do is download the Singapore or Taiwan documents in English and impose them here.

“We’re imposing all of these restrictions on people domestically but people can see that everyone is coming in from infected areas, it’s madness, it’s undermining the whole message that we should take it seriously.

“At that point he was back to, ‘lockdown was all a terrible mistake, I should’ve been the mayor of Jaws, we should never have done lockdown 1, the travel industry will all be destroyed if we bring in a serious border policy’.

“To which, of course, some of us said there’s not going to be a tourism industry in the autumn if we have a second wave, the whole logic was completely wrong.”

Cummings says there was “no plan for social care”.

Cummings denies saying “if that means some pensioners die, too bad” of the government's Covid strategy in February.

“It actually caused huge trouble that, I actually had people at my house threatening to kill me as a consequence of it.”

“It created this terrible impression that essentially we didn’t care about people, but it was not true.”

“Fundamentally, the reason for all these problems was bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning, bad operational capability. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got great people doing communications if the prime minister changes his mind ten times a day and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day. You’re going to have a communication disaster zone.”

On accusations that government comms has been to blame for many problems, Cummings disagrees,

“The director of communications said to the PM twice, do not pick a fight with Rashford, obviously we should do this instead. The PM decided to pick a fight and then surrendered twice.

“So everyone then says ‘oh your communications are stupid’. No, what’s stupid is picking a fight with Rashford over school meals and what should have happened is just getting the school meals policy right. So it’s easy to blame communication for bad policy and bad decision making.

Asked about his infamous trip to Barnard Castle, Cummings says he wants to add some context to this which was not put into the public domain at the time (by him, during the press conference which he had called).

“That whole episode was definitely a major disaster for the government and for the COVID policy.

“In Autumn 2019 I had to move out of my house because of security threats, for about six weeks. On the 28 February when I was dealing with the COVID problem, on the Friday night I was down at Westminster, my wife called and saying there’s a gang of people outside saying they’re going to break into the house and kill everybody. She was alone at the house at the time with our then-three-year-old.

After that I spoke to the PM and the deputy cabinet secretary about the situation and it was suggested that I either move my family into a government accommodation or move them off to family.”

He said that further problems arose following the publication of a story which alleged he’d made comments about letting pensioners die. He then decided that they needed to leave.

“So before the whole thing happened with the PM being sick, my wife calling up, it had already been decided that I was going to move my family out of London, regardless of the COVID rules. That was discussed with people in the cabinet office and with the private office.”

“What happened is, because of this we kept the whole thing quiet, almost nobody in No10 knew about it because I didn’t want the same problems to crop up at my parents’ house.”

Cummings says the original story which came out had a number of errors, including that the police had spoken to him about breaking lockdown rules. This, he says, was untrue, they had spoken to him about the security threats.

“The Prime Minister and I agreed that because of the security things, we would basically just stonewall the story and not say anything about it.

“I was extremely mindful of the problem that when you talk about these things, you cause more trouble for yourself, and I’d already put my wife and child in the firing line on it. So I said, I’m not talking about this, we should shut our mouths about it.”

“The PM agreed, then on the Monday he was under so much political and media pressure that he said ‘this line won’t hold, we’re going to have to do something about it”

“Now at this point I made just a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake, which I am extremely sorry about.”

“What I should have done in retrospect is I should have called my wife and said you and our boy are going to have to get out of London again, I’m going to have to just explain the whole truth about this thing.

“Instead of that, we had a chaotic situation in No10 where the PM said you’re going to have to explain something, and I said I’m not explaining these security things otherwise we’re going to have more mobs back outside my house.

“So I ended up giving the whole rose garden thing where what I said was true, but we left out a kind of crucial part of it all.

“And it just … the whole thing was a complete disaster and the truth is – and then it undermined public confidence in the whole thing – the truth is, if I just when the Prime Minister said on a Monday, ‘we can’t hold this line, we’re going to have to explain things’, if I just basically sent my family back out of London and said here’s the truth to the public, I think people would have understood the situation.

“It was a terrible misjudgment not to do that. So I take … the Prime Minister got that wrong, I got that wrong.”

“After March he thought that the lesson to be learned is we shouldn’t have done a lockdown, we should have focused on the economy, it was all a disaster, ‘I should have been the mayor in Jaws’.

“I thought that perspective was completely mad.

“I had very little influence on Covid stuff, I mean I tried, I made arguments, but as you can see on pretty much all the major arguments I basically lost.”

He said the PM’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, was “desperate” to get rid of him and his team.

We’re getting a number of denials and comments through from Downing Street now.

On the 100,000 daily target for coronavirus tests blasted as “stupid” by Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “This was an ambitious goal during a national crisis which had a galvanising effect on massively scaling up our testing capacity.”

Asked about the former adviser saying it was left too long to set up a functioning tracing system, the spokesman said: “I would refute that, our testing capacity was clear at the start of this pandemic.

“Like other countries we needed to massively scale up the capacity we had and we did that successfully.” On the government’s handling of care homes during the coronavirus crisis, the spokesman said: “With regard to care homes, we’ve always been guided by the latest advice at that time and we’ve taken a number of steps to protect care home residents and those being discharged from hospitals into care homes.”

On border policy the spokesman said: “Obviously I would refute that [border policy is still unsuitable]. We have some of the toughest border measures in the world and we have taken action whenever necessary to keep the public safe.”

The PMs spokesperson declined to deny the Johnson dismissed Covid as a scare story, that he said it was “only killing 80-yer olds” or that he wanted to get injected with Covid on live TV.

The Prime Minister’s press secretary said: “I think the point of this is we’re not going to engage with every allegation made today.

“And the PM was setting out that throughout this pandemic our priority has been to save lives, protect the NHS and support people’s jobs and livelihoods across the entire United Kingdom.”

Asked by Jeremy Hunt whether he stands by his account of the Barnard Castle trip. Hunt says many people took issue not with the decision to move his family out of London, but to drive 30 miles to Barnard Castle ostensibly to test his eye site.

“The truth is only a few days before then I had been sitting in bed writing a will, what to do if I die.

“I try to explain this all at the time, it seemed to me like, OK if you’re going to drive 300 miles to go back to work the next day then pottering down the road for 30 miles and back to see how you feel after you have come off what you thought might be your death bed didn’t seem crazy to me at the time.”

Hunt interjects to say, “did it not seem crazy to do that test with your wife and child in the car with you?”

Cummings says: “It didn’t seem crazy at the time.

Hunt: “Does it seem crazy now?

Cummings: “It didn’t seem crazy at the time, it seemed just like OK, let’s get in the car and drive up and down the road, if it feels bad come home and see how I feel as I get going. But I can completely understand why people think the whole thing was weird.

“Obviously I wish I’d never heard of Barnard Castle, I wish I’d never gone. I wish the whole nightmare had never happened.”

In a stark reminder of what all this is, at least should, be about, Cummings backs call for a Covid inquiry, without delay.

He says, “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die”.

After a recess, the third and final session is now underway.

Cummings says he was pressing for a ‘circuit-breaker lockdown’ in September.

Boris Johnson ignored advice and acted on his own in putting off the lockdown, he says.

The economic arguments were outweighing everything else for the PM “at this point”, he said.