Latest updates: prime minister’s former top adviser to offer testimony including on mistakes he claims No 10 made as coronavirus hit Britain last year
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One of the problems that Dominic Cummings faces is that, while it is easy to believe that the government’s handling of coronavirus last year was seriously flawed (the evidence for that is clear, and even Boris Johnson himself as said many mistakes were made), given that he was supposedly the most powerful aide in Downing Street for much of that time, he cannot escape all responsibility.
In his London Playbook briefing this morning Alex Wickham says WhatsApp messages are circulating in Whitehall that “blow apart Cummings’ central claim — made in his epic Twitter thread over the past few days — that he has sought to expose government ‘lies’ over its alleged policy of herd immunity during the virus’ first wave”. Wickham writes:
The revealing messages were last night circulating throughout Whitehall and call into question Cummings’ current claims to have sought transparency and honesty while, he alleges, government ministers “lied” about herd immunity. The WhatsApps clearly show that, at the beginning of the pandemic in March last year, Cummings directly told his colleagues to publicly deny herd immunity was the government’s policy, and instead agreed they should argue it was a secondary long-term effect of the “mitigation” policy pursued by the government at the start of the crisis.
Cummings’ direct order to ministers to deny that herd immunity was their policy could mean one of two things: That herd immunity either never was the government’s main strategy, meaning his tweets over the past few days are wrong, or that it was but he nonetheless instructed ministers to lie, detonating his supposed claims to be pursuing transparency and seriously undermining his credibility ahead of today’s select committee appearance. If Cummings’ tweets of the past few days are to be believed, these messages show he was guilty of the exact thing he is now accusing ministers of doing.
Rather than saving up all his anti-Johnson allegations for the hearing, Dominic Cummings seems to have been briefing them out liberally all week – a bit like the Treasury ahead of a budget. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has a new one this morning.
Cummings also expected to say PM wanted to go to see the Queen as usual on 18th March as normal, despite public health risks known by then, but was persuaded not to go
Downing St denies this happened – audience that week took place on phone, was shortly before the Queen was going to Windsor
