DOMAGEDDON
Boris Johnson wanted to be injected with Covid on TV & dismissed it as ‘scare story’, blasts Cummings
BORIS Johnson wanted to be injected with Covid live on telly to show it wasn't a big risk, Dominic Cummings sensationally claimed today.
The rogue aide is spilling the PM's secrets live in a committee grilling in Parliament today.
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Summoned to a bombshell Commons evidence session that could run for six hours, the former No10 adviser is lifting the lid on how the PM was too slow to lockdown last March and said the Health Sec's “disastrous” pandemic planning.
The scorned ex-aide has been firing off a stream of attacks for weeks and is finally unleashing his full-throated verdict of the Government.
He said this morning: "The view of various officials inside No10 was that if we have the PM chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone “it’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of”, that would not help serious planning."
And he said the PM thought it was just "the new swine flu".
The PM caught Covid in April last year and spent a week in hospital with the virus - including several days in intensive care - and nearly died.
Dominic Raab even had to step in as acting PM while he was in his darkest days.
This morning Mr Cummings said he should have been "hitting the panic button" far earlier than he was, and said he raised the threat of Covid with the PM in early January.
In a scathing assessment to MPs on a joint science and health committee this morning, Mr Cummings said that No10 was not on a war footing fast enough and "lots of key people were skiing in the middle of February".
And ministers didn't realise the huge holes in their planning until it was too late, he claimed, but admitted he did not attend key COBRA meetings.
The trademark scruffy PM's former right-hand man swept into Parliament with an open-neck shirt, jeans and a black baseball cap this morning.
Mr Cummings is also set to make incendiary claims that Mr Johnson refused to order a second lockdown in September last year because "only 80-year-olds were dying" from the bug.
The PM is also said to have called Covid 'Kung Flu' in a reference to the virus originating from China, reports the
CUMMINGS' CRITICISM
The scorned ex-adviser pointed the the finger directly at his former boss and has said that thousands of lives were needlessly lost by his "awful" leadership.
He also blasted him for being on holiday just weeks before locking down the country.
Ahead of the grilling, Cabinet minister Grant Shapps tried to bat away the ex adviser's bombshell testimony, insisting people care more about the vaccination programme.
And he accused Mr Cummings of having an "agenda" adding "I'll leave others to determine how reliable a witness to all this he is".
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But he didn't deny any of the central allegations.
The transport secretary said today: "He's probably tweeted most of what he's going to say already, and meanwhile we're getting on with the job.
"One of the central accusation is there wasn't going to be another lockdown whereas in fact we had two further lockdowns.
"Let's look at what actually happened rather than what somebody says was said once in some meeting."
Mr Shapps admitted "there will have been things we could've done differently" during the early stages of the pandemic as there was "no textbook to open".
But in a reference to Mr Cummings, who was powerful within No 10 at the time, he added: "It's easy to be professors of hindsight."
And the transport secretary said more Brits are interested in the present, with all over-30s now being called for a vaccine.
He said: "I think that's what will be focussing most people's attention this week rather than a sideshow over a former adviser
"Would I rather be talking about the things that people actually care about that matter to their lives, then of course the answer is yes."
Whitehall insiders are all expected to put in shifts in rotation to watch Mr Cummings's bombshell claims.
They will create a rapid rebuttal unit to respond to his claims and slap them down in real time.
And it was also claimed the PM gave the controversial European Super League the nod.
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A No10 spokesperson did not deny the claims about wanting to be infected with Covid last night and said: "There is a huge task for this government to get on with.
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"We are entirely focused on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the roadmap and distributing vaccines while delivering on the public’s priorities.
“Throughout this pandemic, the government’s priority has been to save lives, protect the NHS and support people’s jobs and livelihoods across the United Kingdom.”
EIGHT THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR AS DOMINIC CUMMINGS APPEARS BEFORE MPS
Did the lockdown come soon enough?
Mr Cummings is known to have advocated tougher lockdown measures, while it has been suggested Boris Johnson didn't want to lock down too early.
In fresh allegations made by Mr Cummings on Twitter this week, he said that on March 14 last year one of the things being "screamed at" Mr Johnson was that there was "no plan for lockdown" and "our current official plan will kill at least 250k and destroy the NHS".
Was herd immunity Government policy?
Government ministers have said herd immunity was not a tactic the Government looked to deploy at the outset of the pandemic.
But Mr Cummings claimed that the official pandemic preparation plan had outlined that the strategy was to have one peak of the disease, before reaching herd immunity by September.
He said the policy - to build up resistance in the population by allowing some spread of the disease - was only dropped in March last year after a warning it would lead to a "catastrophe".
Has the Government been transparent enough?
The PM's former top aide has claimed "secrecy contributed greatly to the catastrophe" in February and March last year.
Mr Cummings said that "openness to scrutiny would have exposed Government errors weeks earlier than happened" and that public scrutiny of plans would help stop a situation where vaccines do not have an impact on new variants.
"This will hopefully show it's been taken seriously," he said. "If not, better learn now that the Gvt has screwed up again than when 'variant escapes' news breaks."
He added: "I can think of no significant element of Covid response that wd not have been improved by discarding secrecy and opening up."
Was the Government prepared for a pandemic?
Mr Cummings said that plan to tackle coronavirus "was supposed to be 'world class', but turned out to be part disaster, part non-existent".
He said MPs should push for the Government to be more open about preparedness plans for "more dangerous things than Covid... before we find out the hard way they're as 'world class' as the Covid plan".
What can be learned from the public inquiry?
Mr Cummings has backed the idea of a public inquiry but also expressed fears that it would not get answers.
He said: "If SW1 wanted to 'learn' there wd already be a serious exercise under way. The point of the inquiry is the opposite of learning, it is to delay scrutiny, preserve the broken system & distract public from real Qs, leaving the parties & senior civil service essentially untouched".
Mr Johnson said earlier this month there would be an independent public inquiry with statutory powers into the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Did the Government close the borders soon enough?
As ministers came under recent pressure over an apparent delay in closing the borders as the Indian variant of Covid grew in risk, Mr Cummings described the early policy at airports as a "joke".
Home Secretary Priti Patel has said she advocated closing the UK's borders in March last year, but was apparently overruled, as the balance between public health and the economy was weighed up.
One paper considered by Sage in April said there was little justification for closing borders while case numbers were high, with imported infections representing a tiny proportion of cases.
Did the Prime Minister miss key Covid meetings to write a book about Shakespeare?
Mr Johnson did not chair the first five meetings of the Cobra emergency committee relating to coronavirus in January and February 2020, and a Sunday Times report suggested officials fear Mr Cummings will use an appearance before MPs to accuse Mr Johnson of missing the meetings because he was working on a biography of Shakespeare, as he needed the money to fund his divorce from Marina Wheeler, his second wife.
Asked if the Prime Minister had spent time on the book, his official spokesman said: "No, not that I'm aware of."
The Prime Minister has been "ensuring the public are kept as protected as possible during this global pandemic", the spokesman added.
How about Mr Cummings' own involvement?
Since leaving Government in November after a behind-the-scenes power struggle Mr Cummings has become one of the harshest critics of Mr Johnson's administration.
But questions have also been posed as to why, as the PM's most powerful adviser who spoke with Mr Johnson's authority, he did not do more.
MPs may quiz Mr Cummings on how he could both be at the centre of Government but also seemingly be powerless to change course of the response to the pandemic.
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Business minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan denies Dominic Cummings' claims that Covid herd immunity was govt policy
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