Dominic Cummings spent hours being grilled by Covid inquiry lawyers on Tuesday about his time in No 10 during the pandemic and on the contents of explosive WhatsApp messages and emails.
But his testimony did not end there, with a 115-page written submission published on the inquiry website just hours later. Here we summarise Boris Johnson’s former top aide’s claims about that turbulent period.
Shakespeare book
As the pandemic crisis unfolded in February 2020, Johnson went on holiday for a fortnight and was, according to Cummings, “little involved in government”. He claimed Johnson was “extremely distracted” during that time because he wanted to work on his Shakespeare book, which was never published.
“He had a divorce to finalise and was grappling with financial problems from that plus his girlfriend’s [Carrie Symonds’s] spending plans for the No 10 flat,” he added. “An ex-girlfriend [thought to refer to Jennifer Arcuri] was making accusations about him in the media. His current girlfriend wanted to finalise the announcement of their engagement.”
Johnson did not take Covid seriously
Cummings texted Lee Cain, No 10’s director of communications, in March 2020 to tell him Johnson “doesn’t think [Covid’s] a big deal”, that he thought it would “be like swine flu” and the main danger was talking the economy into a slump.
Cummings told Johnson to stop shaking hands, but it prompted him to “veer towards mayor of Jaws mode” – a reference to the film’s mayor who kept the beaches open despite the shark attacks – going on TV and doing just that.
Herd immunity
Cummings reiterated his argument that herd immunity was the UK government’s initial plan to respond to a single wave of coronavirus, despite ministers’ denials.
He said it was “astonishing” that the then deputy chief medical officer, [CMO] Jenny Harries, told the BBC in 2021 she had “never been in any government meeting” where it was suggested at the start of the pandemic, given the volume of charts demonstrating it.
Hairdryer treatment
Johnson asked the top scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nose, according to Cummings.
The former senior political adviser described this moment as a “low point”, with the then prime minister circulating a YouTube video of a man using a device for this purpose.
The Queen
Johnson tried to go to see the queen in person on 18 March 2020 when he had Covid symptoms, rejecting advice from Cummings and an aide, Cleo Watson.
Cummings wrote: “I was desperate and said something like: ‘If you’ve got Covid and you kill the queen, you’re finished.’ Cleo said she would not let him get in the car. He agreed not to go.” In June 2021, No 10 denied the story.
Newspaper editors
Cummings claimed that when Johnson insisted on workers going back to their offices in July 2021, “he was under constant bombardment from his newspaper friends to get commuters back because it was hitting their profits hard”.
Cummings claimed that as the pandemic escalated, Johnson was spending time on “irrelevant or frankly alarming things” including meeting Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Evening Standard, to discuss his controversial peerage and “bunging cash” to the newspaper, in the form of advertising spending. “I said I thought this an extremely bad idea.”
Dead cat strategy
Cummings said Johnson had also asked him to find a “dead cat” to get the pandemic off the front pages, because he was “sick” of it. The “dead cat” refers to a strategy for political meddling by circulating striking claims in order to divert attention away from an unwanted story.
“At one point in autumn he told me to ‘put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead-cat Covid, I’m sick of Covid, I want it off the front pages’,” Cummings wrote. “I said that no campaign could dead-cat Covid.”
Matt Hancock
Cummings was highly critical of the former health secretary, claiming Hancock constantly lied and that he had told the PM to sack him on multiple occasions. Senior officials also told Johnson that leaving Hancock in post “guaranteed further disasters and deaths in autumn/ winter”, he claimed, and that if he had been replaced “thousands would have survived”.
Partygate
Cummings claimed that he had been told about the “Abba party’” in the Downing Street flat “celebrating my departure” on 13 November 2020, and that there was a brief reference to this in the newspapers at the time “but because the media was so happy I’d left, this open signal was ignored”.
He claimed that after he left Downing Street, officials told him that “the management of No 10 collapsed and parties became routine”. However, he wrote that he was never interviewed by police, either as an attendee or a witness, over Partygate or fined for attending gatherings in No 10.
Carrie Symonds
Cummings claimed that the cabinet secretary and senior private office officials shared his concern that the PM’s then fiancee, Carrie Symonds, “was exacerbating the trolley problem” (Johnson’s tendency to change his mind).
“After the PM went upstairs in the evening and texted, sometimes contradicting things he’d just agreed, staff often worried: ‘Is it him or is it her?’ Sometimes he would come down in the morning and contradict himself again, saying: ‘Ahhh ignore that, Carrie was going crackers.’”
Cummings claimed she was often blamed by Johnson for U-turns that were not her fault. In November 2020, the PM suggested that she get a job with the royal family and take lots of foreign travel to “get her out of our hair”.
Briefing
Cummings denied claims that he regularly briefed the media once in No 10. “After the election was called in 2019, I hardly spoke to journalists at all and in 2020 practically broke off relations with some I’d talked to for 20 years,” he wrote. The exception was the then BBC political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, because of her role.
He said other journalists “lobbied” Johnson to remove him and “invented stories, invented quotes, invented briefings then wrote punditry about my supposed activities”. He claimed that Symonds was “constantly” telling the PM that he was speaking to the media.
