Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Dominic Cummings’s explosive claim about the Bank of England

Amidst all the explosive claims made by Dominic Cummings during today’s select committee hearing, one towards the beginning of the seven-hour session seemed rather unintentional. When asked by Rebecca Long-Bailey MP about what economic assessments were made when considering the first lockdown, Cummings responded that there was no straight-forward ‘document floating around’ which laid out the ‘economic costs’. He then alleged that conversations were taking place about removing the Bank of England’s independence:

‘It was the case that the Bank of England, the senior officials in the Treasury, senior officials in the Cabinet Office were saying, you know, we have to think about the consequence of, if we do this lockdown, we’re going to have to borrow huge amounts of money. What if the bond markets suddenly spike and go crazy and refuse to lend [to] us. We’re going to then have to find emergency powers to tell the Bank of England to buy the debt, etc. etc. So there were conversations going on at the time about that possible problem.’


According to Cummings, he and the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Cabinet Secretary were all involved in these discussions about what they would do if there was ‘a kind of financial crisis, and bond market crisis, and a sterling crisis on top of the whole health crisis’.



This is a major admission. Last summer The Spectator reported on tensions between the government and the BoE over the country’s spending spree: what would happen if the bank governor Andrew Bailey cut off Downing Street’s line of credit? A senior Tory figure warned at the time that, if that happened, it was ‘50/50 that No. 10 tries to renationalise the Bank of England’. Such an idea was thought to horrify the Treasury and was played down, not just as an undesirable outcome, but an unthinkable one.


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