Just minutes before Prime Ministers’ Questions, Dominic Cummings did what he does best: fire off another salvo in one of his long-running feuds. The former chief special adviser took to Substack to hurl another 7,249 word grenade at his onetime Tory colleagues and while it’s the screenshots of Boris Johnson calling the testing situation ‘totally fucking hopeless’ that will get the most attention, there are a number of incendiary claims worth following up too. Below are the top four ‘Dom bombs’ identified by Mr Steerpike…
Hancock responsible for care homes debacle
Last week Matt Hancock told MPs he had seen no evidence to suggest any medical staff had died because of a lack of PPE and that ‘everybody got the treatment they needed.’ Cummings claims: ‘this is false, he knows it’s false, the PM knows it’s false, families of the dead know it’s false, the CSA [Chief Scientific Adviser] and CMO [Chief Medical Officer] know it’s false.’
His timeline of the events in spring 2020 unsurprisingly differs greatly from the health secretary. He writes that on April 15 the department of health had left in place rules limiting eligibility for tests meaning ‘a lot’ of capacity was ‘wasted’ despite ‘care homes screaming’ and that by 7 May the failure to rectify this led Cummings to conclude to Johnson that ‘Hancock’s failures and dishonesty made him unfit for his job.’
Open borders ‘remains a joke’
Cummings again took aim at the government’s original Covid strategy in his blog and claims this policy of ‘herd immunity’ is why there was ‘no serious border policy’ between January to March 2020. He alleges that it ‘remains a joke’ because Johnson ‘personally opposed repeated attempts by me and others to implement something based on the successful East Asian approach’ which Cummings believes has contributed to the spread of the ‘delta’ variant. The latter goes on to lay this original strategy or ‘strategy A’ as being the reason why the government did not think ‘seriously about an East Asian style test-trace plan’ or a ‘serious vaccine plan’ until April 2020.
Procurement farce
More than a year on, Cummings still feels a great sense of anger at how badly Covid procurement was organised during the early months of the pandemic. He recalls one conversation he says he had with an official in March 2020 at which he was told the UK would not get most of our PPE deliveries until long after the April peak because ‘that’s how long it takes to ship’ as it was against procurement rules to ‘fly’ equipment – ‘we ship everything because it’s much cheaper.’ To which Cummings replied: ‘Call the airlines, tell them we’re hiring their planes, their entire business is dead so you’ll be able to get a great deal.’
The farce was twinned with tragedy of course. Cummings argues that ‘the lack of PPE killed NHS and care home staff in March-May’ laying blame firmly at the door of Hancock for claiming the situation was ‘all under control’ in the week of 23 March which meant ‘further weeks were wasted instead of [being] used to solve the problems.’ He also includes a screenshot of the Prime Minister responding to health officials declining to buy ventilators on cost grounds by blaming the ‘hopeless’ health secretary.
Boris ‘wants to make money’
After all the shenanigans about who paid for the Downing Street flat renovation, this might not be such a surprise. Nevertheless, Cummings’s claim that Boris will do an anti-Thatcher and not ‘go on and on’ is still noteworthy for being the first ex No. 10 aide to say what many have privately long thought in Westminster – that the Prime Minister ‘wants to make money and have fun’ and thus has ‘a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election.’ It is for this reason, Cummings says, action should be taken now as a public inquiry ‘will not start for years’ and will be ‘designed to punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone.’
Maybe he should follow his former chief special adviser and start a Substack?
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