The Cummings clearout: No10 'will hand back control of special advisers to ministers'

Eventually, the last vestige of The Dome will disappear .....

Special adviser Cleo Watson is understood to have handed in her resignation yesterday, a fortnight after the maverick No10 chief departed.

The exit underlines the waning hold of Vote Leave veterans over the heart of government, as Boris Johnson tries to 'reset' his premiership.

Ms Watson worked on the Brexit campaign before joining the No10 operation under Theresa May, and taking a more senior role when Mr Johnson became PM.

Although the 31-year-old's official title is "Head of the PM's Priorities and Campaigns", she has been known as the 'the Cummings whisperer' due to her reputed ability to calm him down.

The pair were regularly seen walking into Downing Street together in the mornings, with Ms Watson's smart appearance in stark contrast to Mr Cummings' shambolic style.

There had been hopes that Ms Watson would opt to stay on in her post, as she was not regarded as being deeply involved in the extraordinary civil war.

Boris Johnson's former chief aide Dominic Cummings enjoyed a bumper pay rise earlier this year, new figures have revealed.

His basic salary rose by about £45,000 to between £140,000 and £144,999.

Cummings is still on the government payroll but is working his notice at home, having left Downing Street in November following a bitter row over the running of Mr Johnson's office.

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “Boris Johnson defended Dominic Cummings when he broke lockdown rules – then awarded him a £50,000 pay rise. Yet he’s freezing pay for key workers and refusing to give our care workers a pay rise to the living wage.

“Cummings’ bumper bonus is an insult to key workers denied the pay rise they deserve. It’s another example of how under this Government, it is one rule for the Tory Party and their friends and another for the rest of us.”

We owe Cummings a very great deal. Hopefully he will soon be able to assist in sorting out the awful Civil Service.

Dominic Cummings’ plan to test millions of people a day for coronavirus led the government to spend over £800m on quick turnaround tests that were later found in a pilot to give the wrong results as much as 60% of the time.

Operation Moonshot, a mass testing scheme championed by Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, prompted the government to buy huge numbers of so-called lateral flow tests from a company owned by a little-known US private equity house.

Innova Medical Group is now believed to be the largest single recipient of payments from UK government contracts during the pandemic. More than 380m Innova tests have been bought so far by the UK government.

While Moonshot has fallen well short of its target of testing 10 million people a day by early 2021, the Innova tests were used to mass-test the city of Liverpool and are now being offered to NHS staff, visitors to care homes, teachers and students. The Department of Health has now secured authorisation for this sort of test to be used for self-testing at home.

Innova secured the contracts, worth a total of £829m, in the last four months of 2020. Based in California, the group is owned by the equity house Pasaca Capital, which was founded by Charles Huang, a Chinese businessman born in Wuhan who did a PhD at Strathclyde University.

The UK government’s first contract with Innova was agreed on 17 September, before the evaluation of its tests had been completed. Prof Tim Peto of Oxford University, chief investigator for lateral flow tests was asked to evaluate their performance with Public Health England at Porton Down.

The evaluation team found the accuracy of the Innova test was on average 79% when the test was given by lab scientists, 73% when given by health workers and 57.5% when people swabbed and tested themselves.

The Oxford team presented the results of their evaluation of Innova’s tests to Cummings in late October, with the health secretary, Matt Hancock, also present. The decision to roll the tests out in a large field pilot as soon as possible was pushed by Cummings a couple of weeks before he resigned.

Liverpool, where cases had skyrocketed, became the first city to pilot the LFTs for mass testing of people without symptoms. However the tests in the field missed 60% of infections in people who were self-swabbing. It should be easier to detect infections in people with high viral loads but the tests missed 30% of those.

Coming to light:

How UK spent £800m on controversial Covid tests for Dominic Cummings scheme

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ummings-scheme



People who get a false negative result will, inevitably, assume they are free of the virus and interpret it as a green light to go to work or visit someone who is frail – with potentially disastrous consequences .....