• claims Johnson came close to sacking Matt Hancock in April 2020
• claims Johnson said he did not mind 'chaos' at No 10 because it meant no one else in control
• says Hancock failed to honour promise that people would be tested before being discharged into care homes
• says Johnson 'never wanted proper border policy'
• describes Johnson as someone who 'changes his mind 10 times a day'
• says he did not disclose last year that security threats were major factor in lockdown-busting trip to Durham
• says his wife insisted on family returning to London with Cummings

Jeremy Hunt says people find Cummings’ story about going to Barnard Castle to check his eyes implausible.

Cummings says, if he were to invent a story, he would have invented a better one. A few days before that trip he was in bed writing his will because he thought he might die.

Q: But if you were testing your eyesight, wasn’t it odd to take your wife and child in the car?

Cummings says it did not feel crazy at the time. He was just driving down the road to see how it went.

Hunt says, having focused on what went wrong, they now want to ask about what was successful - the vaccine programme. Why did it go so well?

Cummings says Kate Bingham, who has in charge of the vaccine taskforce, had clear responsibility. And she had the “strength of character” not to be pushed around.

And she reported directly to the PM, not to the Department for Health.

• claims 'tens of thousands' of people died unnecessarily because of way Covid was handled

Jeremy Hunt has now adjourned the evidence session until 3.05pm. He says they have one more theme to cover - what happened in September, ahead of the second lockdown.

This is the topic on which Cummings’s evidence may be the most damning.

It's certainly a marathon committee session. If you are just tuning in here's a summary of all the main points so far:

• Dominic Cummings has said Matt Hancock should have been sacked - he accused the Health Secretary of "holding back" tests during April 2020 so he could reach a target of 100,000 tests per day by the end of the month
• He said he called government officials to tell them not to pay attention to what Hancock was telling them to do
• Cummings said care home testing was "complete chaos" during the pandemic, which he described as a "cascading series of crises"
• Cummings said he was "extremely sorry" for moving his family from London to County Durham when they were unwell with Covid
• He said he and PM Boris Johnson "fundamentally" disagreed over Covid policy early on in the pandemic. He said he was urging for mandatory mask rules and a more restrictive border policy
• Cummings likened Boris Johnson to "a shopping trolley" changing directions on what policy should be
• He said he believes the timeline for having a Covid public inquiry next year is "completely terrible" and "there is absolutely no excuse" for delaying it

• describes how Johnson rejected Sage's call for lockdown in late September (the PM was listening to people saying there was already herd immunity in the population)
• says he heard PM say he would rather see 'bodies pile high' than order another lockdown *
• Cummings says he came to conclusion Johnson was 'unfit for the job'
  Cummings says his decision to quit No 10 was linked to Carrie Symonds, the PM’s partner, trying to change various Downing Street appointments. In particular, he says she was trying to change the outcome of one official hiring process in a way that was “completely unethical” **
• says Dominic Raab has not got enough credit for how he handled the situation when Boris Johnson was ill. He says he also thinks Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, did a brilliant job.

* This piece of evidence from Cummings is important because Johnson specifically denied saying this, or anything to this effect, in the House of Commons. Cummings is the first on-the-record witness to contradict him.

Greg Clark says, if Cummings has accused Hancock of lying (see previous post), he should publish the evidence. Cummings says he will take some advice on this.

Explaining why Mr Johnson did not attend the COBRA meetings at the start of last year, he (The Dome) said: "The prime minister described it as the new swine flu, I certainly told him it wasn't.

He added that the PM wanted to be injected with the coronavirus live on TV by chief medical officer Chris Whitty to show it was not harmful.

Resumed:

Cummings





** Ironic coming from The "ethically unchallenged" Dome .....



..... What shall I have for tea ..... ..... Chicken Balti with Naan ..... 🍛

The meeting is, presumably, drawing to a close so I'm off t'shops ..... 🛒

Gosh Omah, this makes shocking - albeit unsurprising - reading.....

Nothing to worry BJ, though - he'll bluster through the accusations and brush them off like dandruff .....

In his marathon evidence session, Mr Cummings told MPs:

• "I think the secretary of state for health should've been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly."
• "There's no doubt at all that many senior people performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect. I think the secretary of state for health is certainly one of those people."
• "I said repeatedly to the prime minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary (Sir Mark Sedwill), so did many other senior people."
• "I certainly think Matt Hancock used Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance as shields for himself."

On the claim that Mr Hancock lied, Mr Cummings told the panel of MPs: "There are numerous examples. In the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment they required. He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak. We were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances."

Mr Cummings also claimed Mr Hancock had blamed NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens and Chancellor Rishi Sunak for PPE problems.