Dominic Cummings evidence live: Latest updates as former PM aide expected to land more blows on Government

Cummings says he had a lot of dealing with the media prior to the 2019 general election, but from January onwards effectively stopped speaking to them.

Says he did speak to BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg on a few occasions. He said he did give unauthorised briefings but this was only to rarely speak to journalists without telling the Prime Minister first.

“Yes, I did talk to people unauthorised in the sense of actually pretty rarely did I speak to the Prime Minister before I spoke to any journalists.

“I just got on with things because because my view was the Prime Minister already is about a thousand-times too obsessed with the media in a way which undermines him doing his own job.”

“It’s true that I hit the panic button and said we’ve got to ditch the official plan, it’s true that I helped to try to create what an official plan was.

“I think it’s a disaster that I acted too late. The fundamental reason was that I was really frightened of acting.

“If you’ve got an official plan, you’ve got all the Sage advice, you’ve got the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Secretary, everyone saying you’ve got to do this and if we don’t do it and if we try and do something different and stop it now it’s going to many times worse in the winter, I was asking myself in that kind of two-week period if I hit the panic button and persuade the Prime Minister to shift and then it all goes completely wrong, I’m going to have killed god knows how many hundreds of thousands of people.

“I only had the confidence to do that once I knew that people who are much smarter than me had looked at it and said basically the Sage groupthink is wrong, the DH groupthink is wrong, we’ve got to change course.

“I apologise for not acting earlier and If I had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive.”

Cummings said there needed to be a thorough review of the country’s risk register programmes and that he had concerns plans to protect against an anthrax attack were robust enough.

“I thought that many of the plans seemed to me to fall very short of what was actually needed.

“A lot of things are just power points and they lack detail.

“But most importantly, I think, I think the process around them as with the pandemic plan is just not open, there’s is not a culture of talking to outside experts.

“I was talking to some people who said ‘did you ever go read the plan on solar flares’ and I said ‘no’, and they said ‘if you get some expert advice to that you will see that the current Government plan on that is just completely hopeless, if that happens we are all going to be in a worse situation than Covid’.

“One thing that I did say to the Cabinet Secretary last year in the summer, and which I ardently hope is actually happening, is there ought to be an absolutely thorough, total review of all such risk register programmes, there ought to be an assumption of making this whole process open and only closed for specific things.

“For example, one of the other things very high on risk register is the anthrax plan, what happens if terrorists attack with anthrax.

“Personally, I would be extremely concerned that the plan is as robust as it should be.”

“One of the fundamental problems that we find in this whole thing, it is a general problem in Whitehall but it was very, very clear and disastrous during Covid, is you have this system where on the one hand ministers are nominally responsible in various ways for a, b, c.

“But ministers can’t actually hire and fire anybody in the department. The officials are actually in charge of hiring and firing a, b, c.

“So, as soon as you have some kind of major problem you have kind of that Spiderman meme with both Spidermans pointing at each other, it’s like that but with everybody.

“So, you have [Matt] Hancock pointing at the permanent secretary, you have the permanent secretary pointing at Hancock, and they are both pointing at the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Office is pointing back at them and all the different Spidermans are all pointing at each other saying ‘you are responsible’ and the problem is that everyone is right and everyone is unhappy.”

Cummings says No10 denied him access to his official diary and emails from when he worked for the government.

“I have been critical of the Prime Minister.

“But… if you dropped, you know, Bill Gates or someone like that into that job on the 1st of March, the most competent people in the world you could possibly find, any of them would have had a complete nightmare.

“There is no doubt that the Prime Minister made some very bad misjudgments and got some very serious things wrong.

“It’s also the case, there’s no doubt, that he was extremely badly let down by the whole system. And it was a system failure, of which I include myself in that as well, I also failed.”

The first session of questioning - which dealt with the first two phases of the inquiry - has finished.

However, there’s no rest for the wicked, nor this journalist, and session two is now underway.

We’re going to be here for some time longer.

In case you were wondering, here’s the Spiderman meme referenced by Dominic Cummings towards the end of that first session.

Of the many, many things Cummings has targeted for criticism today, himself included, health secretary Matt Hancock is by far coming off the worst so far.

Cummings says: “In my opinion, disastrously, the Secretary of State had made, while the Prime Minister was on his near death bed, his pledge to do 100,000 by the end of April.

“This was an incredibly stupid thing to do because we already had that goal internally.

“What then happened when I came back around the 13th was I started getting calls and No 10 were getting calls saying Hancock is interfering with the building of the test and trace system because he’s telling everybody what to do to maximise his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month.

“We had half the Government with me in No 10 calling around frantically saying do not do what Hancock says, build the thing properly for the medium term.

“And we had Hancock calling them all saying down tools on this, do this, hold tests back so I can hit my target.

“In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.

“It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm.”

He continues: “That was one of the reasons why the cabinet secretary and I agreed that we had to essentially take testing away from Hancock and put it in a separate agency.

“There was all this bureaucratic infighting in April and remember the Prime Minister wasn’t back then either, Dominic Raab was doing a brilliant job chairing the meetings, but this was a huge call and very difficult for him to basically start carving up the Department of Health in April.

“So, essentially, we never really got to grips with it until the Prime Minister was back in the office and the cabinet secretary and I could say to him we’ve got to do the track and trace thing in a completely different way.”

He says he told them PM, “if we don’t fire the Secretary of State (Matt Hancock) and we don’t get the testing in someone else’s hands, we are going to kill people and it will be a catastrophe”.

Ouch.