THE PRIME Minister's former senior aide Dominic Cummings has apologised to the public for the Government's handling of the pandemic in a bombshell evidence session to MPs.
Dominic Cummings, speaking to the joint Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee this morning said the Government were not "on a war footing" at the start of the crisis last year, and claimed key figures in No.10 were "literally skiing" on holiday in February 2020.
He said: "The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its Government in a crisis like this.
“When the public needed us most the Government failed.
“I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes."
Mr Cummings, who left Downing Street in November last year after falling out with Mr Johnson's fiancee Carrie Symonds, also said the Prime Minister believed Covid-19 was a "scare story" and "the new swine flu".
He claimed No.10 officials were concerned about the PM's attitude towards the pandemic in the beginning, adding: "In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story, he regarded...he described it as the new swine flu."
Asked if he told Mr Johnson it was not a scare story, Mr Cummings said: "Certainly, but the view of various officials inside No.10 was if we have the Prime Minister chairing the COBRA meetings and he just tells everyone 'It's swine flu, don't worry about it, I'm going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with Coronavirus so everyone realises its nothing to be frightened of', that would not help actually serious planning."
Mr Cummings said that assurances given in January last year that pandemic preparations were brilliant “were basically completely hollow”.
He told the Commons committee he received a response from Health Secretary Matt Hancock assuring: “We’ve got full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepared and refreshed, CMOs and epidemiologists, we’re stress testing now, it’s our top tier risk register, we have an SR bid before this.”
He continued: “I would like to stress and apologise for the fact that it is true that I did this but I did not follow up on this and push it the way I should’ve done.
“We were told in No 10 at the time that this is literally top of the risk register, this has been planned and there’s been exercises on this over and over again, everyone knows what to do.
“And it’s sort of tragic in a way, that someone who wrote so often about running red teams and not trusting things and not digging into things, whilst I was running red teams about lots of other things in government at this time, I didn’t do it on this.
“If I had said at the end of January, we’re going to take a Saturday and I want all of these documents put on the table and I want it all gone through and I want outside experts to look at it all, then we’d have figured out much, much earlier that all the claims about brilliant preparations and how everything was in order were basically completely hollow, but we didn’t figure this out until the back end of February.”
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