Dominic Cummings ripped through his old boss Boris like a hurricane

For all the hundreds of thousands of words expended yesterday, the key moment arrived at ten minutes past two when Mr Cummings said: “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.” If you take nothing else from yesterday’s session, remember that.

Sure, there was much of Mr Cummings being a prize pillock possessed of 20:20 hindsight, talking about panic buttons and red teams like some weekend warrior with delusions of leading the SAS.

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At times he came across as a posh Vicky Pollard from Little Britain: “Yeah but no but, I told Boris but he wouldn’t listen cos his girlfriend was doing her nut about her dog, he was useless, the civil servants were rubbish, and do you remember that movie Independence Day about the aliens?”

This was the same arrogant clot, moreover, who decided the lockdown regulations for the little people did not apply to him and drove from London to Durham, a trip that included a drive to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight. And if Mr Johnson was as bad as he says – not a fit and proper person for the job, sniffed his former aide in a poster-ready quote – why did he not resign and blow the whistle earlier?

There is much to mock about Mr Cummings and his hyperbole, and doubtless there will some of that today. But strip away the nonsense, the holes in his testimony, and the chest puffing and what we are left with is the impression that Mr Johnson, his Government, and the Civil Service were disastrously ill-equipped to deal effectively with the coronavirus crisis facing the country.

Mr Cummings began as he meant to go on, by baldly stating that when the public needed government most, government, including him, let them down.

Other incendiary assertions followed. Lots of them. The Government lost precious months of preparation (“Lots of people were literally ski-ing in February”); the Prime Minister thought the virus was a scare story, not as bad as feared (“the new swine flu” he called it, at one point suggesting he be injected with it live on TV); there was no plan in place for dealing with a pandemic, despite official assurances; there was no effective border policy then or now.

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More? Developing herd immunity was the official policy; the country should have locked down in January or by the first week of March at the latest, instead of March 23; the track and trace system as devised by Matt Hancock was a farce; the Prime Minister came close to sacking his Health Secretary in April (Mr Hancock was kept around, he was told, “because he’s the person you fire when the inquiry comes along”); far from throwing a protective cordon around care homes, people with Covid were sent, untested, back to them; and communications policy was a “disaster zone” because the Prime Minister changed his mind ten times a day.

Then there were the admissions around the trip to Durham. Mr Cummings said he and his family had received death threats and it was earlier agreed, with Downing Street, that he could move them out of London.

But when the balloon went up over his Durham trip it was decided not to say anything about the threats, or to apologise for his actions.

Not for the first time this plea begged more questions, such as why he could not have moved to a secret location in London and be given enhanced police protection.

Never mind the Department of Health being a “smoking ruin” on Covid, as Mr Cummings said, the British Government came across as one big skip fire in which the PM governs according to the headlines of the day.

As astonishing as Mr Cummings’ evidence was, didn’t we know, or at least suspect, much of this? And how much does it matter now, particularly with the vaccine roll out underway and an official public inquiry due to be launched next Spring?

The Johnson administration certainly gave off the impression of chaos and confusion at the height of the pandemic. But many people were of the view that this was a crisis unprecedented in the modern age, and that the government, like others around the world, was trying to do its best in the worst of circumstances.

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Mr Cummings has turned that narrative on its head by insisting that it did not have to be this way. He has laid bare the workings of the Johnson administration in the kind of damning detail that sticks in people’s minds, and could prove deeply damaging to the UK Government.

As for how much one man’s evidence session matters, the answer to that lies in Mr Cummings’ assertion that tens of thousands of people died who did not need to. Their families deserve answers as soon as possible.

With the crisis still going on – the lifting of restrictions or no, we will be living with this virus for years – mistakes must be acknowledged and lessons learned as soon as possible. Waiting till next Spring seems even more of a cruel folly.

One of the most significant moments in a session that contained so much that was startling came when Mr Cummings mused on the nature of governments and the quality of officialdom in the UK.

It was “completely crackers”, he said, that people like him, and Boris Johnson, should be in charge at times like these. The public should not have been placed in the situation, as it was in the General Election of 2019, he said, of having to choose between Mr Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. Lions led by donkeys is just the half of it.

In Scotland there is, of course, another choice. It is as yet unclear how much of what Mr Cummings alleges applies to the Scottish Government’s handling of the crisis. For now, he has made a damning case against the Johnson administration, and one that demands answers.