has just unveiled some truly eye-opening evidence from those who advised the then government at the start of the pandemic.
The message added: “He thinks it’ll be like swine flu and he thinks his main danger is talking economy into a slump.”Messages to Cain showed Cummings thought Johnson was “melting down” when Covid cases started to rise.Cummings claimed he told Johnson the NHS was imploding like a “zombie apocalypse film” – but the PM didn’t impose lockdown for another 12 days because he was “oscillating” and couldn’t decide.
Helen MacNamara, who served as the deputy cabinet secretary between 2020 and 2021, said she realised 10 days before the first national lockdown there was no government plan to deal with the crisis.She said she spoke to an official at the Department of Health, Mark Sweeney, who “had been told for years that there is a whole plan” for a pandemic.
Cummings echoed this claim, saying Hancock had “sowed chaos” by insisting early on that those with a dry cough and a temperature wouldn’t be suffering from Covid – even though those were the two most prominent symptoms.Matt Hancock during a Covid briefing, Monday January 25, 2021.11. Hancock supposedly had an interesting attitude to his job
The inquiry’s counsel asked her: “Does it come back to the fact that Mr Hancock regularly was telling people things that they later discovered weren’t true?”The top civil servant told the inquiry about the “obvious sexist treatment” of women she saw while she worked at the top of government.She said Westminster and Whitehall are “endemically sexist” but it got worse during the pandemic when Johnson was at the government’s helm.