Oral evidence: Coronavirus: Lessons learnt, HC 95

Oral evidence, 26 May 2021.

Witness

Dominic Cummings.

Chair

The Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee are undertaking a joint inquiry into the lessons that can be learnt from the UK’s response to the covid pandemic. The public inquiry, which the Prime Minister has announced, will most likely take evidence and report well after most of the pandemic is over. Our inquiry, we hope, will be complementary to this, being focused on lessons that can be learnt already and which can be applied during the months ahead to benefit decisions that will have to be taken during those months. Of course, the evidence we gather in our inquiry will be available to the public inquiry. We will hear from the Health Secretary in just over two weeks on 10 June, after which we will make our report to Parliament. Just a word on how we will organise this morning’s proceedings. This is a hybrid meeting, with some members of the Joint Committee joining remotely and some in person. We will have four sections. The first is about the early days of the pandemic, which I will chair. My colleague Jeremy Hunt will then chair a discussion on lockdown measures and the performance of Test and Trace. I will then chair a section on vaccines. Jeremy will chair the final section on the lockdowns of the autumn and winter period. We will have a short pause between the sections during which the cameras will be briefly turned off. I am very pleased to welcome Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister from July 2019 to November 2020. Good morning, Mr Cummings, and thank you for offering to appear. Perhaps I can start with some general questions about the background to the covid pandemic before turning to my colleagues. In your Rose Garden statement, you said, “For years I have warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat from coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.” Indeed, your blog of March 2019 warned of escapes of viruses from labs in Asia posing “a real danger of a worldwide pandemic that could kill human beings on a vast scale.” On 22 January, Wuhan, a city the size of London by population, was sealed off from the rest of the world. On 30 January, the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern. Given that context and what you had thought about this over the years past, did this set alarm bells ringing? Did you think what you had thought about in advance was happening?

Dominic Cummings

I think it is right that the public’s representatives are trying to figure out what happened and the lessons to be learnt. I hope you will get all the senior people involved in here to speak to you about it. The truth is that senior Ministers, senior officials and 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 at that. Regarding the beginning of this crisis, yes, you are right that I, like many people, had talked about this before. When it started in January, I did think in part of my mind, “Oh my goodness—is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time?” However, at the time PHE here and the WHO and the CDC—generally speaking, organisations across the western world—were not ringing great alarm bells about it. I think in retrospect it is completely obvious that many, many institutions failed on this early question. I can’t remember the precise date, but the truth is that I think the Taiwanese Government basically hit the panic button on something like new year’s eve of 2019. That might not be the exact date, but within a few days. They put into effect a plan that they had figured out from having been terrified of previous outbreaks, like SARS and whatnot. They immediately closed the borders, they produced various new quarantine systems, they did a whole bunch of things right off the bat in January, but I think it is obvious that the western world, including Britain, just completely failed to see the smoke and to hear the alarm bells in January. There is no doubt about it. There were meetings—

Chair

Do you remember a time when you personally were seized of the importance of it?

Dominic Cummings

Well, I talked to people in January about it. On something like 25 January, I said to the private office in No.10 that we should look at pandemic planning. I said that I wanted to go to Porton Down and talk to some of the people up there about it. I think it was on the same day—possibly one day before or after—that I said to Matt Hancock, “Where are we in terms of scanning the pandemic preparations plans? Are we completely up to speed on this? Is it resourced the way that it should be? Etc, etc.”

Chair

So that was about 25 January?

Dominic Cummings

Do you want me to get the exact date?

Chair

If you have it.

Dominic Cummings

Yes, it was 25 January on both things. On 25 January I spoke to private office and on 25 January I said to the Secretary of State—

Chair

When you say “said”, was that a conversation, a memo or a text?

Dominic Cummings

I have got the exact words of a text that I sent him. I think I spoke to him, possibly the next day, at a meeting about it, as well. I said, “To what extent have you investigated preparations for something terrible like Ebola or a flu pandemic? Please ensure we take a risk-averse approach to funding preparations in the SR”—SR is an abbreviation for spending review—“I am going to dig into this plus bioterror.” To which Hancock replied, “We’ve got full plans up to and including pandemic levels regularly prepped and refreshed, CMOs and epidemiologists. We are stress testing now. It is our top tier risk register. We had an SR bid before this.” I replied, “Great. I am reading about the CDC and preparations for a flu pandemic. It is very worrying.” So—

Chair

So on 25 January you instigated a set of inquiries within the system. Would you—

Dominic Cummings

However, 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 that I should have 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 have been exercises on this over and over again. Everyone knows exactly what to do. It is 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— While I was running red teams on 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. I want it all gone through and I want outside experts here to look at it all,” then we would have figured out much, much earlier that all the claims about brilliant preparations and how everything was in order were basically completely hollow. We didn’t figure this out until the back end of February.

Chair

Thank you; we will come on to more detailed aspects of that. In terms of those texts that you referred to that first documented your concerns and your involvement, will you share them with the Committee after the meeting?

Dominic Cummings

Sure, yeah.

Chair

Thank you.

Dominic Cummings

Just to be clear, there were conversations about it before that, in January, in No.10. Obviously, it was periodically on the news. It would sort of flare up and be big news, and then it would die out again. I don’t want to imply that that was the first time No.10 talked about, because that’s not the case. There were conversations in No.10 about it right in the first week back in January.

Chair

When we talk about No.10, there are lots of people who work in No.10. When did you talk to the Prime Minister about it first?

Dominic Cummings

It was definitely raised with the Prime Minister in the first half of January, for sure, because it was on the news.

Chair

Did you have a conversation with him about it?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

When would that be?

Dominic Cummings

The first half of January.

Chair

Was that a chat, a conversation?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, just a general chat with me and other people.

Chair

I see. During the months that followed, was covid the most important matter that you dealt with, say from January onward?

Dominic Cummings

It depends what you mean. Retrospectively, it was the most important issue, obviously. But at the time—

Chair

How did it feel at the time?

Dominic Cummings

In no way, shape or form did the Government act in January like it was the most important thing. It did not act like it was the most important thing in February, never mind in January.

Chair

What proportion of your time would you say, in February for example, was devoted to it?

Dominic Cummings

In January, not very much. In February, a lot more of my personal time.

Chair

More than half, or less than that?

Dominic Cummings

I would say, the first half of February probably less than half. After the reshuffle, which I think was the 12th, more than half.

Chair

Did it increase after that?

Dominic Cummings

By roughly the last 10 days of February, it was over 90% of what I was personally spending my time on. There were other things floating in and out. This is a really important point to register: the Government and No. 10 were not operating on a war footing in February on this in any way, shape or form. Lots of key people were literally skiing in the middle of February. It was not until the last week of February that there was any sense of urgency in No. 10 and the Cabinet Office.

Chair

Would you say that you were operating on a war footing in February?

Dominic Cummings

As I said, in the first 10 days or so of February, no, because there were all sorts of things going on. There was the HS2 nightmare; there was the reshuffle going on. That happened on the 12th, and then the PM went away on holiday for two weeks. I didn’t go on holiday; I was in Downing Street throughout that period. I spent more and more on my time on it. However, again, I want to apologise for this: obviously, in retrospect, I should have been hitting the panic button far more than I was in February. I did increasingly hit the panic button as February went on, but I, like most people, were wrongly reassured by things such as the WHO and what we were being told internally.

Chair

The WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January. The WHO was not giving reassurance—quite the opposite.

Dominic Cummings

They did say that, but after 30 January it was not at all seen in Whitehall that there was going to be a pandemic.

Chair

I’m not talking about Whitehall; I’m talking about what was going on around the world. We had TV pictures of Wuhan being sealed off and reports of people’s doors being welded shut.

Dominic Cummings

Yup.

Chair

Were you not aware of that towards the end of January?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

And you weren’t on a war footing. You explained that is something that you regret. Finally, you said that it did not occupy the majority of your time during February, and it increased over time. Will you give a brief summary of the other things that you were dealing with? What were the principal demands on your time during February?

Dominic Cummings

There was— Well, I was working very much on the whole science and technology agenda. I was working on procurement reform. Ironically, in January and early Feb, one of the things I spent most of my own time on was trying to get to grips with the procurement system. I had weekly meetings in the Cabinet Room on procurement in January and February, to try to get to grips with the nightmare of that whole thing. Ironically, that was completely overtaken by covid. We had to bin the procurement meetings that I was running, because of the procurement problems with covid, if you see what I mean. Planning, procurement, science and technology—

Chair

So science and procurement. Anything else?

Dominic Cummings

There were various national security issues that I was dealing with in February. Essentially, the first 10 days of February were HS2, the reshuffle and various things like that. Then, the Prime Minister and other people went off on holiday. I was dealing with some of those things from the 12th, but then increasingly with covid in the last two weeks of February.

Chair

Okay.

Dominic Cummings

After the election, I hired a guy, a physicist called Ben Warner, and brought him into No. 10 to try to start to build a proper data and analytical office in No. 10. Because one of the great problems that No. 10 had in 2019 when I was there was a huge lack of those kinds of skills.

Chair

So that was taking time.

Dominic Cummings

I brought him in. I sent him off to start attending the SAGE meetings—

Chair

Let’s come on to that because I want to ask some questions about SAGE meetings. I want to leave time for comments on this. Again, some contextual questions. Obviously, you are not just the adviser but the chief adviser to the Prime Minister. Did you have to book meetings with him? Or did you, as it were, pop in and out of his office?

Dominic Cummings

I would just pop in and out of his office.

Chair

You sat literally outside the door, I think. Is that right?

Dominic Cummings

Effectively, yes. Not literally, but yes.

Chair

And did you write notes to him, as well? Or was it through that kind of informal popping into the office?

Dominic Cummings

I sometimes wrote notes, but most of our interaction was talking.

Chair

Did you write any notes to him about the covid situation during January and February?

Dominic Cummings

I did in February; I’m not sure if I did in January.

Chair

Did you keep a copy of it?

Dominic Cummings

I can check exactly what I said to him in February, in terms of things that were written down.

Chair

If you have it, would you share it with the Committee?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, I will.

Chair

Thank you. You were there, sitting outside the office, and you sent at least one note. Did you use text and WhatsApp, with thoughts on the pandemic then?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

Have you kept copies of those during that period?

Dominic Cummings

Not all but lots, yes.

Chair

Can you share those that are relevant to the response to covid during that period?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, I can.

Chair

Thank you. Finally, on some of the meetings, Cobra is the principal emergency response apparatus of the Government. It met on 24 January, before the WHO had raised its international alert. It met another four times in the five weeks before the month of March. Did you go to those Cobra meetings?

Dominic Cummings

I’m not sure now if I attended the Cobra meetings. I don’t think that I did. What I did was what I said before: I hired a guy to run data for No. 10.

Chair

Did you choose not to go or were you stopped from going?

Dominic Cummings

It was a question basically of dividing up different people’s time. So, I sent Ben Warner, the data scientist, and Imran, who was the Prime Minister’s personal secretary, who dealt with the NHS and the whole covid thing. Mainly speaking, in February, those two attended Cobra meetings. Ben Warner—

Chair

The five meetings. Do you remember whether you attended any Cobra meeting in February?

Dominic Cummings

I don’t remember.

Chair

Did you advise the Prime Minister that he should go to the Cobra meetings?

Dominic Cummings

No, I did not.

Chair

Why? Given that this is the principal body that brings all the security, health and intelligence people together. Why didn’t you go and why didn’t you advise the Prime Minister to go?

Dominic Cummings

As I said, I didn’t go because it was a better use of everyone’s time for Ben Warner and Imran to attend those meetings. I spoke and had briefings one to one with Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and with Chris Whitty, about specific things. Lots of Cobra meetings are basically just going through PowerPoint slides and are not massively useful.

Chair

So, that was your take? That Cobra wasn’t worth your time.

Dominic Cummings

No, it was not that Cobra wasn’t worth my time. It was about what was the best use of everybody’s time. Ben Warner was actually a scientist, so he attended the SAGE meetings in February on behalf of No. 10, for which there has been some criticism, but I think that was absolutely the right decision that I took to do that. He and Imran attended the Cobra meetings. I was briefed one to one by Patrick, Chris and other people, where I could dig into a lot of other questions. Also, bear in mind that one of the huge problems we had throughout was things leaking and creating chaos in the media.

Chair

Leaking from Cobra?

Dominic Cummings

Leaking from Cobra; leaking from practically everything. So when I would have sensitive conversations that I did not want to see appear in the media, I did not have those conversations in Cobra—I had those conversations one-to-one.

Chair

Just pause on that. You are saying that the most secure meeting in Whitehall, literally named after a room, the Cabinet Office briefing room, where you have got to leave your phone outside, it is swept for bugs—that meeting was so insecure that you did not feel that you could speak candidly. As you said, you were concerned about leaks, that is presumably the implication?

Dominic Cummings

Certainly. You can just look at the record. The meetings of the XS Committee, supposedly the secret negotiation committee for Brexit, which operated out of the Cobra rooms from summer 2019 at my request, leaked like a sieve continually.

Chair

So you had Cobra, which was nominally the fulcrum of the response.

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

But you didn’t go; the Prime Minister didn’t go. You said in one of your tweets this week that if we had had competent people in charge, we would probably have avoided lockdown 1. But you and the Prime Minister did not consider yourselves to be relevant to that meeting. Was there another meeting, or were you not the most competent, relevant people?

Dominic Cummings

As I said, I was having meetings about it, but I was having meetings with people like Patrick by myself, or with two or three other people, in a forum where I knew that they wouldn’t leak. Lots of the Cobra meetings are quite formulaic. In terms of the Prime Minister, the basic thought was that in February, the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story. He described it as the new swine flu.

Chair

Did you tell him it wasn’t?

Dominic Cummings

Certainly, but the view of various officials inside No. 10 was that if we have the Prime Minister chairing 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 with coronavirus live on TV so everyone realises that it is nothing to be frightened of”, that would not help actual, serious planning.

Chair

You talk about people at No. 10 and you described the dysfunctionality of Cobra. You are not just a person in No. 10, you are literally—your title was—the chief adviser.

Dominic Cummings

With respect, that actually was not my title: my title was assistant to the Prime Minister.

Chair

So you did not consider yourself to be the most senior person in No. 10?

Dominic Cummings

I was not the most senior person in No. 10. The Cabinet Secretary is most senior person, and the principal private secretary runs his office. Obviously, I had an influential role.

Chair

So you did not have the authority? You are right—and often persuasively—about the need to avoid tramlines and group-think, and you talked about a red team challenging the consensus.

Dominic Cummings

Yep.

Chair

When you noted that the Cobra meetings were not useful, didn’t you have the authority in Downing Street to be able to point this out and call for change?

Dominic Cummings

No. My authority to change things in Downing Street is extremely limited. Bear in mind, at the beginning of January I tried extremely hard to have a huge office reorganisation. As you guys will know yourselves, the whole No. 10 building is completely hopeless in terms of a working environment. In January, I tried to get everybody to move, to create a whole new office system so that we could actually be more effective, and I completely lost the argument. There are all sorts of things I tried to do, which, for better or worse, I did not win the argument on.

Chair

I see. In terms of the background, you have talked about Cobra. What about SAGE? SAGE met for the first time on 22 January 2020, then it met very frequently after that. Did you routinely attend the meetings of SAGE?

Dominic Cummings

I wouldn’t say routinely. I attended some of them. I sent Ben Warner to attend all of them, and he did.

Chair

Did you have the right to attend? You delegated to Ben Warner, but could you have gone yourself if you wanted to?

Dominic Cummings

I could have done, yes. In a sense, it is slightly the opposite problem of Cobra. While lots of Cobra meetings are just reading out PowerPoints, quite a lot of the SAGE meetings involve technical questions and I am not a technical person. I am not a smart person. I could not understand a lot of the models and things like that that were being discussed. Ben Warner’s technical training—

Chair

Anyone reading your blogs would say that you had a facility with technical terms and discussions.

Dominic Cummings

That is wrong. That is not a good description of me at all. I sent Ben, and I involved and brought in outsiders from the academic world and from business later on, precisely because I could not understand a lot of things that were being discussed and I could not understand the modelling that was being done. I thought that it was far better to have a PhD physicist there who could actually properly look at the documents and really understand what was being said. He had a lot more to contribute to that than I did. I listened to lots of the conversations in February and March, but a lot of it was over my head.

Chair

You write a lot about the dangers of group-think, people going on tramlines, and precisely experts talking to each other and insiders talking to each other. Didn’t the fact that you consider yourself an outsider on that make it more important, from your own writings and perspective, to be there to make sure that they were not going wrong?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, that is exactly why I sent Ben from No. 10. It is exactly why I listened to some of the meetings and attended some of them myself. It is also why I brought in outsiders to the process later on.

Chair

We are going to come on to talk about the question of herd immunity, and whether or not that was the policy. Jeremy is going to ask some questions on that. I mentioned your blog and the fact that you have been thinking for some time specifically about virus escapes and the consequences of pandemics. Why did you change your 2019 blog between April and May 2020 to refer to coronaviruses?

Dominic Cummings

Well, there have been a lot of funny things written about this. Lots of media stories say that I changed what I wrote, but those stories are all false. Not a single letter of what I wrote in 2019 was ever changed. In 2019, I wrote a blog that said: “Here’s a huge problem—these gain of function experiments being done all over the world. Here’s this big piece in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists explaining it.” I wrote a blog, I quoted a big chunk of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists thing, and then I wrote underneath: “Here’s what I think about it, and this should be taken more seriously in Whitehall.” Not a single letter of what I wrote was changed. What happened was in, I think, May—sometime in the summer; it is not particularly important—after the first wave had happened, I was extremely confident, and turned out to be completely wrong, that the whole question about a lab leak would be shortly a massive issue, because I thought that Trump was going to make it a massive issue in the election against Biden, given that Obama’s Administration had funded some of the gain of function experiments in Wuhan itself. I went back and looked at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists piece that I had originally quoted and said that people should read. In that piece, it actually has a section on Wuhan itself and the BSL2, BSL3 and BSL4 facilities there. I thought: “Jeez! I had half-remembered and half-forgotten the whole thing. It was about a year before. I am going to basically go back to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists piece and paste a much bigger section than I did originally back on my blog, because once Trump and everyone starts going on about this everyone is going to be asking about it and saying, ‘Where did this argument come from?’” I wanted people to realise that this is not some weird thing that has just popped up—people were ringing alarm bells about this a year ago. Just to stress, not a single word of what I wrote was changed. All I did was paste over more from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Chair

So you changed the blog by adding to it things that you thought were of current interest.

Dominic Cummings

Correct.

Chair

That is clear. Do you remember when you did it? We know it was between April and May of 2020. Do you remember when it was?

Dominic Cummings

It was reasonably shortly after I had come back to work after being ill. I came back to work on 12 or 13 April. It was sometime over the next few weeks, because the issue was starting to bobble around and there were meetings about it inside No. 10.

Chair

So wasn’t that a pretty intense period? Did you have the leisure to be adding to your blogpost of a previous year?

Dominic Cummings

Well, as I said, I thought wrongly that it was going to become a massive issue. I knew that everyone would start googling the whole thing and I wanted people to realise that people had been hitting the panic button about this a year earlier, and I thought it would be useful. If you look back at everything that I have written over the last 10 years, I have written over and over again about problems like pandemics—natural or engineered—about crises, about the No. 10 system. It frankly never occurred to me, given that I wrote tens of thousands of words about it, that people would get so het up about the whole thing. I just thought it was very useful for people to realise. As you have seen in the news recently, there is now all sorts of things starting to come out from classified American sources, suggesting that actually people were ill with covid in the Wuhan lab back in November, so I was completely wrong about the timing of this, but I do think it is a very important issue that needs to be addressed.

Chair

Absolutely. It is not to say that it is not interesting, but the tens of thousands of words that you wrote were not at a time when you were employed in public service to handle the most important emergency that the country has faced since the war.

Dominic Cummings

Sorry, I don’t quite understand.

Chair

You say that the blog contains your reflections over the years. The tens of thousands of words that you wrote were written at times when you were not employed in the role that you had during that time. I am perhaps expressing surprise that you had the time to be able to think about adding to or updating your blog when there were, as we will probably come on to talking about, some pressing operational issues.

Dominic Cummings

I went back and re-read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Also, bear in mind that at the time this was an actual live issue. It was not just a sort of historical thing. When I went back to No. 10 after the 12th, there were meetings asking, “Is this engineered? Is it not engineered? Has it escaped from the lab or not? What are the implications of all of this?” So, there were meetings with the Prime Minister, the national security team and whatnot about that question. I obviously cannot go into any of the details about that, but it was a live issue, so I went back and re-read not just that piece, but lots of pieces. Pasting over text into a blog takes 90 seconds. It is not like that was something lengthy; it is literally something that takes a minute or so.

Chair

Okay. Let us move on to this question of the policy or not of herd immunity. Jeremy will lead the questioning on this, but before I hand over, will you just set out for us what you have referred to as being a crucial week, the week beginning Monday 9 March? Just give us a brief summary of what happened in terms of the key meetings that week, and then Jeremy will have some questions on that.

Dominic Cummings

Would it be useful if I explained the thinking about herd immunity now?

Chair

I will hand over to Jeremy now.

Jeremy Hunt

Yes—please go ahead.

Dominic Cummings

I think there is obviously lots of confusion in that the term can be used and is used differently by different people to mean different things. Essentially, the logic of the official plan from the Department of Health was that this disease is going to spread: vaccines are not going to be relevant in any way, shape or form over the relevant time period. We were told it was essentially a certainty that there would be no vaccines available in 2020—something else that turned out to be completely wrong because, as I think we will come on to, it actually turns out that we could have done vaccines much faster than happened and than we thought at the time. At the time, the whole plan was based on the assumption that it was a certainty that there would be no vaccines in 2020. The logic was that if it is unconstrained, it will come in, there will be a sharp peak and it will completely swamp everything—a huge disaster. The logical approach, therefore, is to introduce measures which delay that peak arriving and which push it down below the capacity of the health system. In response to the argument, “But, hang on a second—look at what they are doing in Wuhan; look at what they are doing in Taiwan; look at what they are doing in Singapore; look at what they are doing in South Korea,” the entire assumption in Whitehall was, first of all, that will not work for them and they will all have second peaks later on and, secondly, it is inconceivable that the British public are going to accept Wuhan-style measures here. Even if we therefore suppress it completely, all that you are going to do is get a second peak in the winter when the NHS is already, every year, under pressure, so we only actually have a real choice between one peak and herd immunity by September—terrible, but then you are through it, by the time the next winter comes. If you try and flatten it now, the second peak comes up in wintertime and that is even worse than the summer. Horrific as the numbers look in the summer, the numbers will be even worse if it happens in October, November, December-time. It is important to bear in mind, on the whole herd immunity point, obviously, no one is saying that they want this to happen—the point is it was seen as an inevitability: you will either have herd immunity by September after a single peak or you will have herd immunity by January, with a second peak. Those are the only two options that we have. That was the whole logic of all of the discussions in January and February and early March. That is why in the week of the 9th, people from SAGE and elsewhere in the Government started to talk publicly about herd immunity. It is not that people are thinking, “This is a good thing” that we actively wanted. It was that it was a complete inevitability—the only real question is one of timing. It is either herd immunity by September or it is herd immunity by January, after a second peak. That was the assumption, up until Friday 13 March.

Jeremy Hunt

So when Matt Hancock said, on 15 March, we have a plan and herd immunity is not part of it, was that wrong?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, and saying it is not part of it is completely wrong. I think there is a sort of semantic problem now. I looked back through all of our WhatsApps between me and the Prime Minister and Hancock and Chris and Vallance and whatnot. Essentially, there is a sort of semantic question about, is the “goal” herd immunity? —do we want herd immunity? —versus, is that the basic plan? Of course, no one wants this to happen—no one wanted any of it to happen—but the point was, herd immunity was regarded as an unavoidable fact. The only question that we practically had was one of timing. We can go through the chronology of it, but after some SAGE members said on the 11th publicly, “Well, we are going to be shielding people and then, by the time they come out of shielding, the rest of the population will have herd immunity”, that was the plan. I am completely baffled as to why No. 10 has tried to deny that, because that was the official plan. You can see it in the Cobra documents that I have brought along. Hancock himself and the chief scientist and the chief medical officer were all briefing senior journalists during the week of the 9th, “This is what the official plan is”.

Jeremy Hunt

Let me ask you about the SAGE meeting on 5 March, which the minutes say you were at. At that point on 5 March, it was five weeks since the WHO had said covid was a public health emergency of international concern and countries such as China, Taiwan, Korea, even Australia and New Zealand, were starting to lock their borders down, set up test-and-trace programmes, stop mass events. The minutes of that 5 March meeting say that the only measures recommended were shielding the vulnerable and elderly. At that point, on 5 March, did you advise the Prime Minister that SAGE was wrong?

Dominic Cummings

No, I didn’t. I was ringing increasing alarm bells in the first half of March, but I had a sort of— My thought process was— I started getting people coming to me around the 25 February—very smart people—saying to me, “America is completely screwing this up. You should be really aggressive. Don’t listen to all these people saying that there’s no alternative to this. I personally am starting to take preparations. I’m buying things. We’re going to have to lockdown, etc, etc.” but the official view all the way through the first half of March, and actually into the week of 16 March, was that that would all be more dangerous. My mindset was I was really torn about the whole thing, because in the first 10 days of March I was increasingly being told by people, “I think this is going wrong,” but I was also really, really worried about smashing my hand down on a massive button marked: “Ditch the official plan. Stop listening to the official plan. I think that there’s something going wrong.” I did do that, as we will come on to, but around about the 5th I was still reluctant to do that, and we were exploring lots of different things that were going on.

Jeremy Hunt

Just to be clear, that was two weeks before the champions league event in Liverpool and the Cheltenham gold cup, and you did not at that point advise that those mass participation sports events should be cancelled.

Dominic Cummings

No. In fact, our official advice at the time was, and this shows the kind of logic at play, that doing that, first, won’t really make much difference to transmission, which seems obviously bizarre in retrospect—the idea that we would keep having mass events going on through this whole thing—and, secondly, could be actively bad because you will just push people into pubs. Of course, no one in the official system in the Department of Health drew the obvious logical conclusion, which was: “Shouldn’t we be shutting all the pubs as well?” At this point, around about the 5th, the logic was: “Obviously, given that we’re not going to be closing pubs, closing retail, closing leisure and all of this, I sort of see the point of the official advice, because if you’re not going to do those things, it does have a logic to it.” Of course, the logic itself was completely flawed, but that is what the thinking was around 5 March.

Jeremy Hunt

Let’s talk about the weekend when the plan did change. This morning you tweeted a picture of a whiteboard from the Prime Minister’s study of what you call “Plan B”. You said that you showed that to him on the morning of Saturday 14 March. Was that the moment you told him for the first time that the scientific consensus, as we saw in those earlier SAGE meetings, was wrong?

Dominic Cummings

No, it wasn’t the first time. The data scientist Ben Warner was working in No. 10. His brother, coincidentally and thankfully, was working with the NHS to help the NHS with building a whole data system and data dashboard to deal with covid. He came to me on 7 March and he had been in various meetings about the official plan. He said to me, “I’m really, really worried about this. It seems to me that this plan could easily be mad. It could be incredibly destructive. Has this really been tested? Have you really thought it all through? Should I and some others start thinking about a plan B?”

Jeremy Hunt

But when did you tell the Prime Minister that we needed to change direction?

Dominic Cummings

On the morning of the 12th I said— Well, there are all sorts of different things that I could talk about—

Jeremy Hunt

The morning of the 12th—that was a Thursday, wasn’t it? That was the first time you told the Prime Minister, “The scientific consensus is wrong. We need a plan B.”

Dominic Cummings

On the night of the 11th, I texted the group with the Prime Minister and the chief scientific adviser, and I said: “People can see the trajectory and how social distancing will be needed to flatten the curve. Very sensible people, including former CDC officials, etc. and doctors are saying the risks of delay are much, much higher than the risks of going too soon. If we’re not going to say tomorrow, starting social distancing today, we’re waiting, and effectively just keep telling people to wash hands, there’s going to be massive pushback saying, ‘Why wait five days? Why not move now? Why not flatten earlier?’ Proposing tomorrow that we delay action until next week will require extremely clear justification with supporting data, models, etc. We would have to make it public for global scrutiny.” This was on the night of the 11th, and this was why I and others had this kind of mounting panic about the whole thing.

Jeremy Hunt

Were there people in SAGE who shared your view that we were going in the wrong direction, or was there a group-think that was broadly shared by everyone?

Dominic Cummings

As far as I can tell, and as far as I remember, most people in SAGE thought— This fundamental logic was still operative on the 11th and the 12th in SAGE. This is the reason why I had been reluctant over the previous week to tell the Prime Minister, “I think the advice that we are getting is wrong.” Even around the 11th and 12th, as far as I could tell from SAGE, and as far as the minutes show, the fundamental assumption remained that we can’t do lockdown and we can’t do suppression because it just means a second peak later. On the night of the 11th, I warned— I sent that message and said, “If we’re not going to”— On the 11th, it became clear—this became a running feature of the whole thing—that, contrary to our expectations, all sorts of things that we thought were in train actually were not in train. On the 11th, there was pushback from within the system against advising the following day—i.e. the 12th—to say, “Stay at home if you have got symptoms.” Me and others were realising at this point that the system is basically delaying announcing all these things because there is not a proper plan in place. The justification is, “Oh, well, it doesn’t really matter if it’s now or in a week’s time,” but actually the whole logic doesn’t work. Essentially, these things are being delayed simply because there hasn’t been the planning and preparation made. I wanted us to announce on the 12th that individuals stay at home, and also to push through the household quarantine as well.

Jeremy Hunt

Let me just ask you briefly, how do we stop that happening in the future? There was a consensus about the way to do things. We know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that that was wrong. How would you change the structures and systems to prevent that kind of thing from happening for a future pandemic?

Dominic Cummings

That is obviously a huge question. There is absolutely no doubt at all that the process by which SAGE was secret, and overall the whole thinking around the strategy was secret, was an absolutely catastrophic mistake, because it meant that there was not proper scrutiny of the assumptions and the underlying logic. Actually, SAGE agreed about this. When I said on the 11th, “We’re going to have to make all these models public and whatnot,” there wasn’t pushback from SAGE, and there wasn’t pushback from Patrick Vallance either. Patrick actually agreed with me. When I said, “We should just publish the code for the models so people can play with it themselves and see what the hell these models are,” Patrick also agreed and said to SAGE that we should do that. The problem is that by the time we were doing this, it was fundamentally too late. By the 11th or the 12th, we had already gone terribly wrong. If you see this document here, in terms of your previous question, Jeremy—

Jeremy Hunt

What is this evidence, please?

Dominic Cummings

This is from a COBRA document and a dashboard document. It actually was in various documents over this time period. I have put it on my Twitter feed. It has this graph here. This was the logic from SAGE, and this was the logic in the Department of Health at the time. The black line there is “do nothing”, the blue line there is “do a little bit”, and the green line is “do a Wuhan-style suppression”—not necessarily Wuhan, but in that direction. As it says, “Very stringent social and behavioural interventions (such as those in China) have the potential to prevent major epidemic establishing, but risks a large epidemic re-establishing… The advised approach seeks to avoid this possibility.” This is actually after the crucial meetings on the 13th and the 14th. This graph kept appearing on the 15th, 16th and 17th. This remained the official logic for days.

Jeremy Hunt

You have described the behavioural scientists who advised SAGE on SPI-B—I think it was—as charlatans and been very critical of the advice they got about how people would react to a lockdown. Did you at the time commission research to challenge that view?

Dominic Cummings

We definitely did challenge it. Just to correct that, I did not say that everybody involved with SPI-B were charlatans, and that is not the case. The problem is that in this field of behavioural science, there are a lot of charlatans. Anybody who has been involved with the political world knows that the whole field is riddled with duff studies and memes that people believe are true but are not true. There is no doubt whatsoever that this was a critical part of the false group-think. One of the critical things that was completely wrong in the whole official thinking in SAGE and in the Department of Health in February/March was, first of all, the British public would not accept a lockdown and, secondly, the British public would not accept what was thought of as an east Asian-style track and trace-type system and the infringements of liberty around that. Those two assumptions were completely central to the official plan and were both, obviously, completely wrong. In the first half of March, this was raised—sometimes—in the Prime Minister’s office, and me and others were literally pointing at the TV screen of Lombardy and saying, “Look at what’s happening in Lombardy. We are getting text messages on our own phones from our own families saying, ‘What’s going on?’ This assumption that the public basically aren’t that frightened and don’t want to have a lockdown is false and we should abandon it.” But there is no doubt that that was an extremely important thing.

Jeremy Hunt

Two final questions from me about that period. On Monday 16 March the Prime Minister did announce a change of tack. People were advised to socially distance, but pubs and restaurants were not closed and mass sports events were not stopped. Did you advise that we should be going further at that point, or did you go along with that softer version of a lockdown?

Dominic Cummings

Can I backtrack? Because I think we need to understand the crucial period between Thursday 12th and the Sunday when things started to change. On the 12th, we started— It was a completely surreal day. I sent a message to the Prime Minister at 7.48 that morning—forgive the language this is expressed in, but I might as well say what I actually said—saying, “We’ve got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly shit. No plans. Totally behind the pace. We must announce today, not next week, ‘If you feel ill with cold or flu, stay home’. Some around the system want a delay because they haven’t done the work. We must force the pace. We are looking at 100 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. You’ve got to chair the daily meetings in the Cabinet Room, not Cobra”—because the Cobra system could not work; we could not get all the data in properly. It did not work for a kind of open thing. That is how the day started off, with us thinking, “Okay, today is going to be all about covid and whether or not we are going to announce the household quarantine. We then got completely derailed because, in the morning of the 12th, suddenly the national security people came in and said, “Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the middle east tonight and we need to start having meetings about that through the day with Cobra as well.” So everything to do with Cobra on covid that day was completely disrupted because you have these two parallel sets of meetings. You had the national security people running in and out talking about, “Are we going to bomb the middle east?” and we had the Cobra meeting being delayed and whatnot as we were trying to figure out what we were going to do with household quarantine. Then, to add to that day—it sounds so surreal it couldn’t possibly be true—The Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog, and the Prime Minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office dealt with that. So we had this completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying, “Are we going to bomb Iraq?”; part of the building was arguing about whether we are going to do quarantine or not do quarantine; the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial. You have all these meetings going on through the course the 12th. In the end, we had the meeting on covid, and we decided to push ahead with household quarantine pretty quickly. Fortunately, thank God, the Attorney General persuaded the Prime Minister not to go along with the whole bombing campaign. At the end of all that, at roughly 9 o’clock that night, I then sat down with Ben Warner and Marc Warner. That is, essentially, when they kind of hit the total panic button with me. They said, “We are looking at all this data; we are looking at all these graphs. We are heading for total and utter catastrophe. We need to have plan B.” Ben then went off and spoke to Patrick Vallance about that on Friday the 13th. On Friday the 13th, we then started to look through all the information and we started to pick apart all the different graphs. Ben spoke to Patrick; Patrick said, “I am also extremely concerned. It seems that something has gone fundamentally wrong in the wiring of the system. We have these graphs showing that even on the best-case scenario with the official plan, you are going to completely smash through the capacity of the NHS—not by a little bit but multiple times.” The evening of Friday the 13th, I am sitting with Ben Warner and the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary in the Prime Minister’s study. We were basically saying that we are going to have to sit down with the Prime Minister tomorrow and explain to him that we think that we are going to have to ditch the whole official plan, and we are heading for the biggest disaster this country has seen since 1940. This is the whiteboard—I put it on my Twitter account, and I have also sent it to some journalists, so hopefully you will be able to see on the internet, and you have got copies of it here. This has, essentially, plan B sketched on it. The timestamp is nine minutes past 8 on the Friday night. Essentially, what is happening at this point is, we are thinking, “What do we do on this?” At this point, the second most powerful official in the country, Helen MacNamara—the Deputy Cabinet Secretary—walked into the office while we are looking at this whiteboard. She says, “I have just been talking to the official Mark Sweeney, who is in charge of co-ordinating with the Department for Health. He said ‘I have been told for years that there is a whole plan for this. There is no plan. We are in huge trouble.’ I have come through here to the Prime Minister’s office to tell you all that I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people. As soon as I have been told this, I have come through to see you. It seems from the conversation you are having that that is correct.” I said, “I think you are right. I think it is a disaster. I am going to speak to the Prime Minister about it tomorrow. We are trying to sketch out here what plan B is.”

Chair

I just want to be clear. On the 14th you have that meeting, and things changed, but on the 16th, we did not close pubs or restaurants, or ban mass sports events for another week. Was your advice that we should go ahead and do all those things from the Monday, and that advice was rejected? Or did you not advise that?

Dominic Cummings

If you— This is the other whiteboard—

Chair

Could you just answer that question? Did you advise that those things should happen?

Dominic Cummings

Yes and no. On the Saturday, we had the official meeting in the morning in the Cabinet Room. After the official meeting ended, I got the Prime Minister into his study with me, Ben Warner, Marc Warner and the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary for Health, and we showed him—

Chair

Could we just get to the question? Did you or did you not advise that pubs and restaurants should be shut? Yes or no?

Dominic Cummings

As I say, yes, but it is more complicated than that. We showed him this graph. It has here “No mitigation”, “Our plan”. This is all the NHS broken. And here is an actual plan, which is lockdown.

Jeremy Hunt

I am really sorry, but I just want to be clear. So you did advise him, he rejected that advice, and the pubs, restaurants and mass sports events carried on for another week. Is that correct?

Dominic Cummings

It is more complicated, as I said. We said on the 14th, “We are going to have to lock down. We are going to have to get there as soon as we possibly can.” You are being shown—sorry, we will come back to the logic. The basic answer to your question is: yes, on the 14th we said to the Prime Minister, “You are going to have to lock down, but there is no lockdown plan. It doesn’t exist. SAGE haven’t modelled it. DH don’t have a plan. We are going to have to figure out and hack together a lockdown plan over the next”—

Jeremy Hunt

So it was not so much that he rejected your advice; it was just that we were not physically ready to proceed on that basis and we needed longer to work out how you would do things like that. Is that the broad picture?

Dominic Cummings

Sort of. Essentially, the Prime Minister quite reasonably—this is like a scene from “Independence Day”, with Jeff Goldblum saying, “The aliens are here, and your whole plan is broken, and you need a new plan.” That is what the scene was like that morning, with Ben Warner in the Jeff Goldblum role. He took the Prime Minister through all the graphs, and through the NHS graphs, and showed him, “The system is thinking that this is all weeks and weeks and weeks away. You are being shown all these graphs about time to peak of the epidemic, in June, but this is all completely wrong. The NHS is going to be smashed in weeks, and we have got days to act”—

Jeremy Hunt

We understand that, thank you. I just want to ask a final question, because lots of colleagues want to come in. It is about your role. You are correct that your title was assistant to the Prime Minister, but you were really the most powerful person in Downing Street after the Prime Minister, because everyone knew that he listened to you more than he listened to any civil servant, and more than he listened, actually, to any Cabinet Minister. But you did not advise him, in your own words, to change tack, until the night of 11 March, and you did not have a meeting to discuss that until 14 March, six weeks after our first case, and six weeks after the World Health Organisation had raised the alarm. You did not advise him to cancel the Cheltenham Gold Cup or the Champions League matches, or to lock down the borders—the things that could have prevented a lockdown. He would have thought, “I’ve not just got the scientific establishment telling me that I do not need to lock down. I’ve actually got Dom, who is really interested in science and even goes along to the SAGE meetings as well.” Do you not recognise that it was a massive failure on your part, as his chief adviser, that you took so long to come to him with advice to change tack?

Dominic Cummings

I think that there is no doubt, in retrospect, that, yes, it was a huge failure of mine, and I bitterly regret that I didn’t hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did—in retrospect, there’s no doubt that I was wrong not to. All I can say is that my worry was—my mental state at the time was—that, on the one hand, you could sort of know from the last week of February that a whole bunch of things were wrong. It was clear through all the meetings with PHE and everybody that everything was going wrong; everything we pushed, everything we probed—everything was wrong, bad, terrible. But I was incredibly frightened—I guess is the word—about the consequences of me kind of pulling a massive emergency string and saying, “The official plan is wrong, and it is going to kill everyone, and you’ve got to change path,” because what if I’m wrong? What if I persuade him to change tack and that is a disaster? Everyone is telling me that if we go down this alternative path, it is going to be five times worse in the winter, and what if that is the consequence? I think, in retrospect, it’s clear that the official plan was wrong, it’s clear that the whole advice was wrong, and I think it’s clear that we obviously should have locked down, essentially, in the first week of March at the latest. We certainly should have been doing all of these things weeks earlier than we did. I think it is unarguable that that is the case. I personally bitterly regret that is was not until round about the 11th or 12th that I started to do that. But, to be clear, on the 12th—on this crazy day of the 12th—we were sitting in the Prime Minister’s office. The Cabinet were talking about the herd immunity plan. The Cabinet Secretary said, “Prime Minister, you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity plan and that it is like the old chicken pox parties. We need people to get this disease, because that is how we get herd immunity by September.” I said, “Mark, you’ve got to stop using this chicken pox analogy. It’s not right.” He said, “Why?”, and Ben Warner said, “Because chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people.” You could sense in the whole room that there was this kind of shock, and it was only really at that moment that we realised. To stress, this was not some weird thing that the Cabinet Secretary had come up with. He was saying what the official advice to him from the Department of Health was. So it was a huge, big deal for me and for Ben Warner to say, “Basically, we think that this whole thing is wrong.” Should we have done it earlier? In retrospect, I think, obviously, we should, and I am terribly, deeply sorry that I didn’t, but hopefully people can realise why I was also very fearful of doing that, because it did cause absolute carnage. Once we did this on the 14th, and once we then started to push the Prime Minister to change path, lots of people did come to me and say, “What on earth are you doing? We are going to lock down. It’s going to bounce back up. It’s going to be worse. This is all going to be on you and the people who are trying to change path.” I am terribly sorry that I didn’t do it earlier, but it just seemed like such a massive thing. It was almost surreal, the whole experience. Part of what me and Ben—on the Friday night, we were doing this. The next morning, when there was the Jeff Goldblum scene, with Ben explaining things, the whole thing just seemed like a kind of out-of-control movie. In retrospect, it is clear that we should have acted earlier, but at the time we just didn’t.

Chair

We have quite a lot more ground to cover, as I think you would expect, so I am going to turn to my colleagues, starting with Mark Logan and then Rosie Cooper.

Mark Logan

Mr Cummings, in British politics you are considered as extremely successful by many people. You took back control. You got Brexit done. But when it comes to this particular issue, why were you not able to nail an earlier lockdown?

Dominic Cummings

I didn’t pay enough attention to it early enough, for sure. One of the other reasons why I finally had the confidence to say that I thought that the system had gone catastrophically wrong was that I also got in touch with a guy called Professor Tim Gowers at Cambridge, who is a Fields medallist. He is one of the smartest people on the planet. I got in touch with him, and I started sharing SAGE documents with him in, I think, the week of the 9th—I can’t remember the exact date. People like him and then, shortly afterwards, Demis Hassabis at DeepMind, who I also started sharing documents with and talking to—they actually could understand these things. In the combination of Marc Warner, Hassabis and Tim Gowers, you had three incredibly able people, who could understand the technicalities in a way that I couldn’t do, saying this to me. That gave me the confidence to say to the Prime Minister, “We should change.” But it is obvious in retrospect that I just left this whole thing until far, far too late, and I am terribly sorry about that. I should have done this in January, is the reality of it. I think that was a big part of it. You read about these things in history books. It was literally a classic historical example of group-think in action. The process was closed, and that is what happens in closed group-think bubbles: everyone just reinforced themselves. The more that people from the outside attacked, the more people internally said, “Well, they don’t understand, and they haven’t got access to all this information” and whatnot. It was this classic group-think bubble. In the end, I think a lot of people will say I did the wrong thing by trying to bounce the system into a different path, and who knows? Whether that was right or wrong, what is unarguably the case is that part of my job in situations like this was to challenge things. I did do it on other things, and although I did do it here, I obviously did not do it early enough. That is the heart of the thing. If this process had been opened up to outside scientific scrutiny, and other smart people’s scrutiny—remember, a lot of people who figured out the answer to this were quantitative people who were not epidemiologists or disease specialists; they were people like Hassabis, people like Gowers, people like Marc Warner—in January and we had put all of these assumptions out on the table, we’d have figured out at least six weeks earlier that there was an alternative plan, and this whole thing of, “Well, you’ve only got a choice between that peak, or delay and then that peak” is complete garbage. In fact, the plan that we put to the PM on the 14th, we could have that six weeks earlier, about supress and then build, and crash programmes for drugs and vaccines and everything else. So I failed, and I apologise for that.

Mark Logan

On your earlier point about inertia, why do you think that was? I’ll use a personal example: from mid to the end of January last year, my wife and child were sat about 500 miles east of Wuhan waiting to return to the UK, and they were saying to me, “This is very real.” We had a meeting in Parliament—Chris Whitty chaired it—on 11 February; 650 MPs were invited to, and I think about 15, or at the most 20, attended. There was just a sense of inertia and, to your earlier point, a lack of urgency. What explains that? Is it people, is it the institutions, is it cultural?

Dominic Cummings

We obviously had the wrong people in all sorts of crucial things. I also think it is important to realise that, at this time, not just the Prime Minister but many other people thought that the real danger was not the health danger but the overreaction to it, and the economy. The Prime Minister said all the way through February and through the first half of March, “The real danger here isn’t this new swine flu thing; it’s that the reaction to it is going to cripple the economy.” To be fair to the Prime Minister, although I think he was completely wrong, lots of other senior people in Whitehall had the same view, that the real danger was the economic one. It was because of this group-think, and also the fact that all of these health graphs—about the lack of urgency, I think this is an incredibly important point, which I should have explained before—had time to peak 12 weeks away. When we are talking about meetings in the week of the 9th, when people like the Warners were saying, “Panic, panic. Advance,” everyone was thinking, “We’ve got ages to think about this. The peak is not until June. We’ve got weeks to potentially make decisions about these things.” There was a fundamental misunderstanding about how far this already was in the country and how fast it was spreading in the country. The lack of testing data was an absolutely critical disaster, because we didn’t realise early enough how far it had already spread. So all these graphs are like this, showing a peak in June, whereas the real graph was like that, and we were already much further up it. We didn’t realise that, though, until after we had even locked down. Even a week after we locked down on 23 March, official graphs were still showing this thing going up and peaking in June, even though we already knew from the numbers inside the ICUs and deaths that the official graphs had to be completely wrong. Do you see what I mean? So part of the lack of urgency was that the testing data was wrong. The graphs that we were shown on the models were all wrong because they were all pushed out to the right, and that massively contributed to the whole lack of urgency. Further, another critical thing was this: the reasonable worst-case scenario planning system. There is a guy called Phil Tetlock who wrote a book. In that book, he said, “You should not use words like ‘reasonable’, ‘probable’ and ‘likely’, because it confuses everybody.” This was a classic example of how this happened, because the reasonable worst-case scenario originally seen at the end of February was basically: “This is the worst thing that could possibly happen, but, of course, it is not going to happen.” In the first week of March, I was told, “Well, there is a 20% chance it could happen.” On 2 March, I think, I was told, “Officially, there is a 20% chance that the reasonable worst-case scenario could happen.” By the time we get to 13 March, and I am waving around plan B, scientists are starting to come to No.10 saying, “Hang on a second. The reasonable worst-case scenario is now our central planning assumption.” That’s terrible, because the whole thing has suddenly crept up on us from literally 10 days earlier, when it was probably—no, definitely—very, very unlikely; to the first week of March—“Well, a 20% chance”; to literally a week later, when this was now our central planning assumption. On top of that, the graphs being all out to the right meant that the truth was even more bad than the reasonable worst-case scenario. Do you see what I mean?

Mark Logan

Very briefly—this is my last question—during January, February and March time, how were the international experiences of the likes of China and Taiwan being fed into the system? Did we take serious note of them?

Dominic Cummings

It was essentially completely discarded by the system. I think that was another one of the tragic errors. It goes back to what, I think, Jeremy mentioned earlier on about some of the kind of behavioural assumptions. Fundamentally, in January, February, March and even after we got through to lockdown on the 23rd and in the immediate few days after that, the almost universal view was that it was inconceivable that we would be able to do a Taiwan-type thing. I have got text messages from myself saying, “If Taiwan is doing this and if Singapore is doing this, and we’re not going to this”—in Singapore, everything is in English; everyone can read what they are doing. It’s not like it’s in Chinese; everyone is going to be able to see a highly competent country operating, in English, a completely different approach. If we are not going to do that, we are going to have to have a really good explanation, but the basic default mode was, “This country’s is not east Asian, the people won’t wear it and it’s just impossible.” It was only after we started to push through the idea of plan B—this is why, for example, testing stopped. Remember, testing basically stopped, and the Government officially said, “Oh well, there’s no point testing everyone any more.” What obviously should have been happening is that in January we should have been ramping up testing massively. In January we should have been saying—

Chair

We will come on to testing in the next session.

Dominic Cummings

Well, hopefully that explains fundamentally this group-think. The group-think about, “There’s no option apart from one peak or the second peak,” was completely tied together with, “The east Asian approach is simply completely politically, technically, in every sense not viable in this country.” That didn’t change until after the weekend of the 14th and 15th, as we tried to push through plan B.

Chair

Thank you very much indeed. We will go to Rosie Cooper and then Rebecca Long Bailey.

Rosie Cooper

Good morning, Mr Cummings. The Chair has asked you about the long delays in publishing SAGE papers, and you described, even more worryingly, Cobra meetings leaking. Why not gain the public trust and publish the papers? Were there political barriers to having those papers published?

Dominic Cummings

As I said, when I talked to Patrick Vallance about this, Patrick was completely supportive of it, as you would expect from a good scientist. He said, “I think that’s correct. We should publish all of these things. We should publish the code for the models.” So there was no pushback from Patrick at all, or from Chris Whitty. As far as I am aware, there was no pushback from SAGE either. The problem was that by the time we had this conversation, we were sort of into a crisis, if you see what I mean. What should have happened is that we had that conversation in January and published everything then. That would have saved our bacon. We didn’t really have the conversation about publishing things until the week of the 9th, when we were already dangling over the cliff.

Rosie Cooper

Well, okay. I think the public will be very, very disturbed to hear the chaotic picture you paint, with almost a pick-and-mix attitude to scientific evidence. There was talk of sending the virus packing in 12 weeks and chickenpox parties, and there is an alleged comment from the Prime Minister about bodies piling up in the streets—you might want to comment on that. But all the while, in its co-ordinating role, the Department of Health led specifically on PPE procurement and the design and set-up of Test and Trace. They did that on a largely outsourced business model, with no penalty clauses for bad performance. All we are hearing here is of incompetence and chaos. How would you rate the performance of the Department of Health and Social Care and the Secretary of State? Outstanding? Good? Requires improvement? Or, inadequate, and why?

Dominic Cummings

I think there was some brilliance. Like in much of the Government system, there were many brilliant people at relatively junior and middle levels, who were terribly let down by senior leadership. The Secretary of State for Health should have been fired for at least 15 or 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions, in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room, and publicly.

Rosie Cooper

Oh dear! In that case, do you think people should be worried about facing corporate manslaughter charges?

Dominic Cummings

I don’t know about that because I don’t know what the laws and rules are. But, as I said in my opening statement, I think that there is no doubt that many senior people performed far, far—disastrously—below the standards that the country has a right to expect. 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, so did many other senior people.

Rosie Cooper

I understand that we are coming on to Test and Trace later, but on the evidence we have heard so far, could you comment on why the financial incentives for people with covid-19 to self-isolate were so fundamentally weak. They were fatally weak and that is a big problem for the spread of this disease.

Dominic Cummings

I think that is right. The Chancellor did an outstanding job on furlough, but I would point out that he had in his team some brilliant people: Mike Webb, Tim Leunig and Liam Booth-Smith. That team basically had to create the whole furlough scheme completely out of thin air, in just a few days. There wasn’t any plan for furlough—nothing, zero, nada. They completely had to pull that out of nothing. On the problem you are describing about the financial incentives on covid and isolation, you are obviously completely correct. There should have been a plan but, like on testing and shielding, there was no plan. When we got to that point and said, “Right, what are we going to do on financial incentives?” there wasn’t any plan. If you go back to the 3rd, the Government published a document on the 3rd, which was the “contain, mitigate, delay” thing. We had been told for weeks that we’ve got all these plans in place etc. When we got that document, we leafed through it and Ben Warner said, “This is the press release. Where is the actual plan?” “This is the plan.” “No, this is the press release. Where is the actual plan? Where is the document like that, that has all the stuff on the things that you are talking about?” “Oh well, we don’t know. We haven’t got that. We don’t know where it is.” On all those things, it turned out that we at No. 10 were operating on completely false assumptions. That is why I blame myself terribly for not digging into all of this before I did. We started to realise in the last week of February and the first week of March that that was the case. On shielding, on 19 March, I pulled all the officials in on shielding, to say, “Where is the plan on shielding?” Not only was there not a plan, lots of people in the Cabinet Office said, “We shouldn’t have a plan. We shouldn’t put out a helpline for people to call, because it will all just be swamped, and we haven’t got a system.” Thank God, a brilliant official in the Department of Health and Social Care worked with a guy called Oliver Lewis and they hacked together a team. But the shielding plan was literally hacked together in two all-nighters, after Thursday the 19th. There wasn’t any plan for shielding. There wasn’t even a helpline for shielding. There wasn’t any plan for financial incentives. There wasn’t any plan for almost anything in any kind of detail at all.

Rosie Cooper

The picture you have described is absolutely terrifying. You have described the Department of Health as a “smoking ruin”. What did you mean by that? Did you actually hear the Prime Minister say words to the effect, if the bodies pile up, so be it?

Dominic Cummings

Why did I describe the Department of Health as a smoking ruin? Well, because, as I said, there were lots of great people in it, but the procurement system which they were operating was just completely hopeless. It was not set up at all to do—there wasn’t any system set up to deal with proper emergency procurement. I will give you an example of this: on the day the Prime Minister tested positive, whatever that Friday was—the 27th, I think—in that meeting, we were told at the Cabinet table by officials that the Department of Health had been turning down ventilators because the price had been marked up. It completely beggars belief that that sort of thing was happening. When I was having PPE meetings round the Cabinet Room table, we were told, “Oh well, the PPE is obviously not going to arrive for months.” Why is it not going to arrive for months? “Because it takes that long to ship.” Why are you shipping it? “We ship it, because it is what we always do.” Hang on—we are going to have a peak in the NHS roundabout mid-April and you are shipping things from China that are going to arrive in months’ time, and all the airplanes are not flying. Leave this meeting, commandeer the planes, fly them to China, drop them at the nearest airfield, pick up our stuff, fly it back. At this point, we had Trump sending the CIA round trying to gazump everybody on PPE. The whole system was just like wading through treacle, on all of these sorts of things. There wasn’t an emergency fast-track process for people to deal with these kinds of things. That is why I described it as a “smoking ruin”. And that is why the Cabinet Secretary quite rightly said, “We have got to basically divvy up the Secretary of State’s job, because there are multiple huge things here that are all being dropped—testing, ventilators, PPE, vaccines, drugs, you name it.” Because it was clear that the Department was just completely and utterly overwhelmed.

Chair

Thank you, Rosie. I am going to go on to Rebecca Long Bailey, but I just wanted to pick up something that you said, Mr Cummings. I think I heard you correctly in accusing the Health Secretary of having lied. Did I hear that correctly?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

That is obviously a serious charge. Can you provide the Committee with the evidence behind that assertion?

Dominic Cummings

Yes. There are numerous examples. In the summer, he said that everyone who needed treatment got the treatment that 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 that they deserved. Many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.

Chair

Is that the basis of your assertion or are there other pieces of evidence that you base that charge on?

Dominic Cummings

Yes. In mid-April, just before the Prime Minister and I were diagnosed with having covid ourselves, the Secretary of State for Health told us in the Cabinet Room, “Everything is fine on PPE. We have got it all covered,” and so on. When I came back, almost the first meeting I had in the Cabinet Room was about the disaster over PPE and how we were actually completely short and hospitals all over the country were running out. The Secretary of State said in that meeting, “This is the fault of Simon Stevens; it is the fault of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is not my fault—they blocked approvals on all sorts of things.” I said to the Cabinet Secretary, “Please investigate this and find out if it is true.” The Cabinet Secretary came back to me and said, “It’s completely untrue. I have lost confidence in the Secretary of State’s honesty in these meetings.”

Chair

The Cabinet Secretary said that.

Dominic Cummings

The Cabinet Secretary said that to me and the Cabinet Secretary said that to the Prime Minister.

Chair

Did you make a note of that at the time?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

Can you supply that to the Committee?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Chair

And to corroborate the accusation that you have made against the Health Secretary you have given orally some of what is in your mind when you make that charge. I would be grateful if you could write to the Committee to set it out, so we can consider it. Obviously, that is a very serious thing to say.

Rebecca Long Bailey

Thank you, Mr Cummings for speaking to us today. Now, you have mentioned Whitehall dismissing the strict early measures taken in Taiwan and Wuhan, and you have also said that in Whitehall the real danger was viewed as the economic one rather than the virus. Indeed, an article from the Institute for New Economic Thinking in November last year noted that the UK was one country of many that chose to limit pandemic response in favour of economic stimulus in the name of saving their economies at the expense of their citizens’ lives. So who was providing economic advice to the Government? What did it say? And who within Government was arguing against taking strict measures for economic reasons, both at the start of the pandemic and throughout? And ultimately, did anyone within Government actively attempt to trade off lives in favour of economic activity?

Dominic Cummings

I slightly missed some of that, but I think I got the gist of it. There were quite a few people around Whitehall who thought that the real danger here was the economy. The Prime Minister’s view throughout January, February and March was, as he said in many meetings, the real danger here is not the disease—the real danger here is the measures that we take to deal with the disease and the economic destruction that that will cause. He had that view all the way through. In fact, one of the reasons why it was so rocky getting from the 14th, when we suggested plan B to him, to actual lockdown was because he kept basically bouncing back to, “We don’t really know how dangerous it is. We are going to completely destroy the economy by having lockdown. Maybe we shouldn’t do it.” And through the course of that period—16th, 17th, 18th and 19th—there was this constant sort of back and forth of, “Here’s the hourly data coming in, showing that we are further ahead in the pandemic than we realised. The situation is worse. The NHS situation is worse. Everything is getting worse”. And that kind of propelled things a bit towards lockdown. But it is also the case that fundamentally the Prime Minister just did not really think that this was the big danger. Now, there have been lots of reports and accusations that the Chancellor was the person who was kind of trying to delay things in March. That is completely wrong. The Chancellor was totally supportive of me and of other people as we tried to make this transition from plan A to plan B. He got his team working on the furlough scheme. However, it is the case that there were senior officials who worried that—it is not completely unreasonable either to say, “If you completely shut down the economy, you are definitely having huge, terrible effects on all sorts of people’s lives. If you have a lockdown, you are definitely consigning some people to all kinds of suffering in various ways, and some of them might die because of the lockdown itself.” So, I think there were reasonable arguments: it is not like just having the lockdown was the obvious thing to do. There were reasonable arguments to say, “We’ve got to kind of weigh up all the other destructive effects of what to do”. Now, me and others came to the conclusion that actually the logic was fundamentally false, because what we ended up arguing was that, in fact, if you try not to lock down and you try and optimise for the short-term economy, you will not actually even get that, because what will happen is that the public will lock themselves down, because they will realise that there is not going to be any NHS for anybody. That was the reality. I think this point, even now, is constantly lost. In the scenario that we were heading for, not only would you have had hundreds of thousands of deaths from covid—you would then have had absolutely no NHS at all for anybody. Your seven-year-old daughter falls over and needs A&E? There is no A&E for her. You’ve got cancer treatment? There is no cancer treatment. Nothing—nothing at all for anybody for three months. That is what we were facing. Part of our argument was that once people realise that that is the situation we are heading for, they will be so terrified that they will stay at home, anyway. There will be some kind of lockdown whatever happens. Either we get ahead of this and we try and do it as intelligently and sensibly as we possibly can, or if we plough into this process where we basically just say, “Well, there’s no alternative. We’ll just have to get through it”, you are going to have not only hundreds of thousands of people dead from covid and not only hundreds of thousands of people dead because there is no NHS for three months, you are then going to have a gigantic economic disaster on top of it all, anyway. Do you see what I mean?

Chair

Let’s take some more questions from Rebecca.

Rebecca Long Bailey

Sadly, not locking down hard enough or soon enough has arguably produced far more long-term adverse economic effects and has needlessly cost so many lives. That was a point made by the IMF some time ago. Did the Government commission official economic advice to sit alongside the scientific advice it was receiving? And when you moved towards that group-think on plan B, as you suggested earlier, was economic advice produced alongside that to show the outcome of such decisions being taken?

Dominic Cummings

I am absolutely sure that there was all sorts of economic advice going on and being written. I do not personally remember it—it was not my focus. I knew that Rishi and his team—the Chancellor and his team—were extremely competent and therefore I basically left them to deal with the economic stuff like furlough, because I had complete confidence that they would be able to do it. I was focusing my time and efforts on all the other things like shielding and the Department of Health, where it was clear that the system was broken. So I am afraid I am not—what I can definitely say is that there is not some kind of document floating around that says, “Here is the economic cost” and that everyone was looking at that, or that the Prime Minister was looking at that and said, “Well, looking at this document, maybe we shouldn’t do this.” That was not the case and that did not happen. It was the case that the Bank of England, the senior officials in the Treasury and senior officials in the Cabinet Office were saying, “We have to think about the consequences. If we do this lockdown, we will have to borrow huge amounts of money. What if the bond markets suddenly spike, go crazy and refuse to lend to us? We will then have to find emergency powers to tell the Bank of England to buy the debt etc, etc.” So there were conversations going on at the time about that possible problem—what if we have a financial crisis, a bond market crisis and sterling crisis on top of the whole health crisis? There were conversations about that and meetings with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Cabinet Secretary and me to discuss it. To stress, all the stories say that the Chancellor tried to stop this happening or tried to delay it. All of those stories are wrong. The Chancellor completely supported what me and Ben Warner and others—Patrick Vallance as well— were arguing for from the 14th about accelerating through to plan B.

Rebecca Long Bailey

Point 24 of your recent Twitter thread on the Government’s handling of the pandemic states: “The public inquiry will at no point ask: how does the deep institutional wiring of the parties/civil service program destructive behaviour by putting the wrong ppl in wrong jobs with destructive incentives?” In your view, who was destructive? What were their incentives, and were those incentives financial?

Dominic Cummings

Well, I think there is a very profound question about the nature of our political system that means that we got at the last election a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. I think any system that ends up giving a choice between two people like that as the people to lead is obviously a system that has gone extremely, extremely badly wrong. There are so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two, and there is obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties if that is the best that they can do. It is also the case—I do not exclude myself from this—that in any sensible, rational Government, it is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position, in my personal opinion. I am not smart. I have not built great things in the world. It is completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it is crackers that Boris Johnson was in there and that the choice at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn. It’s completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there and that the choice at the last election was Jeremy Corbyn. It is also the case that there are wonderful people inside the civil service—there are brilliant officials all over the place—but the system tends to weed them out from senior management jobs. The problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys, over and over again, with great people on the ground doing things—as I said, this brilliant young woman, Jen Allum, wasn’t the top person in GDS. There were great people further down the hierarchy who did brilliant things, but the leadership, people like me and the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health—we let down the people on the frontline and we let down those excellent officials as well. We all should be asking, and you guys in the political parties need to ask yourselves: what is it about your parties that gives choices like Johnson versus Corbyn? And we have to ask: what is it about Whitehall that promotes so many senior people who are completely out of their depth?

Rebecca Long Bailey

The question was specifically about the very specific comment that you made. You implied that there were people with destructive incentives involved at a Government level throughout the pandemic. Who were those people, and what were those destructive incentives? It is a very specific statement to make, and the answer that you have given is very general and outside of the sphere of Government, unfortunately.

Dominic Cummings

You are asking about destructive incentives. I think you are implying: do I think that corruption was a big part of the problem? That is not at all what I meant by destructive incentives. What I meant was that politicians are incentivised to play to the media tomorrow in the headlines, and officials are incentivised to keep their heads down and to follow processes, even when things like that are going to kill thousands of people. The incentives are not programmed to say, “How do we get people who understand how to make decisions under uncertainty into key jobs?” They are not, “How do we get people with brilliant operational capability into key jobs?” The incentives are constantly pushing people away from rational behaviour and building what is needed at scale quickly. That is what I meant by destructive incentives.

Chair

Thank you very much, Rebecca. Just before I turn to Laura Trott, Mr Cummings, you say that you are not smart enough to keep pace with the discussions in SAGE and all the rest of the things, but you do, I am sure, have an appreciation of good order in Government, and you told us earlier that Cobra was not a place in which you could have candid conversations, because it leaked. In other words, there were unauthorised briefings. Did you ever engage in unauthorised briefings?

Dominic Cummings

What do you mean by “unauthorised briefings”?

Chair

Briefings that were not authorised by the Prime Minister and those others in senior positions in Government.

Dominic Cummings

In general, my engagement with the media was very different before the election and after the election. Before the election, I had quite a lot of engagement with the media. After the election was called in October 2019, I actually had extremely little dealings with the media. One of the issues that happened is that in January I essentially stopped talking to almost all journalists almost all the time. In fact, during the course of 2020—one of the things that you read constantly—this basically drove the media mad, because nobody in my position had essentially stopped talking to the media, for decades. I was working, say roughly, 100-hour weeks. Of that time, less than an hour a week, for sure—much less than 1%—was spent talking to the media. I did occasionally talk to people. The main person really, though, that I spoke to in the whole of 2020 was Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, because the BBC has a special position in the country, obviously, during a crisis; and because I was in the room for certain crucial things, I could give guidance to her on certain very big stories. I will give you an example of the sort of thing I did. On Wednesday 18 March, huge rumours spread that there was going to be a London-only lockdown, and pictures started appearing in some of the media and websites about tanks encircling the M25 and cutting it off and whatnot. Laura Kuenssberg called me and said, “This story is happening. Is it true?” I said, “I can categorically tell you that it’s definitely not true; you should definitely not report it. I absolutely 100% guarantee it.” That meant that the BBC did not, as some of the media did, run the story. But that was really very occasional. I spoke to her maybe, on average, once every three or four weeks through the course of the year. But I spoke to the media close to zero in the course of 2020. Your question was about unauthorised. Yes, I did talk to people unauthorised, in the sense that, actually, pretty rarely did I speak to the Prime Minister before I spoke to any journalists. I just got on with things, because my view was that the Prime Minister is already about 1,000 times far too obsessed with the media, in a way that undermined him doing his own job, so the last thing I wanted to do was involve him in further conversations about the media. In fact, I did everything I could to limit the conversations that the Prime Minister had regarding the media.

Chair

I understand that.

Dominic Cummings

So, unauthorised in that sense, yes.

Chair

In an hour a week, you can convey quite a lot of information, whether it is a Laura Kuenssberg or anyone else. You said that Cobra became dysfunctional because you could not rely on its confidentiality. You have also said that, in the context of SAGE, there was too much secrecy, that things should be much more in the public domain so that people can interrogate it. In that spirit, will you publish the texts and emails that you sent to members of the media during the period from January to the summer?

Dominic Cummings

I think there are two different things. The SAGE stuff should have been published—scientific advice should be published, unless there are very specific national security reasons for it not to be. You can imagine some crises where it would be different from covid—

Chair

But not your briefings.

Dominic Cummings

I will come on to that. The Cobra process, I think, is different. The problem there is that the Government should be much more transparent, but the answer to that is not Ministers, Spads and officials just leaving the room, picking up the phone and randomly calling whoever they feel like, often to get a favour from someone—that is not proper transparency; it is not good Government. What that does is sow absolute chaos through the whole system. What is the case on Cobra is that the whole workings of the process around Cobra should have been much more open, but done in an orderly way, where it is like, “Right, here we are, on the record, here is logic, here are the workings of how we got to it.” If people had been able to see more of the back and forth and the logic, both in SAGE and in Cobra, it would have enormously helped, because outside experts would have been able to see—“Well, that’s not right” or, “We can contribute to this”—but that culture just doesn’t exist.

Chair

But doesn’t that apply completely to your briefings to the media? To make sure that they are accurate and authoritative, it would be helpful for them to be in the public domain, in the way that you described for the communications from Cobra and the proceedings of SAGE.

Dominic Cummings

Obviously, on the rare occasions when I spoke to the media myself and tried to explain things, I am trying to explain what is happening with official Government policy. They are official briefings—

Chair

For good, high-minded reasons, I am sure.

Dominic Cummings

It is not in any sense normal for everybody just to publish every conversation they have with the media. It is hard to see how that would work.

Chair

If that was their intended purpose, to give an accurate and fair reflection and to correct misapprehensions—possibly, as you say, you cited a story that would be wrong—what is the problem with publishing that so that people can see?

Dominic Cummings

Well, I would be happy to talk to you about it further. I think there are huge lessons—

Chair

We’re talking now. Can you make a commitment? You have committed to publish other messages—for example, with the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary and others. Given that these were, as you say, briefings designed to be clear and helpful, in that same spirit, will you share them with the Committee?

Dominic Cummings

Almost all of these things are conversations, first of all—

Chair

First of all, but some are texts and messages—

Dominic Cummings

First of all, there is nothing to share. Secondly, having a system in which all written communication between everybody in Government and all journalists is published is a very serious change to how the media operates in this country. There are all sorts of ways in which you could improve the system. There are all sorts of ways in which you could have greater transparency. I am not sure that it is possible in a free society to say that we are going to have everybody in Government—I mean, would you, for example, say that you would publish all of your WhatsApp messages with all journalists over the last 12 months?

Chair

I haven’t made the commitment that you have today to transparency, to the point that you published a picture of a whiteboard in Downing Street. Presumably, that was in a private circumstance. You did it, I am sure, to be able to put into the public domain helpful information. Will you share with the Committee, clearly on the basis that they would be helpful, the briefings that you gave and such texts as you have retained? Will you share them?

Dominic Cummings

First of all, I think there is almost nothing that I have got like that, which could contribute very much—

Chair

It might be very little, which makes it easier.

Dominic Cummings

Secondly, what I certainly would do is look back at my texts with various journalists and see whether there are things among these that I think have a kind of— What I would say is this: anything that I think has a kind of direct bearing on the decisions that were made and the mistakes that were made, I would be happy to share those—

Chair

Can we be the judge of that, so that we can understand what you were briefing to—

Dominic Cummings

With great respect, Chairman, I am not going to say to you that I am going to hand over my private phone and let you just scroll through everything and decide what it is you think deserves or does not deserve to be in the public domain. I will certainly look through what I have sent to various journalists and, as I said, anything that I think is significant to how decisions were made—in particular, mistakes that were made, including by me—then I will share those. But once you get into that sort of thing, you are into difficult territory, because you are also sharing things that journalists themselves are assuming are going to be private, so it requires a lot of careful thought before we go down such a path.

Chair

I understand.

Dominic Cummings

In principle, I am in favour of maximum transparency on this whole process.

Chair

Everyone understands that and there is no one on the Committee, least of all me, who wants to have access to your mobile phone. Perhaps we can rely on your candour in selecting those messages.

Dominic Cummings

I will certainly have to go through things anyway for the public inquiry, so as I go through the process for the public inquiry—

Chair

We are keen to learn lessons on the way and it would help if we had it now.

Dominic Cummings

Exactly. The point is that I am going to have to go through that process anyway for the public inquiry, so as I go through that process, if there are things I think are relevant to this Committee, then I will speak to some people involved and see what might be done.

Chair

Laura Trott, and then Katherine Fletcher.

Laura Trott

Thank you, Chair. Hi Dom. Did anyone mention a pandemic plan or a risk register to you before 2020?

Dominic Cummings

Yes.

Laura Trott

In what circumstance did they do that?

Dominic Cummings

I had conversations with various people in the Cabinet Office between July 2019 and the general election in 2019 about the risk register in general and also some specific national security risk register issues. Also, in my time in government, I had various specific meetings with people about the question of bioterrorism, which obviously overlaps with pandemic planning.

Laura Trott

Did you have any view on the quality of the pandemic plan that you were shown at that point?

Dominic Cummings

I thought that many of the plans seemed to me to fall very far short of what is actually needed. A lot of things are just kind of PowerPoints and they lack detail, but, most importantly, I think the process around them, as with the pandemic plan, is not open. There is not a culture of talking to outside experts. I will give you a recent example. I was talking to some people who said to me, “Did you ever go and read the plan on solar flares?” I said “No” and they said, “Well, if you will get some expert advice on that, you will see that the current Government plan on that is just completely hopeless. If that happens, then 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 that 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. It should be open by default and only closed for specific things. For example, one of the other things very high on the risk register is the anthrax plan—for what happens if terrorists attack with anthrax. Personally, I would be extremely concerned that that plan is as robust as it should be. I cannot go into any details of it, but I think that there is no doubt that everything like that needs the most incredibly careful thought. This country spends tens of billions of pounds on national security issues, but we do not spend anything like the right amount of money or engage the right kind of people involved. Bear in mind that, on this, as soon as people like Marc Warner, Demis Hassabis and Tim Gowers looked at what was being planned, they could say straightaway, “This is wrong; your logic is wrong here; your logic is wrong there.” I am absolutely sure that if you opened up this kind of process—not to people like me, who frankly wouldn’t have good questions to ask—there is definitely a way in which that process could be improved.

Laura Trott

Did you make those comments at the time in 2019? You said you made those comments to the Cabinet Secretary in the summer of 2020. Did you make those comments in 2019?

Dominic Cummings

Yes. In 2019 we kicked off a whole process around what became known as the integrated review, but there were all sorts of conversations in the second half of 2019, which I was involved in, about rethinking the whole way in which we look at national security questions like this.

Laura Trott

Was anything done on the pandemic plan specifically as a result of the questions that you raised in 2019, do you know?

Dominic Cummings

I don’t know and I can’t remember now. I asked No. 10 before I came today if I could go and review my official diary and my official emails for that whole time, so that I could try to help this Committee as much as I possibly could, but they declined to let me do that, so I am afraid I don’t have all the records for that.

Laura Trott

Who to your knowledge is responsible for monitoring future threats?

Dominic Cummings

It very much depends. What kind of threats do you mean?

Laura Trott

If we are thinking about a pandemic, who is responsible within Government for monitoring those future threats, to your understanding? Is it the Civil Contingencies Secretariat?

Dominic Cummings

Well, I think a fundamental problem with this whole business, and a fundamental problem that was exposed in covid, is that there are multiple responsibilities. No one has an answer to your question. That is part of the problem. In one sense, you could say that the Cabinet Secretary is responsible because he is responsible for the whole civil service, but that is only really nominal. He would say, quite reasonably, “I’m not a pandemic expert. I’m not a blah-blah expert. You’ll have to speak to so-and-so. The chief scientific adviser signs off this, and so-and-so signs off that.” One of the fundamental problems that you find in this whole thing—it is a general problem in Whitehall but it was very, very clear and disastrous during covid—is that you have this system where, on the one hand, Ministers are nominally responsible in various ways for A, B, C, but Ministers cannot 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— Do you know that Spiderman meme with both the Spidermans pointing at each other? It is like that, but with everybody. So you have Hancock pointing at the permanent secretary, and you have the permanent secretary pointing at Hancock. 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’re responsible.” The problem is that everyone is right, and everyone is unhappy. Everyone kind of has a point about it. It is not clear, and this was critical. In a well-run entity what would have happened here is essentially, in my opinion, you would have had a kind of dictator in charge of this. If I had been Prime Minister, the way I would have handled this is that I would have said, “Marc Warner is in charge of this whole thing. He speaks with my authority. He has as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do stuff, and pushing the barriers of legality. He is in charge of everyone, and he can fire anybody, he can move anybody, and he can jiggle the whole thing around.” That way you actually have clear responsibility. One of the terrible problems that we had through April, May and June, as we were trying to build plan B, was that we in No. 10 could say, “Right, we’ve got to build testing. We’ve got to do this and that, and we’ve got to do the other.” The Cabinet Secretary quite rightly was saying, “Hancock is responsible,” but everybody else was saying, “Hancock is completely incapable of doing the job, so he can’t be responsible,” so no one got to grips with who was actually in charge.

Laura Trott

I guess my questions are more around the monitoring of the risk. Who is raising that alarm, and who is the person that is responsible for trying to make sure that we have a plan ready for the pandemic? Who were you having the conversations with, in 2019, about the risk register?

Dominic Cummings

It’s a diffuse set of people; it’s not clear. Again, this is the problem. In one sense, the Civil Contingencies Secretariat inside the Cabinet Office has a sort of co-ordinating role, but I will give you a classic example of that. On Monday 16 March, we asked, “What is the view of the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat on the various pandemic plans that have been given? Because as far as we can tell from our meetings, and as far as I can tell from our meetings, some of them don’t exist, and the ones that do exist have got gaping holes.” To which we were given the answer, “These plans are not held centrally by the Cabinet Office.” So we are all clutching our heads—this is 16 March, and we are suddenly told that. We are all assuming that the Cabinet Office has had scrutiny of these things for six to eight weeks. We only find out on 16 March that not only have they not been scrutinising, testing and red teaming them, they haven’t even seen them, and they are only beginning, in the week of the 16th, to actually get hold of these things.

Laura Trott

And you would assume that is the core competency of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat.

Dominic Cummings

The Civil Contingencies Secretariat completely collapsed under the pressure of this. They didn’t have the people. They didn’t have the skills. They didn’t have the data. They didn’t have the data architecture to collect all the data across Whitehall. All of that basically imploded and had to be reconstructed in the course of April, May and June.

Laura Trott

When you said on 12 March, and I will paraphrase you, that the Cabinet Office is terrifyingly awful, was that what you were referring to—the failure, in that respect, of just not having any contingency planning and not holding that purpose centrally?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, that was a big part of it. Again, I stress that there are lots of great officials in there, but this is part of the problem. Systems can make people smarter in various ways, and they can also make people dumber. The problem in the Cabinet Office was that, like all over Whitehall, you had some great, great people, but it was clear that the wiring was wrong. The wiring of responsibilities was wrong. The wiring of incentives was wrong.

Laura Trott

You have spoken about the fact that you think a central person should have been responsible for the pandemic response once it was actually going. But in terms of the preparedness and monitoring of future threats, is it just that the Civil Contingencies Secretariat should do their job better, or should there be a different organisation that provides that function?

Dominic Cummings

Essentially, the whole wiring of how the Cabinet Office does national security issues in general needs to be radically changed. I started to work with the Cabinet Secretary on this process from summer last year. The overlapping Venn diagram touches on the civil contingencies, but it also touches on lots of other things. It also goes back to the way in which the Cobra system could not work. The Cobra system, as some people will know, is what is called a STRAP environment. That means that it is an environment where you don’t have phones. You cannot just take in laptops. It is kept in a certain way, so that the intelligence services know that Russia, China, North Korea or whoever cannot smuggle things in. That kind of system is completely hopeless for a pandemic. This is why we all moved out of Cobra. We had to end up doing it literally in the Cabinet Room and just gerrymander iPads, TV screens and stuff in there, because you could not get the people with the laptops, the internet connections and the data that we needed to look at into the Cobra room, because the Cobra room is a STRAP 3 and above environment, which does not allow such things in. The whole wiring of how the Cabinet Office is set up to deal with this kind of crisis just fundamentally didn’t work. The last Cobra meeting I can even remember downstairs in the Cobra room was essentially a Potemkin meeting, because it was with the DAs. What happened was that, as soon as we had these meetings, Nicola Sturgeon would just go straight out and announce what she wanted straight afterwards. Again, you have these completely Potemkin meetings, without anyone actually digging into the reality and the detail, because everybody thought that as soon as the meeting has finished, everybody is going to just pop up on TV and start babbling. So that whole structure inside the Cabinet Office needs to be completely changed. The good news is that the Cabinet Secretary knows that. The Cabinet Secretary himself saw—as did a lot of other people last year—how the whole thing fell apart, and there is a plan to build a whole new system for dealing with this kind of thing. Or certainly there was a plan, and I was working on it with some great officials before I left, so I hope that that is all still being done.

Laura Trott

Thank you.

Chair

Thank you very much indeed, Laura. We will go to Katherine Fletcher, who is very obviously a Lancashire MP.

Katherine Fletcher

Thank you, Chair. We are scientists, and this is a hearing of the Science and Technology Committee along with colleagues from Health. Science is driven by actualities and not speculation, and I want to return to the data and the raw numbers you had to inform your decision making in the period between, say, January and April/May last year. What is your assessment of the data? We have heard concerns from others.

Dominic Cummings

Concerns—it is like saying, “We’ve got concerns about the situation” in May 1940. The whole thing was just completely—

Katherine Fletcher

Let’s stay on the data.

Dominic Cummings

In all sorts of ways it did not exist. The data system on Monday 16 March was the following. It was me wheeling in that whiteboard you have seen from the photo and Simon Stevens reading out, from scraps of paper, numbers from the ICUs. I would write them down on the left-hand side, and I would get my iPhone out and go x2, x2, x2. Then I would write another column and say, “So, if it’s doubling every five days, these are the numbers we’re going to be looking at.” Everyone would look at the whiteboard and go, “Jesus—can that possibly be correct?” There was no functioning data system, and that was connected with there being no proper testing data. Because we did not have testing, all we could really do was look at people arriving in hospital. So the whole thing, therefore, is weeks and weeks out of date. Once you are looking at ICU numbers as your leading indicator, you know that you are in a world of trouble. Now, fortunately, one of the things that actually worked incredibly well was that there was a brilliant official at the NHS called Nin, and she worked with a great British tech start-up and they essentially built, in about four or six weeks, a whole new NHS dashboard system. So the situation—

Katherine Fletcher

When was that between?

Dominic Cummings

They started working on it, I think, in the first week of March. In the week around 16 March or 24 March, it was still me scribbling things on a whiteboard and hitting x2 x2 on my iPhone. But by the time I came back from being ill, which was Tuesday 13 April, they basically then had an absolutely brilliant data system. So then you had all the NHS bed data, ventilator data and ICU data. They were then starting to build models and predictions of where the NHS was going. That made a huge difference. It actually made a huge difference to the whole data agenda across Government, because senior people actually got to see, on a massive epic crisis, the difference between a completely non-existent data system and a world-class, really brilliant data system. It completely transformed decision making over about a four-month period.

Katherine Fletcher

Thanks. There are probably two things I want to pursue. Firstly, let’s nail this down: there was a recognition that the data was poor, and work was commissioned in February, to start in March, to create an entirely new pandemic data dashboard to support what we were going to need to do to make decisions within the pandemic.

Dominic Cummings

Correct. So, actually what happened—

Katherine Fletcher

Okay. Given that that came to emerge six to eight weeks after the WHO declared the emergency, that is a reasonably quick response, wouldn’t you say?

Dominic Cummings

Yes, although we got lucky in the sense that there was a brilliant company that was actually already working with Simon Stevens and the NHS on AI. They were trying to build a kind of AI lab for the NHS as a long-term project. Because they were working there already with the NHS data people and the NHSX team, what happened is that, in the first week of March, they essentially spoke to this brilliant official Nin and Simon Stevens, and basically said, “Right, drop all of the long-term AI lab stuff. Let’s just throw all of our resources into building this dashboard.” Roughly speaking, they were working on it from the 3rd or the 5th, or something like that.

Katherine Fletcher

Brilliant. This brings me to my second line of questioning. I was fortunate enough to start talking to colleagues about covid back at the end of January, and attended the briefing from Professor Chris Whitty in early February time that my colleague Mark Logan mentioned earlier. What was apparent were the set ratios—the maths—with which this disease travelled, so rough transmissibility rates and a range estimate of likely mortality rate across the whole population. As a fellow studier of data, you will know that those things are relatively fixed, and while they become narrower in their range of certainties, you can make predictions from those things, which I know were available in February. To what extent were you taking account of this expertise with your whiteboard in mid-March when these ratios and disease proliferation and death rates were known six weeks before?

Dominic Cummings

So the problem was— I think what you’re saying is half right. You’re right that a lot of the key numbers we knew roughly, or at least we knew within some kind of confidence intervals, and you could make predictions about those. Where this went wrong, however, was that we now know from various data that covid had spread faster and further in January and February than we had realised at the time. So you’re right that we knew a lot of these parameters, and you could draw graphs from them, but part of the whole point was at the meeting on 14th in the Prime Minister’s office—the “Independence Day” Jeff Goldblum meeting—

Katherine Fletcher

Let’s stick to data, shall we.

Dominic Cummings

He was saying, “These curves are all wrong.” Yes, the pattern, as you say, is clear but they are all stretched out towards a peak in June. It is not going to peak—that’s not relevant. The graph is actually going up like that.

Katherine Fletcher

So new data emerged—

Dominic Cummings

It was very confused at that—

Katherine Fletcher

Final question from me: I am really interested in understanding how the actual data tied in with the prediction data within the models. To what extent you, leading the charge here, were able to put your calculations of the actual data into the scientific modellers to allow us to shift from predictions, which inevitably are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, into modelling the real world and making life or death decisions off the back of it. When did that happen?

Dominic Cummings

That didn’t really happen properly, I would say, until April. At the time when we were making these huge judgements around 13, 14 and 15 March, there were models but, as the graph that I showed you earlier on showed, when we got the updated graph—

Katherine Fletcher

It’s all right; I won’t be able to see it. I don’t think you shared it in advance.

Dominic Cummings

In a nutshell, all these graphs that I have shown you, and the SAGE graphs at the time, have these terrifying curves like that, but they are peaking in June. What Ben Warner, Patrick Vallance and others said around about the 13th or 14th was, “Actually, we think from patchy data that is coming in, including the IOCU data, that we are further along this curve. We are not back here at week 2 with 10 weeks to go.”

Katherine Fletcher

Understood.

Dominic Cummings

So we are up at there on the curve, do you see what I mean? But officially—

Katherine Fletcher

So for our scientists, new data emerged and we reframed our hypothesis.

Dominic Cummings

Yes, exactly. We realised in the week of the 16th.

Katherine Fletcher

I am dead conscious that there are lots of other colleagues that want to come in.

Chair

Thank you very much, Katherine. Finally, in this section, Aaron Bell.

Aaron Bell

Thank you for coming, Mr Cummings. I’d like to return to Mr Hunt’s earlier line of questioning about the planning. You gave us the quote from Helen MacNamara on 13 March, “There is no plan.” However, it is reported in late February 2020 that you said, “I’ve seen the plan, and I’m afraid it is not a plan at all; it’s just a plan to have a plan at some stage.” There was a fortnight or so between those, and obviously hundreds of seeding events coming into the country. That quote, by the way, was from your wife in The Spectator. What were you doing in those two weeks, given that you already knew that there was not a meaningful plan in those first two weeks of March?

Dominic Cummings

I was having a meeting after meeting with people, trying to figure out where we were on the planning system. That quote referred to the document I mentioned earlier—the contain, mitigate, delay thing. That was the document, which was officially touted as a plan, but as you can see, is not actually a plan at all. What I was doing from around about the 25th, when people were hitting the panic button with me, was having meeting after meeting with people around Whitehall on issue after issue—shielding, this, that and the other, testing etc.—to try to figure out, “Okay. Who has got a plan around here? Who is actually doing what around here?” There were all sorts of people doing all sorts of great things, but it was also clear that, overall, there was not a coherent plan. In particular, that reference on the night of the 13th from Helen MacNamara and Mark Sweeney was particularly about the NHS: it was about this mismatch of, where is the NHS plan to deal with the numbers? There isn’t one, because the NHS capacity is going to be maxed by a factor of times 10. On the night of the 13th, one of the things that Mark Sweeney was talking about was that there is not even a plan to bury all the bodies.

Aaron Bell

There was a period where we were saying we were four weeks behind Italy, and then very suddenly it became two weeks behind Italy, when we realised where we were.

Dominic Cummings

Exactly.

Aaron Bell

That was because of the multitude of seeding events that took place, we now know. We got data later about that. Was there any thought given to those seeding events during that early March period? Obviously, quarantine would potentially have delayed it and given us a little bit more time. Was there any thought given to that at all?

Dominic Cummings

Essentially, no. It is connected with what I said earlier. The official view was that it was inevitably going to spread. In retrospect, obviously, we should have had individual isolation in February. We should have had household isolation in February. Obviously, in retrospect, we should have had the Taiwan system: we should have closed the borders; we should have ramped up testing; we should have had masks as compulsory; we should have had compulsory quarantine properly enforced. All those things should have been out in January.

Aaron Bell

That was flawed scientific advice. Our Committee heard from Patrick Vallance on 25 March last year that, basically, Government were entirely following scientific advice through this period, more or less. We were ranked second for pandemic preparedness on the international comparisons, which are obviously based on utterly flawed criteria—this is all group-think again. In your view, were all Ministers, from the Prime Minister downwards, badly advised in that period before the first lockdown by the people who should have been looking out for them—the civil servants and scientific advisers?

Dominic Cummings

I think all senior people involved with that process—me, the Cabinet Secretary, the CSA, the CMO—would say we got a lot of things wrong in that period. I have been critical of the Prime Minister, but if you dropped Bill Gates or someone like that—the most competent people in the world you could possibly find—into that job on 1 March, 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 is also the case that there is no doubt that he was extremely badly let down by the whole system. It was a system failure, and I include myself in that as well. I also failed.

Aaron Bell

Understood. I wanted to close the session by asking about why you are here. Your previous attitude towards Select Committees of this House has been, quite literally, contempt. You have decided not to give evidence to Select Committees. Are you here today to help us learn lessons, or are you here to help settle scores for yourself?

Dominic Cummings

Well, I was invited to come and try to explain the truth about what happened. As I said, I think the families of all the thousands of people who died unnecessarily deserve the truth. That is why I am here. I could go into the reasons why I did not attend meetings about the referendum if you’d like, but I am not sure if anyone wants to get into that.

Aaron Bell

No, I don’t want to do that now. I was just trying to get to the bottom of this. You have made some fairly major swipes at some fairly major political figures in the last few hours. That leads me to ask: what was your actual motivation in working for the Prime Minister? Was it to get your ideas into Government? The fact that the covid derailed that, is that a source of regret to you?

Dominic Cummings

I went in because in summer 2019 it seemed to me that the choice the country faced was either to sort out what was essentially a constitutional crisis, respect the referendum and have the country move on with a new agenda, or have Jeremy Corbyn and a second referendum, which I thought would be absolutely catastrophic for the country. That is why I got involved with it in the summer: I thought that I could help solve that problem. I do think there is one way in which this could have been even worse than it was. If you imagine that hung Parliament of 2019 colliding with this disaster in January 2020, God only knows what would have happened. This is not a comment at all on Brexit—reasonable people can agree or disagree about Brexit, and it is perfectly reasonable to have a view that remain should have won and whatnot. I do not want to get into that whole thing. If that broken Parliament had limped on into 2020 and confronted this crisis, frankly I think the whole system would have melted down and fallen apart.

Aaron Bell

Did covid prevent what you wanted to achieve from happening? Is that a fair assessment? You obviously had a lot of designs on reforming Whitehall and No. 10 itself.

Dominic Cummings

It is hard to say. In some ways, the covid stuff accelerated a lot of the things that I wanted to do. One of the big arguments I made was that the civil service has to reform and does not have the right skills in place—that is now obvious. I said that science and technology should be the centre of the agenda for the British state in the future, and I think that things like the vaccine taskforce show, both in a defensive and positive building sense, what a science and technology agenda could do. It is a very big question, your hypothetical about how the world could have worked out differently. I am not sure to what extent the Committee wants me to get into broader comments about the political scene. I would be happy to come back in the future to talk to you about broader questions.

Aaron Bell

Thank you, Mr Cummings.

Chair

Thank you very much indeed, Aaron. It has been a long first section, but we have covered a lot of ground. I think we have learned a lot, and I am sure that in the further sections we can be a bit brisker. One of the things we have learned—as you just said, Mr Cummings—is that everyone, wherever they were in the world, was looking through a glass darkly at that phase of the pandemic. Whether we call it “flattening the curve” or “herd immunity”—as you said, that is a semantic question—we were embarked on a policy that does not require fancy modelling. Just looking at the figures, if you have an adult population of 60 million people and two thirds of it get covid, and 1% of the people who get it die, then 400,000 are going to die. That logic was there from the beginning—it did not require the Imperial model to be published—yet for six weeks from the beginning of the pandemic until these events of 13 and 14 March, SAGE was recommending the strategy of, let’s call it “flattening the curve”. That was not changed until a kind of epiphany on that weekend. Now, either that was because there was a group-think in SAGE and among the advisers that you were a part of, which is ironic because you have been a great critic of group-think, or you knew what was going on but felt too junior—notwithstanding the fact that, if not the chief adviser, you were a very senior person—to call it out. Which of those two is it, or is it a combination of both?

Dominic Cummings

It is a mix, as I have said. There is no doubt that in SAGE, the Department of Health, and the Cabinet Office, there was a general group-think problem, which was that there was no alternative to either a single peak and herd immunity by September, or to trying to act now, which probably will not work, but even if it does, will lead to a second peak in the winter, which will be even more catastrophic. You are completely correct: the basic numbers of it were obvious, and it was obviously going to be terrible. But the argument was, terrible as that looks, it is better than the alternative, because if you have the second wave in the middle of an NHS crisis in the winter, then it could be twice as bad as that, or three times as bad as that. The fundamental group-think problem was being trapped in the idea that there was only a choice between herd immunity by September or herd immunity by January, whereas in fact the right way of looking at it was, we can avoid both. That is what that stupid graph I drew on the 13th, on the whiteboard in the Prime Minister’s office, was trying to do. You push up the line on NHS capacity by build, build, build and all sorts and you manage a kind of wiggly line along below. But until we started to discuss that, around about the 12th or 13th, nobody in Government thought that anything like that was possible. Bear in mind, even on the 18th and 19th, after the SAGE meeting on the 18th—bear in mind that in the SAGE meeting on the 18th, it was not unanimous in SAGE then that we should lock down. When Demis Hassabis came in at my request—I asked Patrick Vallance to bring him in—Hassabis laid out his numbers. He is one of the top data science AI people on the planet, if not the top one. People in SAGE argued with him and said, “You are being too simplistic about all of this.” Then Tim Gowers, the Fields medalist at Cambridge, said, “No, that’s not correct. Demis is right about this.” To be fair to the PM, the scientists were still arguing about that at SAGE on the 18th. After that meeting, very senior officials at the Department of Health said, “We don’t understand what people are now talking about with this possible plan B because, after we come out of lockdown in a month’s time, this will come straight back up again and we are back to square one. Why the hell would we do that?”