“No. 10 was a plague pit”: how Covid took hold of Westminster
Westminster is an infectious place, writes Jessica Elgot. The windowless offices are cramped, MPs sit elbow-to-elbow in a Commons chamber that can only squeeze just over 400 MPs into its seats, twothirds of the number in Parliament. High security means much business is conducted in person. This was the situation when Covid-19 arrived in the UK. A number of staffers and politicians who were there at the time, many of whom chose to remain anonymous, have revealed that the virus spread far more widely than has been reported, and that there was a sense of panic as Covid threatened to paralyse government.
Famously, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings contracted the virus. So did England’s Chief Medical Officer, Prof Chris Whitty and the then Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill. Ministers and their staff had it, along with several MPs and parliamentary lobby journalists. But the situation was at its worst in Downing Street, where almost all staff had it. “No. 10 was a plague pit,” one adviser recalls. “No one outside the postcode quite knows how bad it got.”
On Wednesday 25 March, two days after lockdown began, Johnson was advised by Whitty to take a test, which came back positive. It was not taken too seriously by staff, or the PM himself. He would thump himself on the chest and say “Strong as a bull!”, and aides would laugh. But it was quietly becoming evident it was taking him a long time to shake off the virus. He continued to work, with papers tossed to him through an open door, “coughing and spluttering his way through conference calls”. A video in which the PM told the public he still had “minor” symptoms took many takes to record because he was coughing so much. Aides had to keep politely finding different ways to say: “I’m not sure we’ve quite nailed that there, boss.” On Sunday 5 April, he was admitted to St Thomas’ hospital.
No. 10 at that point was like a “ghost ship”, as one aide put it. Cummings was on his ill-fated trip to Durham. “That week was hell,” one official said. “There were all these meetings where it was never completely clear who was... in charge. Who was actually going to be there if you had a meeting?” Lee Cain, the then director of communications, then returned from self-isolation. “Lee did end up running the country for about two weeks, I’d say,” an adviser confided. “There was no one else [of] any sort of senior level who had any sort of authority on behalf of the PM.”