How FIVE accusations unravelled

FORESIGHT

CLAIM: That he was one of the first to react to the looming crisis. Mr Cummings was scathing about ministers’ slow-footed response, saying the Government ‘was not in any way on a war footing’ for Covid in mid-February.

REALITY: Mr Cummings admitted he did not speak to anyone about Covid until January 25, and did not start focusing on the crisis until the middle of February – two weeks after the WHO declared a ‘public health emergency’. On January 22, the Department of Health said people arriving from Wuhan would be met by health officials. On February 11, Matt Hancock announced plans to build emergency isolation facilities.

TESTING

CLAIM: Matt Hancock got in the way of efforts to ramp up testing. Mr Cummings said the Health Secretary’s target to increase testing from under 10,000 a day to 100,000 a day in a month ‘hugely disrupted’ efforts to increase testing. ‘It was criminal, disgraceful behaviour that caused serious harm,’ he said.

REALITY: Many in government viewed Mr Hancock’s target last April as a vanity project, and there was controversy about whether numbers were artificially inflated to hit it. But the drive to meet it led to a string of innovations, including bringing in the Army to help with logistics and developing home testing kits.

HERD IMMUNITY

CLAIM: Ministers pursued a policy of herd immunity before belatedly realising it would lead to disaster. Mr Cummings said ministers and officials actively wanted people to catch Covid, adding that then Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill even told the PM to encourage ‘chicken pox parties’ to help spread it.

REALITY: Government scientists thought that, with no vaccine in sight and doubts about how well a lockdown would work, a degree of herd immunity was inevitable. When modelling predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths they switched to a lockdown strategy. But they deny herd immunity was ever a policy goal.

BARNARD CASTLE

CLAIM: Mr Cummings was sorry about his lockdown-busting trip to Durham last year. He said he had made the trip because of security fears, after his wife had called him at the end of February to say there was a gang outside their London home threatening to ‘break in and kill everybody’.

REALITY: At his Rose Garden Press conference, Mr Cummings was unrepentant and made no mention of security concerns. It is unclear why he only decided to leave London at the end of March when he and his wife had Covid – or why he returned immediately afterwards.

MASS EVENTS

CLAIM: Mr Cummings said mass events such as the Cheltenham Festival were allowed to continue almost right up to lockdown because it had not occurred to anyone to shut the pubs. He said ministers feared that locking the spectators out would force them into pubs where the virus would spread.

REALITY: Government scientists had been discussing the closure of pubs for weeks, and briefed journalists on the idea on March 2. Ministers were reluctant to shut pubs because they feared a public backlash.