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‘Like a scene from Independence Day’: Dominic Cummings timeline of the ‘crucial week’ in the government’s coronavirus response
Dominic Cummings has given a blow-by-blow account of the Downing Street operation in the “crucial week” of Covid-19 decision making pre-lockdown
Photo: Alamy
27 May 2021
This timeline sets out the key moments, according to the PM s former senior adviser, where Boris Johnson s team reversed on herd immunity and the then-cabinet secretary advocated for chicken-pox style parties.
Monday 9 March: Herd immunity hits the headlines
Discussions ramp up over the virus’ escalation and whether the current scientific thinking and plans are the right ones. Cummings said the “official plan” from the Department for Health and Social Care was that the disease would spread, there won’t be vaccines available in 2020, so the approach was to delay the peak arriving.
Dominic Cummings has unveiled whiteboard charts that he says were brought in to convince Boris Johnson to lock Britain down last year - a move which he compared to a scene from the film Independence Day.
The former aide to the Prime Minister uploaded an image on Twitter which he says was taken in Boris Johnson s study on March 14, 2020, before Britain s first lockdown.
It shows a series of graphs drawn on a whiteboard, outlining potential outcomes that could happen depending on how the Government approached the crisis.
One graph, labelled No mitigation , shows a blue bell curve, seemingly representing Covid cases, skyrocketing well above a red line representing NHS capacity , predicting there would be 100,000+ people dying in corridors if no action was taken.
The UK Health Secretary will face MPs on Thursday over allegations made by former senior No 10 aide Dominic Cummings that he lied to colleagues and performed “disastrously” during the Covid pandemic. Matt Hancock said on Wednesday night he had not seen Mr Cummings’ seven-hour evidence to MPs as he was “saving lives” by dealing with the vaccination rollout. He will answer a Commons urgent question and is due to lead a Government press conference, the day after a scathing attack by Mr Cummings who argued the Cabinet minister should have been sacked on 15 to 20 occasions. The former de facto Downing Street chief of staff, who apologised for his own shortcomings, also claimed the Prime Minister was “unfit” for the job and that “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die” because of the Government’s failings.
1. No.10 was a Covid chaos zone
The whole point of Dominic Cummings’ evidence was to provide the first draft of the history of the government’s handling of the pandemic. While his personal opinions on what went wrong can be dismissed, his eye-witness testimony cannot be easily shrugged off. And on that score, he didn’t disappoint, giving vivid accounts of the chaos in Downing Street as Covid hit landfall in March 2020.
His description of the events of over two key days allowed the public a glimpse of just how Boris Johnson runs, or doesn’t run, his government. On the “insane day” of March 12, while the PM clearly had no choice but to deal with Trump’s plea to join a bombing raid on Iraq, Cummings implied that his boss allowed partner Carrie Symonds’ to waste valuable press office time with complaints about a story about their dog Dilyn.