A long-serving minister on Wednesday defended Rishi Sunak’s role in the Cabinet during the Covid crisis after explosive evidence from Dominic Cummings painted a dismal picture of top-level dysfunction.
Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden dismissed the former No10 chief of staff as “one particular witness” at the Covid inquiry, insisting it would hear from other top officials and ministers including the current PM before writing up its conclusions in the round.
Mr Dowden was in charge of the culture, media and sports department for much of 2020-2021, when Mr Sunak was Chancellor under Boris Johnson.
“Of course I don’t recognise many bits of the account that were given,” he said on Sky News when pressed about one claim heard at the inquiry that Mr Johnson favoured letting old people die of Covid rather than lock down the economy.
Asked if Mr Cummings was lying, Mr Dowden told Times Radio: "There will be many other witnesses to come. This is how the inquiry works.
"It's just not going to be helpful to the conduct of this inquiry for me to be giving evidence on one particular witness of many dozens that will give evidence during this period."
Mr Dowden defended Mr Sunak’s own contributions as Chancellor, insisting the current PM had “an awful lot to be proud of in terms of the way that he conducted himself” during the pandemic, stressing that he saved “millions of jobs” through the big-spending furlough scheme.
But another costly initiative of Mr Sunak - the Eat Out to Help Out scheme to support restaurants - has been criticised at the inquiry for seeding a new wave of Covid after August 2020.
The scheme “made absolutely no sense whatsoever”, according to Lee Cain, Mr Johnson’s former director of communications, who gave evidence to the inquiry on Tuesday before Mr Cummings.
“At this point of developing policy, we are indicating to people that Covid is over – go back out, get back to work, crowd yourself on to trains, go into restaurants and enjoy pizzas with friends and family – really build up that social mixing,” Mr Cain said.
“Now that is fine if you are intent on never having to do suppression measures again – but from all the evidence we are receiving, from all the advice we are receiving, it was incredibly clear that we were going to have to do suppression measures again.
“We knew that all the way through, that was the strategy from the start.”
