Boris Johnson's government “had no plan” to deal with the Covid pandemic just a few weeks before the first national lockdown was ordered, his former director of communications said on Tuesday.
Lee Cain, a key aide to the prime minister during the first stage of the pandemic, said Mr Johnson was still likening Covid to swine flu in early March 2020.
Mr Cain was giving evidence at the Covid-19 Inquiry before Dominic Cummings, the controversial former chief adviser to Mr Johnson who was accused of breaking lockdown rules, was set to take centre stage.
An “action plan” was published by the government for handling the pandemic but Mr Cain admitted he could see that it was little more than a PR exercise.
“There wasn’t a plan”, he said in his evidence to the inquiry. “The detail of how you were going to do these things was somewhat absent.”
Commenting on the document, he added that some within government were saying: “If that’s the plan then we don’t have a plan.”
He said the government was “complacent” about the looming pandemic in January 2020, when the focus within Downing Street was on Brexit, 5G phone networks, a Cabinet reshuffle, and HS2 rail. It was wrongly believed that Britain was well-prepared for a pandemic and it could be handled primarily by the Department of Health. Mr Cain told the inquiry: “Clearly we got the assessment wrong.”
Counsel to the inquiry, Andrew O’Connor KC, asked if he agreed that the general theme was “of a lack of leadership, chaos, if you like”. The former top aide replied: “Yes.”
Mr Johnson chaired his first emergency Cobra meeting on the pandemic in early March, at Mr Cain’s suggestion, and after the meeting Mr Cummings — the PM’s chief of staff — sent a text saying: “He doesn’t think it’s a big deal and he doesn’t think anything can be done and his focus is elsewhere. He thinks it will be like swine flu and he thinks his main danger is talking the economy into a slump.”
Mr Cain resigned in November 2020 amid reported infighting at Downing Street, a day before his ally Mr Cummings also walked out.
Mr Cummings was set to face questions about the way the government prepared for the looming pandemic and dealt with the first wave of Covid.
He was Mr Johnson’s closest adviser at the start of the pandemic, but was forced out after a spectacular falling out at the heart of government.
His resignation came a few months after it had emerged that Mr Cummings made a journey by car from London to the North-East at the end of March 2020, at a time when the government had ordered everybody to stay at home.
In April 2020, before returning to London, Mr Cummings made a now-notorious trip to Barnard Castle in County Durham — which he later claimed was to check that his eyesight had not been affected by Covid.
Mr Cummings was brought into Downing Street by Mr Johnson after he spearheaded the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum and worked on the Conservatives’ 2019 election campaign. But following his axing from government, Mr Cummings turned into a fierce public critic of Mr Johnson and his wife Carrie on social media.
Speaking on Times Radio on Tuesday morning, former health minister Lord Bethell said Mr Johnson’s Downing Street operation had tried to “blow up” the British way of running the civil service in the midst of the Covid pandemic. He said there was a “power grab from the centre” and an attempt for “every decision” to be made in Downing Street by a small group of people hand-picked by the prime minister and Mr Cummings.
“What I did see was an attitude that had no respect... in fact was seeking to blow up the British way of doing the civil service, of blowing up the procedural, bureaucratic, empirical approach and to replace it with a power grab from the centre.
“This was an explicit plan that Dom Cummings and others have talked about in a specific way and it took the form of trying to turn their back on the processes around Cobra, submissions, red boxes, and all of that and instead trying to make every decision within Downing Street by a very small group of people who were hand-picked by Boris and by Dom.
“That just does not work when you are trying to run a civil service army of half a million people.”
