BBC News 26 May 2021
Boris Johnson's former chief adviser has made a series of explosive claims about mistakes made by the government in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Here are the key points so far from Dominic Cummings's evidence to a joint session of the Commons Heath, and Science and Technology committees.
Apology
Mr Cummings began with an apology: "The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most the government failed.
Government's initial reaction
Mr Cummings said the government was not on a "war footing" when the virus first emerged in January and February last year and "lots of key people were literally skiing".
'Scare story'
"In February (2020) the prime minister regarded this as just a scare story, he described it as the new swine flu."
When asked if he had told the prime minister it was not, Mr Cummings said: "Certainly, but the view of various officials inside Number 10 was if we have the prime minister chairing Cobra meetings and he just tells everyone 'It's swine flu, don't worry about it, I'm going to get (Chief Medical Officer) Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it's nothing to be frightened of', that would not help actually serious panic."
Herd immunity
Mr Cummings said he was "completely baffled" as to why Downing Street has tried to deny that herd immunity was the official plan early last year.
"It's not that people were thinking this is a good thing and we actively want it, it's that it's a complete inevitability and the only real question it's one of timing, it's either one of herd immunity by September or it's herd immunity by January after a second peak. That was the assumption up until Friday, 13 March."
Health Secretary Matt Hancock was "completely wrong" on 15 March to say herd immunity was not part of the plan, he said.
Lockdown delay
Mr Cummings said it was" obvious" in retrospect that the UK should have locked down in the first week of March at the latest - and it was a "huge failure" on his part not to alert the prime minister.
"I bitterly regret that I didn't hit the emergency panic button earlier then I did. In retrospect there's no doubt I was wrong not to."
He also said that the situation in Downing Street in mid-March was like "a scene from Independence Day with Jeff Goldblum saying the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken and you need a new plan".
Mr Cummings said on 14 March, Boris Johnson was told that models showing the peak was "weeks and weeks and weeks away" in June were "completely wrong".
He said the PM was warned: "The NHS is going to be smashed in weeks. Really we've got days to act."
'Going completely crackers'
Mr Cummings painted a vivid picture of the atmosphere in Downing Street on one "crazy" day when the government was considering a national lockdown.
On the morning of 12 March, said Mr Cummings, the "national security people came in" and said "Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight" and this "totally derailed" meetings about coronavirus.
At the same time, "the prime minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers" over stories in the press about her dog.
Part of the building was talking about bombing Iraq, part was talking about household restrictions, and "the prime minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about something trivial," Mr Cummings told the committee.
'Chicken pox parties'
"On this crazy day of the 12th, we are sitting in the prime minister's office, we're talking about the herd immunity plan.
"The cabinet secretary (Mark Sedwill) said 'Prime minister, you should go on TV tomorrow and explain the herd immunity plan and that it is like the old chicken pox parties. We need people to get this disease because that's how we get herd immunity by September.'
"And I said, 'Mark you have got to stop using this chicken pox analogy. It's not right.' And he said 'why?' And Ben Warner said: 'Because chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people'."
Hancock 'should have been fired'
Mr Cummings told the committee Health Secretary Matt Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 things".
"I think there is no doubt at all that many senior people performed far, far - disastrously below the standards which the country has the right to expect. I think that the secretary of state for Health is certainly one of those people. I said repeatedly to the prime minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people."
Whiteboards
Before giving evidence to the MPs, Mr Cummings tweeted pictures which he said showed the thinking at government meetings on Covid during the early part of the crisis.
"There was no functioning data system," he said. "And that was connected with, there was no proper testing data.
"Because we didn't have testing, all we could really do was look at people arriving in hospital."
The whiteboards related to the government's "plan B" for dealing with the pandemic, he said.
