Merciless Cummings leaves stage littered with bodies

Like the climactic scene in a revenge tragedy, Dominic Cummings's seven-hour appearance before a Westminster committee on Wednesday was always going to leave the stage drenched in blood and strewn with casualties. But as his pitiless eye moved past Boris Johnson to health secretary Matt Hancock, the cabinet office and senior civil servants, Cummings began to build up a body count to rival Titus Andronicus.

By starting with an apology for his own failures as well as those of his former colleagues, Cummings sought to inoculate himself from the charge that he was engaged in a political vendetta. But nobody at Westminster failed to notice that while he denounced the prime minister and the health secretary, he praised Rishi Sunak, the bookies' favourite to succeed Johnson, and glossed over the role of his longstanding political patron Michael Gove, who was also at the centre of events.

Regardless of his political calculation, Cummings’s evidence told a remarkable, insider’s story of government dysfunction and incompetence that caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths from coronavirus. Johnson ignored or played down the impact of the virus until the middle of March last year, when he was persuaded to abandon a light-touch strategy that could have led to more than a quarter of a million deaths.

Cummings said he persuaded Johnson on March 13th that he had to change course and follow the lead of Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore by closing pubs and restaurants and banning mass events. But as this newspaper reported that day, Britain was already an outlier within Europe in the slowness of its response.

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Cummings portrayed himself as a disruptive voice who was willing to challenge the Downing Street consensus but the alternative to Britain’s approach was already being practised by all its neighbours.

Damning charge

Ireland locked down on March 12th and other EU member states also introduced restrictions earlier than Britain, based on assumptions that Johnson's government and scientific advisers rejected until mid-March. But in his evidence on Wednesday, Cummings ignored the European experience in the early stages of the pandemic, only invoking the EU to criticise its vaccine strategy.

Cummings accused Hancock of lying repeatedly to other ministers and to the public, adding that he should have been fired for 10 or 15 reasons. But his most damning charge was against the prime minister, whom he accused of being unfit for office.

"There's a very profound question in the nature of our political system, any system that leaves people with the choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn is obviously a system that's gone extremely badly wrong," he said.

By the time he left Downing Street last November, Cummings was trying to surround Johnson with people who would prevent the prime minister from following his instincts.

“I was trying to create a structure around him to try and stop what I thought were extremely bad decisions and push other things through against his wishes. He had the view that he was prime minister and I should just be doing what he wanted me to,” he said

Cummings also said it was “completely crazy” that he himself should have held a senior role in “any sensible, rational government”. But as his testimony made clear, sensible and rational are the last words to use in connection with the government he played such a central role in creating, shaping and directing throughout most of the events he was describing.