 Dominic Cummings says thousands of people die needlessly as a result of government mistakes in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The PM's former top aide said Boris Johnson was unfit for the job, claiming he had ignored scientific advice and broadly delayed lockdowns. He also claimed Matt Hancock should have been fired for lying something denied by the health secretary. As I said in the earlier session, the Prime Minister took the view in January-February that economic harm caused by action against Covid was going to be more damaging to the country than Covid and we could not persuade him that if you basically took the view of let it rip and not worry about Covid you would get not just all the health disasters but you would also then get a huge economic disaster because if people are faced with not having any health system which is what we were faced with in March if we had gone down to Plan A or what we would have been faced with if we hadn't finally put the brakes on it in October then people are going to lock themselves down out of terror and we can never persuade him of this argument. He also essentially thought that he had been gained on the numbers in the first lockdown and he thought the NHS would somehow have got through. Click the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.