 Today anybody over 30 can get your vaccine so get out there and get your vaccine. Are you worried about Dominic Cummings giving evidence today Mr. Hancock? You've just watched Matt Hancock literally run away from a question about the theme of tonight's show. That is of course Dominic Cummings much awaited evidence session to the Health and Science Select Committee and presumably Matt Hancock had at least some inkling of what would be said because in that seven hour marathon back and forth with MPs Cummings was absolutely brutal about the health secretary. He didn't just reserve his criticisms for Matt Hancock though. Not many parts of government were spared. Actually there were some notable exceptions, people who I think he wants to work for in the future such as Richie Sunek but still lots of people did feel the ire of Dominic Cummings in particular his old boss. Now tonight we are going to take you through the evidence blow by blow throughout. I will be joined by Moya Lovie and McLean, politics editor at Gal Dem Magazine. Thank you so much for joining me today. Have you been glued to your television for the past seven hours as I have? I've been watching Dominic Cummings speak for what feels like forever so I'm glad to get my thoughts out here because I need to talk to someone about them and I feel like my mum doesn't actually want to hear me say anything about this. It was actually incredibly engaging television like for seven hours I was surprised at how you know it was it was captivating and he did come across actually much better than the last time we saw him which was almost a year to the day in the Rose Garden when he was explaining how he had to drive to a castle to test his eyesight. This one had more interesting content if not the same barrel of laughs as that one did and before we go on if you're not already subscribed to this channel do hit the big red button below. Some of the evidence given by Dominic Cummings was very personal non non non more so than his accounts of the health secretary's behavior during this pandemic and the sitting prime minister but the majority of his seven hour evidence was given over to describing the flaws of the Westminster system as a whole and its inability to respond properly to Covid-19. He also took some personal responsibility here and he began his evidence session with an apology. The truth is that senior ministers senior officials senior advisors 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 and I'd like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that. Now we are of course yet to hear an apology as Frank has that from anyone who is currently in government and you know to be fair to him it's I appreciate it that he has said sorry not that that necessarily writes the wrongs of much of his behavior over the past year. Now the evidence he gave was very much in in in free part so there was this discussion about that the overall failure of British government and British science in the first wave to grasp the seriousness of the pandemic. He then goes on to talk about some of the personal failings of Boris Johnson essentially and throughout there are these you know really really brutal critiques of Matt Hancock and we're going to go through the evidence in that order we want to tell you all of the key points not just focus on the big Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock headlines because it was all pretty interesting. So first of all we're going to talk about that period and his evidence about that period between January and March last year when Britain had a catastrophic response to COVID-19 and to be fair to the Prime Minister it wasn't all his fault there was really a collective failure in those first months of COVID-19 to respond properly to the pandemic. He explains why I think quite cogently to begin with he has a similar critique that we had on on Navar at the time to be honest which is he says that Britain failed to learn from countries such as Taiwan and China this was Dominic Cummings account of that failure. One of the critical things that was completely wrong in the whole official thinking in sage and in the Department of Health in February March was the British public will first of all the British public will not accept a lockdown secondly the British public will not accept what was thought of as a kind of East Asian style track and trace type system and the infringements of liberty around that those two assumptions were completely central to to the official plan and were both obviously completely wrong in the first half of March this was raised sometimes in the Prime Minister's office and me and others were literally pointing at this at the TV screen of of Lombardi and saying look at what's happening in Lombardi we are getting text messages on our own phones from our own family saying what's going on this assumption that the public won't you know basically aren't that frightened and don't want to have a lockdown is false and we should abandon it. So it's really quite incredible actually that those conversations were happening inside government because they were happening outside of government as well and we were talking about them on Navar I know that many of my friends were as well this was you know people said what are they doing what is this herd immunity plan we can see that Italy is locking down we can see that China has had a really intense lockdown and countries like Taiwan are already stopping incoming travel what are our government doing and he's saying that same conversation was happening in in Downing Street if a little bit too late now the interesting parts of his evidence when it comes to this systemic failure was his account of why this was down to groupthink he says that it's groupthink essentially to blame for that first part of Britain's catastrophic Covid response we can take a look at that part of his evidence here. The fundamental groupthink problem was being trapped in the idea that there was only a choice between herd immunity by September or herd immunity by January whereas in fact the right way of looking at it was we can avoid both and that's what that stupid graph that I drew drew on the 13th on the on the whiteboard the Prime Minister's offer the idea you push up the line of the NHS capacity by bill by bill bill bill in all sorts and you manage a kind of wiggly line along along below but until we started to discuss that around about the 12 13th nobody in government thought that anything like that was possible so the 12 to the 13th just talking about the 12 to the 13th of March very late on in the pandemic already really too late to to stop the disaster that was unfolding although still obviously we left it about 10 15 days to have a proper lockdown because of the pace that our government tends to work on you'll see there though his criticism of groupthink he was saying look decisions policy was made totally by insiders they were working on the premise that the kind of extreme actions that were being taken by by countries like China Taiwan indeed Italy that couldn't happen here they had all of these these weird assumptions which was to say no people would you know there's no possibility that people could be kept in their houses for the sake of a pandemic so we're going to have to accept that everyone's gonna gonna get it that that's the only option we have everyone gets it in two weeks or everyone gets it over a period of three months they were the options they were working with what this reminded me of because also I should say he was very clear one thing that would have stopped this group group think or at least disrupted this group think were if they were more transparent if they published their documents if they published they're working so people could question it what this reminded me of was that labor at the time of course led by Jeremy Corbyn back then they had called for the government to publish their scientific advice precisely for this reason so we could see why is Britain outlier are the models correct and it's worth reminding ourselves how some of Britain's top commentators responded at the time Jennifer Williams is the political editor at the Manchester Evening News and she commented I'm on this policy from the Labour Party presumably so more people with humanities degrees can form expert opinions on epidemiology more expert than say a group of senior professors of epidemiology and Aisha Hazarika who's at the Evening Standard and the Times radio says yep I really need some hipster analysis to reassure me so you can see at the time precisely what we were saying on this show again which was that you need to publish all of this because yes top scientists are saying this but there are also some top scientists outside of Sage who were saying completely different things and also it's actually quite easy to work out in the back of an envelope that we're heading towards catastrophe there was a demand for transparency and what we saw from commentators from journalists who like to hold the public to account instead of hold politicians to account was basically to dismiss that laugh now we can hear that people in government as well were saying this is this is ridiculous and also some transparency would have helped one more tweet from Aisha Hazarika I'm not going to spend too much time focusing on commentators today I just thought this was too good not to show Aisha Hazarika's response to today's hearing was your courteous and polite regular reminder that groupthink at the top of government politics or anywhere else is bad and delivers poor outcomes she should have given that courteous polite regular reminder to herself when she was dismissing anyone who was asking for transparency of the data and the evidence saying they were just guilty of wanting to do hipster analysis for likes and clicks I want to go back to Dominic Cummings because this is his account of how that failure happened why we were so slow to act what that slowness to act led to according to him as well was some quite extraordinary moments where people at the center of government realized well they'd fucked it I can say that because because this isn't me bringing bad language to the show unnecessarily he says yes he gives an account of the extraordinary moment when the realization dawned on those in power that Britain was heading for catastrophe we've got these graphs showing that even on the best case scenario with the official plan you're going to completely smash through the capacity of the NHS not by a little bit but by multiple times the evening of Friday the 13th I'm sitting with Ben Warner and the Prime Minister's private secretary in the Prime Minister's study and we basically say we're going to have to sit down with Prime Minister tomorrow and explain to him that we think that we're going to have to ditch the whole official plan and we're heading for the biggest disaster this currently seen since 1940 at this point the second most powerful official in the country Helen McNamara is the deputy cabinet secretary she walked into the office while we're looking at this whiteboard she says I've just been talking to the official Mark Sweeney who is in charge of coordinating with the Department for Health he said quote I've been told for years that there was a whole plan for this there is no plan we're in huge trouble I've come through here to tell him I have said I've come through here to the Prime Minister's office to tell you all quote I think we are absolutely fucked I think this country is heading for a disaster I think we're going to kill thousands of people as soon as I've been told this I've come through to see you it seems from the conversation that you're having that that's correct and I said I think you're right I think it is a disaster I'm going to speak to the Prime Minister about it tomorrow now I mean that's one of the most extraordinary accounts of a conversation I've ever heard you know briefed about what was happening in government we're completely fucked we're going to let tens of thousands of people unnecessarily die because of our terrible plan now at this point you might be thinking look Dominic Cummings has a coherent account of groupthink in government which led to catastrophe at the same time we know that Dominic Cummings is supposed to be one of the biggest critiques or critics sorry of groupthink so he's one of those people who says I am an outsider I can bring in different perspectives I'm a disruptor so why did it take him so long remember this is not till the 12th of March this conversation is happening why did it take him quite so long to raise the alarm he gave a particularly surprising answer to this question because he said he was scared to raise the alarm it's true that I hit the panic button and say we've got a ditch the official plan it's true that I helped to try to create what an official plan is was it's also true that in retrospect I think I my own personal view I mean the people who who think that we should have stuck with the original plan will say that it was a disaster that I interfered with it I think it's a disaster that I acted too late the fundamental reason was that I was really frightened of acting you know if you've got an official plan you've got all the sage advice you've got the cabinet office the cabinet secretary everyone's saying we've got to do this and if we don't do it and if we try and do something different and stop it now it's going to be many times worse in the winter I was asking myself in that kind of two-week period if I pulled if I hit the panic button and persuade the prime minister to shift and then it all goes completely wrong I'm gonna have killed god knows how many hundreds of thousands of people well I apologize for not acting earlier and if I had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive if he had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive he said his his fear and to be honest actually I do think there was you know I I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand he was saying look there were moments when I thought things are going wrong but all the scientists are saying this there you know all the people whose job it is to to to solve these problems are saying that no we're still going for the herd immunity strategy so it you know it took him a while to speak up to be honest I mean it was so obvious that what was going on was catastrophically wrong I'm not sure how good an excuse that is but it's it's an explanation at least and Moira I want to bring you in at this point as I said we're going to talk later about you know the big swipes he took at Boris Johnson and at Matt Hancock but for now I want to stick to this really interesting point in the pandemic response which was January February March last year when there was really this collective failure of the scientists of the civil servants and yes of government ministers and indeed of of Dominic Cummings himself and I want to know what you make of of his account of why he did not stop this disaster happening do you buy it that he was he was scared of intervening well I I do slightly buy it but I don't know if that's just because I'm gullible I think it's very telling that even Dominic Cummings foresight was still hindsight you know he says at another point in the feed that in February he was being told by very smart people that the UK would need to lock down but he didn't even think of challenging the plan by the 5th of March when there's a sage meeting only by the 12th of March did he get antsy enough to start kicking up a fuss and perhaps it all comes down to something else he said in his testimony I'm not that smart he says you know I'm not that smart it's ridiculous that I was in such a senior position and perhaps as we'll get on too late to be when being surrounded by people who are a lot less smart than you even mediocrity still makes you seem like Nostradamus so the reason he the reason he was a bit complacent is because he was like well look at least I'm at least I'm more on top of this than Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock you know I might not really understand what's going on but I don't you know I don't feel like an idiot because Boris Johnson's clearly less on top of it than I am I think I think I don't think it was probably that conscious but I think the fact that he now recognises after the fact I'm not that smart and the people that surrounded him you know he kept talking about the classic phrase lions led by donkeys well there were a lot of donkeys there and so you know you could be the shabbiest stallion in the yard and if you're surrounded by donkeys you're still going to feel like a stallion so I think basically it was yeah he was he's an idiot surrounded by idiots maybe maybe that's too simple but I feel like I'm on to something there no I like that that's a unique analysis that's the that's the that's the intervention of an outsider that is not groupthink I like that we're going to stick this is the last bit we're going to do from this sort of period of of that early failure going into herd immunity when it was a catastrophic plan as I've just shown you Dominic Cummings basically thinks this was a shared error and to be fair to well he was being fair to the people he was talking about in a way because he was saying there was no bad will here there was no malice it was a collective failure due to groupthink there was one element of that early period that he was very harsh about one issue when it came to herd immunity which he was very damning about and that was the government's decision to be dishonest about the fact that they had pursued herd immunity after the fact when we had the meeting on the 14th the whole point of that meeting was here is the real numbers on what the herd immunity by September strategy really means it's on the best case 260 000 people dead on the DH's own thing we can't do that we just can't do it we've got to gamble on an alternative plan but at that point remember the conventional wisdom was if you do gamble an alternative plan it's not going to be 260 000 people dead it might be two or three or four times worse than that in the autumn and that was the whole argument that kind of played out between the night of the 13th and when we've and really when we decide to lock down everybody knows the secretary of state for health the chief scientific adviser the chief medical officer were all briefing Laura Coonsburg Robert Pester and all the keen media people in the week of the ninth on single peak herd immunity by september plan it's totally bizarre and incomprehensible to me that the government would that number 10 would now be trying to deny that when it was officially described it's on all the official documents the csa etc and people from sage all said it on tv and the cabinet secretary described it is the chicken pox party's thing on the 12th that was the whole so i'm completely baffled as to why number 10 is now trying to deny the deny that that was the plan the whole point is that was the original plan but we realized what the consequences of it were going to be and we decided that it was intolerable that we had to try and try something else the chicken pox plan he referred to there a very striking part of the evidence he gave was to say that there was a moment um he said they're on the 12th of march where a senior civil servant came and said what you need to do boris johnson is stand in front of the the public at a downing street press conference and say guys um you want to get this um you want to get this virus so we can get some herd immunity let's have the the equivalent of chicken pox parties i assume that would be you know if you're young and healthy and not in a risk category it's your obligation um to go and snog loads of people in an enclosed space hope that you get covered 19 so that we can get herd immunity quickly enough with the with the fitter members of our population that was the that was the background there obviously the broader point he was making there was to say that it was ridiculous on the part of the government to pretend that herd immunity wasn't the plan they should have just been honest i also think this looks very bad on many members of the media who didn't hold the government to account on this because remember there was so many press conferences there was so many opportunities for the media to call bullshit essentially on the government and and pin them down and say look we are literally reading word for word what patrick valent said on this day and you are now telling us that herd immunity wasn't the strategy but they let them get away with it and i do think that that's just as embarrassing for our press as it is for for the government in terms of the government's willingness to lie the press is willingness to just go along with lies moira i don't know what you you think about that i have seen sort of some journalists on twitter saying no we we didn't we didn't even think we needed to write this at the time because it was already in the public domain anyway do you how much blame do you think in general the press have for the disasters that we saw during these first three to four months of the pandemic christ how long is a piece of string i think i think there's a disproper no there is a very large amount of blame to be placed on the role of the press and a complacent media in disseminating the messaging of the government word for word but you know repeatedly telling us that we would just i mean i say this as part of the media but repeatedly making the general public think you're just trolls you know who won't understand the deep science of epidemiology and yes it looks like it's going really badly but actually this is all part of a bigger plan or this is actually the best case scenario we did like a vert disaster even when we're in the middle of summer and there's been no no no the cases are going up and there's no second lockdown on the horizon or whatever through it was really interesting because even when i was doing the bits of reporting and like i was working at i think it was like a more virally daily news site at the time throughout 2020 doing daily bits of reporting on covid and i did you know a couple of pieces where i talked about people being forced back into work and people would challenge me saying like but the rest of the media says it's fine you know why you're having to be you why being such a doom monger that kind of idea and i think it just goes to show how the scale of compliance like compliance from the media as a whole they all went along with the message the governments were disseminating we had one point where Cummings was specifically named his sole source of 2020 his pet editor Laura Kuhnsberg at the BBC and he's like i only talked to Laura and there was a very funny sort of a realization on twitter i think when people were watching the BBC two feet of this live coverage and it cut out her name as they said it and they said we're cutting away from this coverage now on to another channel i was told it was it was broadcast on BBC parliament but on the BBC two coverage Kuhnsberg's name was suddenly cut out and they came back in and Cummings was just at the tail and being like and that's who i talked to which is just pure comedy wow i was watching it on sky i think that's amazing yeah very funny but throughout this it's like you know the media now the media is not going to do any sort of retrospect or hand ringing you had people like Alison Pearson who was massively anti-lockdown the whole way through she's called current Cummings is evidence boring and these the names that get the most traction because they say the most sort of like outrageous things and push that sort of window of what's acceptable and what we should be what we should be looking at with a side eye ever wider i just i mean i i know i am part of the media but i have lost complete faith in sort of the ability to have serious journalism that focuses on the actual you know nitty gritty of what's going on to the degree you know even the boring bits that make these bits accessible these journalists who talked about this stuff being in the public domain so they didn't think to report on it well why didn't you think to report on it you report Boris Johnson's curtains all the time why would you not think to report on this because they find it boring okay well it's your job to make it accessible and engaging for a public who needs to know about it and not treat them like they're idiots but they won't because you know this is report that came out the other day that the media is still 92% white and 75% now come from i think um privately educated or the highest social class the backgrounds of the highest social classes which is more than it was three years ago so the media is getting less sort of like representative of the general public at large so it does not surprise me in short that the media were compliant with the sort of messaging from the Tory government about the pandemic i don't think you need to keep apologizing for being part of the media i'll make a defense of of alternative media like galdem and navara media because you might you know you could i'm sure you can make many criticisms of this channel and the output we do and the output you do but what we don't normally say is don't bother being critical because you're not smart enough to understand what's going on anyway which i think is what many of the the mainstream media what we saw i should has a rica there say on twitter that was the message you were getting from them or i was getting from them at least um in those first three months and i do think that is something that is particular to certain journalists and i i would hope that we don't replicate it on on navara or all that you do on on galdem um let's go to a couple of comments nick gusset with a fiver says contrition from comings wow will we see the same from client journalists who are to my mind just as complicit yes you peston and coonsberg um i very much doubt it um joshary youngman says but michael boris was writing about shakespeare um absolutely he there was actually a question to comings about that because that was in a that was a briefing to the sunday times we talked about that on monday's show that the reason apparently why boris johnson missed all the cobra meetings because he was writing a shakespeare book that was brought up at one point comings didn't really rise to debate he didn't he didn't mention it but he did say that um everyone knows that boris johnson had a lot of personal problems at that point in time including financial issues so i suppose he did he did allude to it interestingly on those cobra meetings comings made a big defense of not attending them because he said why would you attend a cobra meeting when it was hosted by matt hancock who's an idiot obviously we've got a whole section on that later so i won't go into too much depth there but i thought that that was an interesting nugget um on his dismissal of cobra meetings um oh as i say yeah we've got a we've got a clip out we put a segment out on that that boris shakespeare thing that you can check out um larry with five euros was that matt hancock jogging clip from a new episode of the thick of it and larry also says greetings from lin um in germ which fox has translated from because i would have been very confused and by that comment so thank you fox i don't know if fox speaks german or is just good at google translate now we have over three thousand people watching only 500 likes do hit the like button if you haven't already um let's go on to the juicy bits which is the attacks uh this is where it gets personal um and this is on on boris johnson in the first phase of the pandemic now dominick comings evidence was full of criticisms of the west minster system in general but it also contained a lot of personal criticisms of his old boss now the first part of those denunciations concerned boris johnson's complacency in the run up to the first covet wave and that included this extraordinary claim in february the prime minister uh regarded this as um just a scare story he he regarded he described it as the new swine flu did you tell him it wasn't certainly but the view of various officials inside number 10 was um if we have the prime minister chair in cobra meetings and he just tells everyone it's swine flu don't worry about it i'm going to get chris witty to inject me live on tv with coronavirus so everyone realizes it's nothing to be frightened of that would be that would not help actually serious panic that's dominick comings main defense of why boris johnson missed all those cobra meetings remember he missed five cobra meetings at the start of the pandemic dominick comings is saying it's good he wasn't sharing those meetings because he was so dismissive of covet 19 he wanted the chief medical officer to inject himself or to inject him sorry with covet 19 live on tv presumably to show everyone it was incredibly harmless and so you could go to these chicken pox parties and all catch covet 19 off each other so we could get herd immunity super quickly um and move on with obviously hundreds of thousands of people dead but they'll be old um anyway that's you know me putting forward what i think boris johnson was thinking and what we're hearing from briefings of course not my own moira i want to bring you in on on that clip you know in particular because you know we've often heard in in this country you know we've dealt with it badly but at least we haven't had someone like trump in charge someone who's going on television and saying maybe what we could do is inject ourselves with bleach now this this comment from dominick comings really reminded me of that comment from donald trump you know injecting yourself with bleach is is a silly idea but injecting yourself with covet 19 isn't that far from it i mean the idea that he was he was saying these things or at least you know it's not it's not so much a quote is it but comings is saying that was the fork process that boris johnson was having at that period of time that is quite remarkable you know inject me witty um i think even if it was even if it was said as a joke it's it still shows the disdain and more importantly the disbelief of the seriousness of covet from the most powerful people in the country regarding the virus and it's not surprising like it's not surprising we saw boris proudly boasting about shaking hands with covet patients on the third of march remember that that was infamous and comings's evidence throughout repeatedly showed just how ignorant ministers were for example there was that fervent belief that they shouldn't stop large events like the chelton gold cup or the liverpool parade because it wouldn't affect transmission and also would push people into pubs and then he adds but no one even thought of closing the pubs it was just it was just a given that the pubs would stay open and i think this anecdotes about boris johnson injected by with covet in many ways it sums up why i think perhaps he's not the prime minister we need but he's the prime minister gotham deserves because he fully embodies that sort of british and boris exceptionalism where you know nothing could hurt me i'll always survive and that's something we saw throughout the evidence that comings gives just boris does not believe in the seriousness of covet and even after it affects him there is there's a period where he's sort of like down and he's he starts to worry about it and what they should do but by autumn which we'll get on to he's he's bounced back and he's once again the economy the economy the economy you know it's not killing as many and there is a there's a point where he um talks like rasty of the claims about the body's pile high comment and coming says you know he did say this thing um and it's he sort of bounces back and he just constantly believes whatever happens then he we're teflon britain's teflon he's teflon he can't be affected by this virus there's also i think there's a lot of motivated reasoning going on as well because he wants to be the prime minister of the good times right so he's like well if we pretend it's not that big a deal or if i pretend to myself it's not that big a deal then i can still be this lovable charming guy who says everything's okay and i mean in this first part of the pandemic what that meant is that he was incredibly complacent as we'll talk about a bit later what it meant in the second half was that he was actively obstructive i want to stick to this this first part for now just because there's a couple more significant comments where i mean this really you know Dominic Cummings suggesting that Boris Johnson just was not taking this seriously that he had his priorities all wrong and probably the most cutting of those criticisms involved his partner Carrie Simons we then got completely derailed because um in the morning of the 12th suddenly the national security people came in and said Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight and we need to start having meetings about that through the day with Cobra as well so everything to do with Cobra that day was on Covid was completely disrupted because you had these two parallel sets of meetings you had the national security people running in and out talking about are we going to bomb the Middle East and we had the Covid the Cobra meeting being delayed and whatnot as we were trying to figure out are we going to do house on quarantine and then to add to the it sounds so surreal it couldn't possibly be true that day the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog and the Prime Minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that so he had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq part of the building was arguing about whether or not we're going to do quarantine or not do quarantine the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial and you have all of these meetings kind of going on through the course of through the course of the 12th so through the course of the 12th is important that the 12th is the 12th of March so we're in the middle of the really really significant phase that's the evening he said when they worked out they're all fucked and his account is that what was going on was that Boris Johnson was too busy talking to the press office about a time story about his and Carrie Simon's dog to take the pandemic properly seriously and more this is I suppose one of many examples where you know you could interpret this is as Dominic Cummings having a dig at old enemies clearly he doesn't like Carrie Simons he thinks the reason he was pushed out of Downing Street is because she didn't like him do you think this is just him with a grudge or do you seriously believe that Carrie Simons is the kind of person who even in the middle of a pandemic when they're you know deciding whether or not to bomb another country is saying the priority Boris Johnson is this story about our dog can I check and out say both I think that both Dominic Cummings has a grudge and also that Carrie I just from what I've seen of Carrie thus far she is somebody who you know is very obsessed with the little details around her personal profile how she's presented in the press you know there was that big sort of Sunday Times story about her friends coming forward being like no she's actually really good she's a really great person all these stories are fake except which is quite obviously the kind of you know damaged control situation that you you put your friends on to do for you if you have people who are connected with Sunday Times and it makes sense she was the press officer for the conservatives so she is somebody who is concerned with public image and I both do think that she is someone who you know there's been things in the past and we'll get on to the stuff that Cummings says as well where there's dubious perhaps ethical concerns like maybe her compass is a little a little off and she makes a perfect partner for Boris Johnson is all I'll say on that but I can understand how for someone like her of her domain is sort of this personal private life she has and the dog story gets brought maybe that is for her day the most serious thing she can think of what because you know she's under lots of stress and she can't really do anything about it she's not exactly running the country she might have influence and undue influence which we can discuss later but she's she's come at decisions her fiance is in the middle of this mired in the middle of this like horrible situation is behaving like a buffoon maybe she does just complain about dog it wouldn't be my choice to complain about the dog but I can understand that maybe it did happen is what I'm trying to say in a long way I don't I don't like to judge people by who they date but Carrie Simons is I I do in this is engaged to Boris Johnson has previously dated Harry Cole who is political editor of the sun so I kind of feel like we we know enough about Carrie Simons to make you know some kind of some sort of judgments I got one more clip about a claim made about Boris Johnson from that first period we're going to go on to the second period in a moment which is actually more damning but this is the most consequential influence I think that the prime minister had in the first phase which was to essentially even after the scientists and the advisors around him had decided we need a lockdown was him dragging his feet let's take a look at that claim there were quite a few people around Whitehall who thought that the real danger here was the economy the prime minister's view throughout January February March was as he said in many meetings the real danger here is not the disease the real danger here is the measures that we take to deal with the disease and the economic destruction that that will cause he had that view all the way through in fact one of the reasons why it was so rocky getting from the 14th when we suggested plan B to him to actual lockdown was because he kept he kept basically bouncing back to we don't really know how dangerous it is we're going to completely destroy the economy by having a lockdown maybe we shouldn't do it and through the course of that period of 16 17 18 19th there was this constant sort of back and forth of here's the you know hourly data coming in showing that we're further ahead in the pandemic that we realized the situation is worse the NHS situation is worse everything is getting worse and that kind of propelled things a bit towards lockdown but it's also the case that's fundamentally the prime minister just never didn't really think that this was the big danger I mean that is super super damning because as I say big failure of government in general but Cummings describes a situation where the top civil servants and himself and the scientists had worked out essentially on the 12th the 13th the 14th that this was going to be a catastrophe they needed to take a complete U-turn it wasn't until at least a week later that Britain actually implemented a lockdown and that was because I mean it was what we all assumed at the time was that Boris Johnson was dragging his feet even after everyone had realized well we need to radically change course he was like but do we really I don't want to be the guy that shuts down the country that's not the kind of prime minister I wanted to be unfortunately you don't get to decide you don't get to decide what moment what catastrophe arrives when you happen to be prime minister you have to adapt to that so if Boris Johnson you'd like to be the good happy cuddly guy then when a pandemic comes along I mean maybe you should just stay reading your Shakespeare books or writing your Shakespeare books sorry because clearly his interventions were I mean less than helpful they were they were actively damaging and that was only more so in the second part of the Covid pandemic which is what we're going to get on to next that's a really really actively damaging parts of Boris Johnson's response to this crisis before we do that some some comments I think we have Ishtak with a fiverr says let's see what those supine jellyfish Tory MPs that backed him after Barnard Castle say now I mean one of those people was actually Matt Hancock which is he's going to be kicking himself now there are clips of Matt Hancock saying no very good guy he did what any honorable person would do now he has really come round and um uh screw him over I suppose Rico Shea tweets on the hashtag tisky sour this question Michael you've been complimented a lot by your co-host Aaron Bostani for your coverage and analysis of Covid-19 if you were in that committee meeting today what would you have asked Dominic Cummings perhaps accounting for that he perhaps accounting for the fact he has access to grind it's a very good question the part of that select committee that disappointed me from the seven hours was that actually in many situations Dominic Cummings gave a reasonable account that actually we agreed with at the time we still do about I said me and my co-host at Navarra is not a royal we about the gaps in government policy and one of those obvious gaps in government policy which he accepted in that um grilling was that the test and trace system was not going to work without giving people money to self-isolate without paying people or replacing people's incomes if they've been contacted and told they have to stay in their their houses for two weeks and that was one of the biggest failures of government throughout this period and it also to my mind remains unexplained so Dominic Cummings gives this account of why this this failure at the start of the pandemic he says that was because of a failure of science a group think etc he talks about the failure in the second part of the pandemic that was basically Boris Johnson not wanting to introduce restrictions but he didn't have any account of why there was no money for people to self-isolate now he was asked should there have been money for people to self-isolate he says yes there should have been but there was no follow-up to ask why that was not implemented and why I think that would be an interesting thing to push him on is because one it's it's unanswered we do have a right to know why that didn't happen as as as a general public but also I think that might have put him in an uncomfortable position which would one have meant he had to critique Rishi Sunak which he did not do throughout that seven hours in those seven hours any potential criticism of Rishi Sunak who we know resisted the second lockdown who brought in lockdown skeptics to Downing Street he basically tried to just cover Rishi Sunak in glory but there's also a bigger ideological point as we often talked about on on this show as Dalia Rashinar and all all sort of articulated very well one of the reasons I think and my co-hosts think that that money for self-isolation was not introduced was because it would be seen as a bad precedent if what they want is to to make it the case that people when they're sick when people can't go to work that's their own personal responsibility that's an individual responsibility where you can't rely on a collectivist state the Tory ideology doesn't want to change that the Tory ideology doesn't want to say to people oh yes if you need support we'll give you support and to me that's why that was never introduced and so and actually I think that's the moment it coming seems to share that analysis as well he's actually quite right wing when it comes to things like personal responsibility so I think that could have put him in an awkward position that none of the the MPs on that committee managed to put him in potentially I think because actually two of the most effective questioners where I hate to say it is the co-chairs which is Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark and you can imagine why they wouldn't push on that particular point because it's also their ideology that is being protected when we don't grill down into the reasons why money to self-isolate was not introduced final comment in this part Scott Thompson with 499 this whole thing demonstrates the need for more alternative media now more than ever thank you to everyone at Navarro media keep up the good work and thank you so much for that super chat and I'm going to use that as a well-timed segue to ask you that if you do want to help Navarro media grow to please go to navarromedia.com slash support and as you probably know we ask for the equivalent of one hour's wage a month so we can continue growing make these shows more often make them make the graphics even better you know really build out from from where we are in the first wave of COVID-19 Boris Johnson was criminally complacent but he was also let down by poor scientific advice however in the second wave he had no such excuse and in his damning evidence to the health and select committee Cummings painted a picture of a prime minister who by last summer had thoroughly given up on following the science many of us had said in the summer to the prime minister do not tell everyone get back to work don't do this whole everyone go back to work thing and COVID's over but at that point he his main concern was about the economy so over July August obviously the whole impetus of the government was to try and pretend that we could get back to normal so he couldn't have been clearer right everyone was advising him everyone was saying don't tell people to go back to work I mean again this is where I maybe would have pushed Dominic Cummings because on the shows that we were doing we were saying one of the reasons he's saying go back to work is because the Tory party's connection to landlords it was the landlords who were desperate for everyone to stop working from home it seemed completely ridiculous to advise people in the middle of a pandemic to go into work when they didn't need to that seemed to be the only explanation obviously those possibilities weren't put to Dominic Cummings but what's very clear as day there is that Boris Johnson ignored the science now that wasn't the only example it wasn't just in telling people to go back to work that Boris Johnson actively overrode the science it was also in refusing to enter a circuit breaker lockdown in September I said to him the whole lesson of what happened before is that by delaying the lockdown had came later it had to be more severe it had to last longer the economic disruption is even worse anyway and we'll have killed up God knows how many thousand people in the meantime who've caught Covid who wouldn't have called it if we had now surely we've got to learn the lessons from the past and Prime Minister decided no and said basically just get a hit and hope all credible serious people in my opinion were saying essentially the same thing so I was very very clear with with him about it and so you were pressing for a circuit breaker lockdown in September so if the Prime Minister wasn't persuaded in your words of the importance of this whose advice was he taking I wasn't taking any advice he was just making his own decision that he was going to ignore the advice if you took anybody at random from the kind of top one percent competent people in this country and presented them with the situation they would behave differently to how the Prime Minister behaved I couldn't really get more damning than that I'd actually go further than Dominic Cummings because he said if you took anyone from the top one percent I don't know I suppose he means cognitively competent in terms of competence and they would do better than the Prime Minister if you look at the polling from that period of time actually if you took anyone if you took a random sample of anyone in the British public they would have made a better job of this than Boris Johnson over the summer and in the winter because the majority of the public throughout that whole period was saying if the scientists are saying go into a lockdown go into a lockdown if the scientists are saying close the borders close the borders every policy which was you know essentially sensible when it came to COVID-19 was backed by the public but opposed by Boris Johnson opposed by Tory backbenches and opposed opposed by some people in the media which we will expand on in one moment because there was some super interesting insights in his evidence on that front first of all I just want to fill you in on a couple more um factoids I suppose that Cummings gave forward or arguments we can't you know it's Dominic Cummings I don't actually want to confirm them as facts but say the the evidence he gave so did come Dominic Cummings did and confirm that he heard Boris Johnson say he wants to let the bodies pile high instead of going into a third lockdown this is slightly later now that was when they entered the first lockdown at the end of October um he also said he advised against telling people to go back to work and against students going back in September but was overridden by the Prime Minister um as I've already said Dominic Cummings doesn't like to say anything bad about Rishi Sunak so he had no thoughts whatsoever about the etout to help out scheme which was to my mind one of the most disastrous policies of the pandemic basically because it was it was an invitation to say go back to normal start spending money let's forget about this whole COVID thing and to be honest Rishi Sunak said that publicly quite a lot right he said we need to learn to live with this you know Dominic Cummings is trying to rewrite history here but his assessment of Boris Johnson is shared by many and there's actually quite a lot concrete evidence of it so I trust him on on the Boris Johnson question and I said there were some interesting insights in the evidence about the the reasons and why Boris Johnson was so interested in or so motivated to override the will of the scientists the opinions of the scientists now the clearest assessment here came in a response to Dominic Cummings about border control fundamentally there was no proper border policy because the Prime Minister never wanted a proper border policy repeatedly in meeting after meeting I and others said all we have to do is download the Singapore or Taiwan documents in English and impose them here we're we're imposing all of these restrictions on people domestically but people can see that everyone's just coming in from from in fact areas it's madness it's undermining the whole message that we should take it seriously and his basic argument at that point his he was into back to lockdown was all a terrible mistake I should have been the mayor of Jaws we should never have done lockdown one the travel industry will all be destroyed if we bring in a serious border policy through which of course some of us said there's not going to be a tourism industry in the autumn if we have a second wave like the whole logic is completely wrong if we don't bring in a proper border policy now we can and a bunch of other things we're going to have a second wave in the autumn and everything is going to be shut forget just tourism but he was you know he had the Daily Telegraph with their stupid campaign on the whole subject he had Tory MPs going crackers about it at the same time and essentially at that point he was in we should never have done a lockdown I should have been the mayor of Jaws now I'm going to be open everything up get on with it and me and others could not win that argument we never won the argument as of today look at the whole thing about variants we still don't have a proper border policy in my opinion that point about Boris Johnson saying he should have been the mayor in Jaws that was mentioned quite a few times actually over that seven hours and that's a reference to the the movie which I haven't seen actually I only know the storyline because it gets mentioned so much in the context of coronavirus I'm told the mayor of that town didn't want to close the beach even though he had a deadly shark and Boris Johnson wanted to be the same he said even though there's a deadly pandemic here I don't want to close the shops I want to be the guy who goes against scientific advice even if it leads to catastrophe that was mentioned a few times Jaws the other thing that came up a few times in that evidence given by Dominic Cummings was the telegraph so he mentioned more than once the fact that Boris Johnson seemed to be guided more by the telegraph than by his scientists he mentions it again let's let's take a look at him bringing up the telegraph one more time the problem wasn't necessarily I couldn't persuade other people on lots of things I mean everybody was screaming on quarantine have a policy and set it out clearly and stick to it we cannot keep changing your mind every time the telegraph writes an editorial on the subject everybody agreed with me about that regardless almost of what they thought the real policy should be but nobody could find a way around the problem of the Prime Minister just like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle into the other that was basically all of our worst fears about Boris Johnson confirmed or at least reflected in the evidence given by Dominic Cummings of course that was the case against the Prime Minister let's take a look at the verdict you've described the PM's running of number 10 as chaotic incompetent lacking judgment at times do you think Boris Johnson is a fit and proper person to get us through this pandemic thank you Moira I want to bring you in on this that was quite a case for the prosecution against Boris Johnson when it comes to his culpability for the the disaster that was the second way with the pandemic there's also just one thing I want to emphasize and make clear two-thirds of the people who died from COVID-19 died in the second wave so whilst it was the case that that first wave of coronavirus the blame really can be shared the majority of people who died from COVID-19 in this country the blame when it comes to Dominic Cummings evidence and I think actually most of the evidence points to this that is the personal responsibility of Boris Johnson he has personal guilt there I mean it's it's so damning isn't it I mean you can't really get you can't really get worse than that I also want to make it clear that I think the total death toll we're at now for the UK is 128 128k but it's 112k alone in England which I think says a lot given you know we had devolved governments in charge of different types of policies over the different orders and where Boris Johnson was fully in control then the death toll is ridiculously high Cummings said it again and again again tens of thousands of people died you did not need to die I mean I think we know I think we know who Boris Johnson is at the station I think we know that he is fundamentally not fit to lead the country during a pandemic and I would argue not fit to lead the country will stop during any sort of peace times any good times otherwise but it's just been an absolute tragedy that he managed to be in charge during this point in our history because I can't think of somebody who would be worse not even Kirstama I think would be worse at the actual nitty gritty of administrating making difficult decisions having to do things that might seem unpopular in the moment but would save lives long term not looking out for personal interests not pursuing a policy that relies more on cronyism and just handing out contracts to who's nearest because it's easier than actually finding the people who are good for the job and that's something they talk about a lot later with the vaccine rollout and what went wrong with you know the initial test and tray system which we'll talk about but it's just you know there's there's blame to a portion elsewhere and you know we'll talk about Hancock etc as soon but ultimately Boris Johnson was at the top of that government and there is a there's a quote that he said that were Cummings as he said which is where Dominic Cummings is saying like you know do you want to stop the chaos or are you worried about me having the power to stop the chaos and apparently Boris allegedly Boris Johnson laughs and says chaos isn't that bad chaos means everyone has to look to me to see who's in charge and we've seen the chaos and we've seen who's in charge and you know what it's killed thousands hundreds of thousands of people so I think I think there is no nothing more damning than that and it's a tragedy I do think that was a really important moment in in the evidence when Dominic Cummings said that I was a bit like whoa he's he's you know he was telling Boris Johnson look this is a chaotic situation no one has authority nothing's working he says I don't really mind chaos yeah he thrives on it I've done long think pieces about it and it's it's also just interesting that Cummings remembers everything everyone else says it's photographic memory but when it comes to comes to Richie Sudak he has nothing no we shouldn't say anything anyway also when it comes to himself he can't remember if he attended the five Cobra meetings like did you attend those ceremonies like oh I can't remember I can't precisely remember that even though I can remember every sentence my enemies say yep as you say photographic anything I said anything my allies said oh who's to say I'll have to look through my whatsapps but I might tell you if it's if it's useful for me you mentioned that Keir Starmer would have been would have been better in the job during this whole pandemic and to be honest I have no doubt he would have been I think he would have listened to the scientists more than Boris Johnson did I don't think he's as wildly irresponsible as as Boris Johnson as Prime Minister I do think though and as we've mentioned a lot on this show he has been very disappointing as an opposition figure over this period of time and that is partly because or particularly because actually he has basically restricted his opposition to saying the government comms is poor you know we don't have any particular opinions on the policy but what we think is we need clarity and they're not giving us clarity that's what we've heard over and over and over again we've always said no the problem isn't the comms the problem is the policy talk about the policy talk about the interests that are shaping the policy Dominic Cummings today agreed and let's take a look at him talking about the difference between comms and policy and where the real problem lay I think the same thing happened in in the autumn it's happened in in January it was bad policy and bad decisions the problems in the autumn were not fundamentally communications problems they were that the prime minister made some terrible decisions and got things wrong and then constantly you turned on everything it's not that's not a communications failure you know you see it used everyone in the outside world sees it as a communications failure but the reality is it's it it's much more fundamental than that the autumn the autumn disasters when we were fundamentally not communications problems the communications problems were a consequence of bad decisions and bad management now I think what Dominic Cummings said is there is really obvious you know I don't think you needed to be an insider to know that but I do find it incredibly frustrating that so much of the public debate has been about comms and actually that's not just from the opposition because the opposition I think have way too often relied on the fact oh we need clarity because it means they don't actually have to take a position and they hate nothing more than taking any kind of position but also in terms of the media narrative about this we spent so long talking about can you or can you not eat a scotch egg as a meal in a pub you know we've also heard you know can you go to an amber country they're kind of saying you can go they're kind of saying you can't go all this shit basically about it's not particularly clear we found this minor contradiction in the advice and fine yeah advice should be as clear as possible but the real issues in this pandemic weren't that the the government said one thing in the morning and a slightly different thing in the afternoon the problem was the fundamental strategy the policies behind it the fact that no one was paid to self isolate the fact that every time there was a spike we went into a lockdown way too late the fact that there was never a border policy until this year and those were the kind of things that most of the media basically just accepted because they were too busy having a row about whether or not scotch eggs were a full meal you know whether or not you you could order a pint with a scotch egg instead of a lasagna it was it was so meaningless and both the media and the Labour Party fed into that narrative whereby the government were on really comfortable ground because comms probably is kind of hard during a pandemic but the problem was was the policy Moira I don't know what you think about that I mean I know you're you're famously called Kirstama a wet wipe I think probably the focus on the comms was downstream from being a wet wipe um yeah I mean I think I think I mean people who might not be acquainted with me will probably not know about my disdain for Kistama but I'm sure everyone who does doesn't want to hear me go on about it again because I've talked about Kistama too many times in one lifetime for somebody who wants who actually has a full life outside of him um but I do I do want to talk about the comms just a little bit because I think what you're saying is completely correct I would actually go as far to argue that the comms were almost a distraction for a lack of the policy that wasn't there for you know they were they're doing what all incompetent governments do which is just farm out noise and farts basically hoping people won't notice what's actually going on and I think something else that Cummings talked about which was quite interesting was that they kept introducing tighter and tighter regulations sort of in relation to policing powers and he he was saying he railed against this um or opposed this because he's he framed it as people who majority of law-abiding people which you know we can talk about that but law-abiding people who were being caught out by these regulations or being penalized by these regulations while the people who were break they were trying to target were not being targeted at all so they kept tighting the regulations in order to try and catch them out because they had so many loopholes and obviously it did nothing except result in a lot of people being traumatized by a heavy policing that resulted in fines that eventually got dismissed and these sort of like extra targeting of minority ethnic groups you know we saw a stop and search on young black men go up I think by 40% during lockdown so the this idea of these comms and these regulations I do think that they were just deliberately obscure deliberately muddy to mask what was not there um but when it comes to you know Starman's opposition I think you've said it all he he wasn't present because he didn't want to oppose full stop um we which is the policy they're pursuing the lay party pursuing right up until today this morning we saw Lisa Nandy go on Good Morning Britain and when asked by Bill Turnbull about policies she said oh it's not the time to play politics it's not the time to there was a I don't know if you've seen the clip I didn't see that but it's not as a surprise oh my goodness it's amazing there is a okay so they ask they are saying oh what are some policies the lay party and she looks like as she goes we ask each other to earth like really hopefully and they're like no no no we're asking you and she's like oh it's not the time to play politics like we just believe in like focusing on the job at hand it's not the time to sort of oppose the government right now and Bill Turnbull's like we'll ask you about Labour Party policies and what it's hilarious because obviously there's no policies that she can think of off the top of the head but two she's saying it's no time to play politics or oppose the government on the morning that the government's former most senior advisor is about to give a boatload of evidence to the select committee which her party leader then uses later in you know Prime Minister's questions it's just so that's sort of like I think that shows the the contradictory and self-account productive approach to the lay party at the moment which has been throughout the pandemic and I would argue also may have led to more deaths than we needed to by failing to hold the government for account but the majority of the blame is obviously on the Tory. Absolutely yeah majority of the blame on the Tories but yeah Labour could have helped I mean I think there are areas they could have pushed on and they could have done something yeah let's go to some comments apparently lots of shock in the comments that I've never seen Jaws I'm quite scared of sharks already so I don't know if you know even now as a as an adult I sometimes have that I you know if I'm in the sea that maybe there's something that's going to bite me behind me so I just I didn't need the stress but maybe I should just to understand the discourse. Oliver Kant with a five says remember when the entire media establishment printed articles for weeks saying but you love going to work so go I do you know I do as Oliver Kant I do remember that as well what I do remember that was even more disgusting actually was not just people saying oh we love going to work it was saying the kids are going back to school why are you not brave enough to go back to work now that was that was the kind of line that the Telegraph were doing I think the Metro did a similar headline I can remember off the top of my the top of my head and I mean again we talked about this at the time but it was the complete wrong attitude because if kids are going back to school that was always a difficult that was always a difficult one I know you know good arguments in both directions for for that one but if you were going to send kids back to school what you should do is make sure that everyone else stays at home because there's a budget isn't there if you're going to get the R number over one you if you if you want to open schools then you can't go to work probably in retrospect schools we should have done quite differently increase the ventilation etc etc I don't want to go down that rabbit hole but just that point of saying bullying people to go back into work because some things were opening was the most anti scientific and disgraceful campaign I've seen from the press in in quite a long time and they haven't been held to account for it and we have a very kind comment below from Darrell Kavanaugh who tweets on the hashtag tisky sour thank you Michael Walker this is a tour de force tonight on your limited resources you have distilled today's event so expertly with no notice no banks of researchers that is a very kind comment I did have some notice but to be honest I didn't do any preparation for I just spent seven hours watching sky taking down whenever something interesting gets said but I have to say it was one of the more interesting was the only time I've ever watched anything going on in the House of Commons for probably more than an hour and this was for seven hours so you know there were some decent questions let's go on to our final section which is the most brutal part of the select committee to put us putting together this section it was only putting together this I realized how brutal it was because this is all spread over seven hours when you squidge it together you're like oh wow um that would hurt the most brutal attacks in the whole of Dominic coming seven hour testimony to the health and science select community were reserved for health secretary Matt Hancock he said Matt Hancock should have been fired multiple times I think that the secretary of state for health should have been fired for at least 15 20 things including lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly I should have been fired 15 or 20 times the claim there he should have been fired for lying in public and in private now the co-chair of the committee who is Greg Clark asked Cummings to clarify exactly what lies he was talking about this is what there are numerous examples I mean in the summer he said that everyone who needed treatment who got the treatment that they required he knew that that was a lie because he'd been briefed by the chief scientific advisor and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment that they deserved many people were left to die in horrific circumstances is that the basis of your assertion there are other pieces of is that the basis of your assertion or are there other piece of evidence that you base that that charge on yes I mean in in in mid april the so at the at the just before the prime minister and I were diagnosed with having covered ourselves the secretary of state for health told us in the cabinet room everything is fine on PPE we've got it all covered etc etc when I came back almost the first meeting I had in the cabinet room was about the disaster over over PPE and how we were actually completely sure that hospitals all over the country were running out secretary of state said in that meeting this is the fault of Simon Stevens it's the fault of the chancellor of the exchequer it's not my fault they've blocked approvals on all sorts of things I said to the cabinet secretary please investigate this and find out if it's true the cabinet secretary came back to me and said it's completely untrue I have lost confidence in the secretary of state's honesty in these meetings the cabinet secretary said the cabinet secretary said that to me and the cabinet secretary said that to to to the prime minister so very very damning there one he's saying he lied to the public when he said people didn't die because of lack of care I mean it was quite clear from the outside that that was that was the case that care had to be rationed because so many people were sick and they hadn't locked down early enough and they hadn't increased the the capacity of the NHS quite fast enough obviously everyone in the NHS was working incredibly hard there's a problem with the government of not locking down soon enough not having the proper preparation he's also saying they're very very significantly saying he lied on PPE he said PPE would be sorted then he blamed it on other people when it was actually his fault those are the words of comings of course but he says the cabinet secretary also agreed now according to comings those weren't the only lies told by Matt Hancock another incredibly serious allegation that would have cost lives again involved care homes because asked about how it could possibly have happened that covid patients were discharged into care homes comings answered the following when we realized in april that this happened the prime minister said a less polite version of what on earth are you telling me when he came back after being ill what on earth has happened with all these people in care homes Hancock told us in the cabinet room that people were going to be tested before they went back to care homes what the hell happened we were told categorically in march that people will be tested before they went back to care homes we only subsequently found out that that hadn't happened now or the government rhetoric was we put a shield around care homes and blah blah blah it's complete nonsense quite the opposite of putting a shield around them we sent people with covid back to the care homes in the same way no one thought about how to produce the details of what to do on shielding and therefore i had this terrible meeting on the 19th on shielding i just think that the whole thing around care homes was the same they're just fundamentally it had never been properly dug into and what happened was in the crisis environment of complete chaos in that week of around the 16th as we were heading towards lockdown people just said well we've got no alternative to do this and why on earth Hancock told us that everyone was going to be tested i've absolutely no idea so we've got quite a lot of allegations piling up there he lied to the public about people dying without proper care he lied to his colleagues about PPE and now he's lied to his colleagues about people being tested before they go into care homes now that decision to send people into care homes without being tested which c did covid 19 to precisely those groups of people who were most vulnerable that would have cost tens of thousands of lives so an incredibly serious charge from Dominic Cummings there and i don't know if you'll be surprised to know but it goes on there are more allegations leveled at Matt Hancock from Dominic Cummings this one involves the test and trace system this is not so much about lying it's in a way more serious he's saying that Matt Hancock screwed up the test and trace system purely so he could be seen to meet arbitrary targets in my opinion disastrously the secretary of state had made while the prime minister was on his near deathbed had made this pledge to do 100 000 by the end of by the end of april now this was really this was an incredibly stupid thing to do because we'd already had that goal internally we'd already had conversations 10 days earlier to say instead of cancelling testing we should be ramping up testing and it shouldn't just be 100 000 we should be heading for a million tests today and more but that means building the kind of architecture in the foundations to do all this properly what then happened when i came back around the 13th was i started getting calls and number 10 were getting calls saying Hancock is interfering with the building of the test and trace system because he's telling everybody what to do to maximize his chances of hitting his stupid target by the end of the month so we had half the government with me and number 10 calling Brown frantically saying do not do what Hancock says build the thing properly for the medium term and we had Hancock calling them all saying down tools on this do this whole tests back so that i can hit my target now in my opinion he should have been fired for that thing alone and that itself meant that the whole of april was hugely disrupted by you know different parts of whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely because Hancock wanted to be able to go on tv and say look at me my hundred k target it was criminal disgraceful behavior that caused serious harm criminal disgraceful behavior that caused serious harm quite the challenge it was also particularly noticeable that he was saying those arbitrary targets were set when Boris Johnson was on his deathbed and Cummings was out of action now you remember from the time those targets were quite ridiculous and the the government was clearly bending the rules and doing lots of accounting tricks to make it seem as if they had been met remember they were they were counting a test is done if they just sent it in the post counting many of them multiple times so there was a lot going on it did seem like the government were essentially distracting themselves with the desire to meet targets instead of actually do what was functional and useful and he is saying the person who bears personal responsibility for that is Matt Hancock the list still goes on i'm not going to show you every single allegation i'll fill you in on some some more of them so we also accused Matt Hancock of using the chief medical officer and chief scientific advisor as a shield basically to cover for his own mistakes it would be interesting to see how how they respond to that allegation he also said and this is probably the most extraordinary one he said the top civil servant personally told the prime minister that he should fire Matt Hancock because and these are Cummings words the British system is not set up to deal with a secretary of state who repeatedly lies in meetings so he's saying the top civil servant someone who is not necessarily a factional maneuver who we presume doesn't just you know hate Matt Hancock because he's got personal grudge and you know wants to replace him in the cabinet or has an ally who wants to replace him in the cabinet whatever we'd assume they have some objectivity they're saying this guy lies so much that the British system cannot survive with him being secretary of state very very extreme all of this obviously poses the question as to why Boris Johnson kept the lying incompetent health secretary in post this is a question which has a lot of bearing for the prime minister and his fitness for the job Cummings was asked that precise question and this was his answer it's definitely the case that the prime minister was told that country to my view I said sack him I said sack him almost every week sometimes almost every day he was told though that you should not sack him you should keep him there because he's the person you fire when the inquiry comes on I thought my my counterargument to that was if you leave him there we're going to have another set of disasters in the autumn and that's the critical thing forget the inquiry the quiet god knows when that'll bloody happen we've got to get rid of this guy now because every single week things are going disastrously wrong he was saying that that Boris Johnson was told objectively this is someone who you should fire but he listened instead to advice which said no keep him on because there's going to be a public inquiry which is going to be very critical and you're going to need someone to fall on their sword when that happens and Matt Hancock is a good candidate now moya obviously there are a lot of questions here should we trust Dominic Cummings here does he have an axe to grind I mean we know he does have an axe to grind but how much should that affect how much we believe of his testimony if we do accept it though you know who comes off worse here is it Matt Hancock or is it is it Boris Johnson oh um I mean first of all there are a good many terrible choices there who do you want to be an apologist for moya Matt Hancock or Boris Johnson the hardest place possible um well first of all I think that we should for the majority probably accept this testimony Cummings has nothing to lose uh apart from um being penalized further than the inquiry I think he's trying to get ahead of the story he's trying to get it out now but from what we've seen it does seem to ally with what we were told about what we what we witnessed with our own eyes not all we were told what we witnessed with our own eyes during the first half of the pandemic um as for who's to blame well I'd say it seems to be like a true meeting of turds really because I would say the majority of the blame lies with Johnson ultimately he's the prime minister he had if he had the power to stave off the lockdowns if he had the power to say no we're not going to implement this system yet because the British public won't take to it the way the Taiwanese public has he has the power to also enact those systems on the flip side the portrayal of the Boris Johnson in Cummings's testimony and what I thought was most interesting was that he was a weak man um because most of the time Boris tries to portray himself as this like you know if not a leader just someone who does what he wants when he wants whenever and this was a weak man a weak man surrounded by more weak men um and I think the buck ultimately stops with the person at the top of the tree um you have Matt Hancock and put in these positions of power by the likes of Boris Johnson um and not he doesn't remove him whether that's to protect his own background inquiry which you know you get he he might have he's responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people just to protect himself that's a long term sort of outlook that is purely about self-serving like narcissism and so ultimately if the person who put Matt Hancock in the position where he could have been able to make those decisions where he could have been able to lie to that degree and also probably knew that he was a liar because I was looking around earlier and I found stories about Matt Hancock being accused of lying to a degree where people noticed it as late like as early as 2013 that he was he appeared on this program he once skipped an interview and he said oh I was I was 30 minutes 30 seconds late so they wouldn't let me on and the producer was like no you are you were in bed when we called you this was a flagship TV show then he wouldn't turn up to come and defend his like skills policy and they were just shocked even by the level of government that we have they were shocked that a minister just would not get our bed to come and defend his own skills policy on this TV program and then lied about it so blatantly so the signs of Hancock I feel like you kind of work with this man and put him in that position if you did not know who's a liar you have these two you know your aid your cabinet secretary telling you this man is a lie he's going to kill tens of thousands of people and you keep him on well where's the blame stopping that it's going to be with Boris Johnson and I mean I think this is I actually want to bring in a comment because PF with five euros says how much should we believe Cummings on his word all of this seems plausible but I wouldn't put it past him to bend the truth to get back at Johnson now I do think that's really important context here because obviously you know we know that Dominic Cummings is actually I say we know that Dominic Cummings is good at weaving a story we also know that he can be incredibly bad at weaving a story as he did in the Rose Garden when he tried to justify going to Durham but we also know that he can he can at times we have a good story and here he has told a convincing one but also it could be politically motivated and I think on this issue with Matt Hancock this is particularly relevant because I do actually believe most of his criticisms of Matt Hancock I believe that he's an incredibly dishonest person at the same time there was a clear bias in Dominic Cummings testimony against Matt Hancock and potentially Boris Johnson and in favour of Rishi Sunak who he only had glowing praise for even though we know that when it came to the second wave and as we've you know as I've already said more people died in the second wave than the first wave it was people like Rishi Sunak who were pushing against a lockdown and people like Matt Hancock who were pushing for one so for all his faults when it came to that crucial key argument at that key moment Matt Hancock was on the right side of history and Rishi Sunak who you know Dominic Cummings seems to be allied with still was on the wrong side of the argument so while to be honest I find all of these criticisms of Matt Hancock completely believable I find the fact that he's saying he is responsible for all of the bad things Rishi Sunak is responsible for all of the good things as is Dominic Raab as is Michael Gove I find that completely unbelievable so I can believe that whilst the faults about Matt Hancock are real he's potentially blamed things for Matt Hancock that are actually shared by people who are his allies and it's convenient to concentrate all of the problems on one person. Do you think I'm being fair there Moira? What I would say on that one is that the reason I'm more prone to I think it's very obvious that he did you know admit he veered away totally from playing any sort of like apportioning any blame to Rishi Sunak but what I thought was interesting is that he did he did say in the second lockdown Matt Hancock was on his side and Matt Hancock decided that we did need to lock down and Matt Hancock was actually one of the voices saying that which made it more credible the the sort of accusations he leveled elsewhere but at the same time he is a man with an axe to grind he has got motivations I don't know whether that's to get back into government or just so that he can get back at the people he thinks messed up his project you know this was a man who delivered Brexit he delivered taking back control he delivered Boris Johnson's majority and this pandemic came along and it turns out the man he's put into this huge power got this huge mandate it's a moron who's killed hundreds of thousands of people I can imagine that rankles when you think that you've dedicated all of your sort of Machiavellian tricks to putting this person to power and be like I'm gonna do this for you and then the way they repay you is by bungling it and literally killing people that's a guilt to carry and I think I do think that he's maybe offloading some of that guilt by giving what he sees as just unfettered testimony and of course it's going to be affected by bias because he's Dominic Cummings and we are all affected by bias to some degrees but this is a man who is very clear sort of like he thinks of himself as a libertare like he wouldn't say this but he thinks of himself as you know individualist this libertarian who has no political alliance but clearly does he believes in eugenics he loves British Sunak like there's there's clear allegiances there but I think he's offloading his guilt ultimately I think that's why he's decided to be radically honest and talk about his openness he's offloading the stain of what he's been involved in and that's why I'm prone to believe him but that's also why we have to just be so analytical and critical about the testimony because there's gaps he will not fill because he perhaps doesn't he's too scared to even think about his role in this I think that's a very interesting perspective and I want to close the conversation on Matt Hancock by saying if this show has wet your appetite for more testimonies to the science and technology select committee I didn't think I'd ever use that sentence in two weeks time exactly two weeks time Matt Hancock is the person in the dock so all of these charges which were leveled at him by Dominic Cummings will presumably be put to him there and he will have the chance to respond so that could be very very spicy if you want to make sure you do not miss the key bits of that testimony and our analysis of that testimony make sure you hit subscribe if you are not already subscribe to the Navara media YouTube channel that means you won't miss it also do turn on notifications which means that you absolutely cannot miss it and we are going to wrap up there thank you so much Moira it has been a marathon of a show I have loved analyzing Dominic Cummings seven-hour testimony in in 90 minutes with you we didn't quite go for seven hours thank you so much for having me I'm amazing through that worth it so I'm very glad that we gave you the motivation to watch seven hours of parliamentary testimony thank you of course to everyone joining us tonight we'll be back on Friday at 7 p.m. for now you've been watching Tiske Sauer on Navara media good night