Chairs of home affairs, foreign affairs and justice committees to be among those involved in inquiry
Ward says that “no minister or special adviser played any role in the provision of evidence” under this government. He says he cannot say if that was the case under the last government.
There is a lot of jeering at this. The Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, reprimands Tom Tugendhat for his interruption.
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Lindsay Hoyle starts by telling MPs that speakers from the parliaments in Fiji and Ukraine are in the gallery. And he says it is four years to the day since David Amess was murdered.
It’s PMQs. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Continue reading...Pair recently met to discuss Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other political matters, Sunday Times says
Nigel Farage has reportedly met Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s adviser turned nemesis, after the Vote Leave founder suggested voters should back Reform UK at the local elections.
Cummings, who was once a sworn enemy of Farage during the EU referendum as he battled to keep control of the leave campaign, is reported to have met the Reform leader to discuss Whitehall changes, which allies said was the strongest sign yet that Farage was taking seriously the idea of becoming prime minister.
Continue reading...Whoever wins the next election, a reckoning is overdue on the costs of Britain’s nuclear deterrent
When Rishi Sunak visited Barrow-in-Furness on Monday he said the Cumbrian town was “mission critical for our country” because of its role building four new nuclear submarines to carry the UK’s nuclear weapons. If you believe Sunak’s erstwhile ally, Dominic Cummings, then that mission faces serious problems.
Cummings, once Boris Johnson’s most powerful adviser, said this month – in characteristically aggressive terms – that spiralling costs were making a mockery of the government’s budget plans. He wrote on X: “the nuclear enterprise is so fkd [sic] it’s further cannibalising the broken budgets and will for decades because it’s been highly classified to avoid MPs thinking about it.”
Continue reading...Tories express alarm over claim, with some saying it showed prime minister’s lack of judgment
Conservative MPs have expressed anger and alarm at the claim that Rishi Sunak offered Dominic Cummings a secret deal to help him win the election, with one saying Boris Johnson’s former chief aide should have “no place in political life”.
Other Tory MPs have commented in WhatsApp groups to express opposition to the idea, first revealed in the Sunday Times, with some saying it showed a lack of judgment by Sunak.
Continue reading...Sir David Omand tells parliamentary inquiry the platform should be restricted to ‘background mood music’
The former head of GCHQ has called for an end to the government handling crises over WhatsApp, saying the platform might suit gossip and informal exchanges but is inappropriate for important decision-making.
Sir David Omand, who ran the UK intelligence service before becoming the permanent secretary of the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, criticised the way government was conducted in the pandemic and said future crises should be handled with “proper process”.
Continue reading...Discredited ex-PM faces a demolition job in one of the few policy areas to which he and his allies still cling
Even at the height of his popularity, Boris Johnson routinely avoided close questioning – to the extent of once hiding in a fridge to dodge a TV inquisitor. The former UK prime minister is likely to be dreading next week’s appearance at the Covid inquiry. And he probably should.
It is no exaggeration to say that events on Wednesday and Thursday at the inquiry’s repurposed office building in Paddington, west London, could help define the post-power image and legacy of Johnson, and very possibly not for the good.
Continue reading...Ex-health secretary has described Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by ‘culture of fear’
Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if the UK had locked down three weeks earlier, Matt Hancock has told the Covid inquiry, as he described the operation of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street as undermined by a “culture of fear”.
The former health secretary said his staff were abused by Dominic Cummings and that Johnson’s then chief adviser attempted to exclude ministers and even Johnson himself from key decisions at the start of the pandemic, hampering the government’s response.
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Hancock is now deploying the defence previewed in the Observer on Sunday. (See 9.58am.)
He says from the middle of January the DHSC was “trying to effectively raise the alarm”. He says:
We were trying to wake up Whitehall to the scale of the problem and this wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be addressed only from the health department. Non-pharmaceutical interventions cannot be put in place by a health department. A health department can’t shut schools. It should have been grasped and led from the centre of government earlier. And you’ve seen evidence that repeatedly the department and I tried to make this happen.
And we were on occasions blocked, and at other times our concerns were not taken as seriously as they should have been until the very end of February.
Continue reading...Levelling up secretary breaks away from evidence at Covid inquiry to apologise for ‘errors I and others made’
Gove breaks away from the line of questioning to issue an apology.
I want to take this opportunity, if I may, to apologise to the victims who endured so much pain, the families who’ve endured so much loss, as a result of the mistakes that were made by government in response to the pandemic.
And as a minister, responsible for the Cabinet Office, and who was also close to many of the decisions that were made, I must take my share of responsibility for that.
Continue reading...Ex-cabinet minister set to hit back at inquiry after being made a scapegoat for government failings
Matt Hancock and his officials bombarded Downing Street with early warnings about Covid-19 but were treated with ridicule and contempt, according to senior Whitehall figures, who believe that the former health secretary is unfairly being made a scapegoat by civil servants and scientists during the official inquiry into the pandemic.
Attempts by the Department of Health, in mid to late January 2020, to raise the alarm were dismissed out of hand by senior staff working for the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, because they believed Hancock was mainly seeking publicity and exaggerating the dangers, the insiders say.
Continue reading...Former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance revealed there was ‘complete lack of leadership’ at times in crisis
Vallance says that some of what he was doing during Covid would have been done by anyone else in the post of government chief scientific adviser (GCSA).
But he says because of his medical training, and his knowledge of vaccines (he had worked for GlaxoSmithKline before taking the GCSA job), he was probably more involved than another GCSA might have been.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser denies contributing to an atmosphere of misogyny at No 10, saying he was ‘much ruder about men’
Heather Hallett, the chair, intervenes at this point. She asks Cain if he is defending the 10-day gap. She says she finds that curious if he is.
Cain says locking down the country is a huge, huge undertaking. In government terms, that is government acting at speed. But it was “longer than you would hope”, he says.
Do I understand from what you said earlier that you would defend the 10-day gap between the decision taken that there had to be a national lockdown and actually implementing that decision? Because I find that curious.
As I said, I think it is longer than you would like, but I think it’s important just to emphasise the amount of things that had to be done and the amount of people we had to take with us to deliver a nationwide lockdown.
It’s a huge, huge undertaking and to be honest, from my understanding of government, that is government moving at a tremendous speed – which maybe says more about government than other things.
Continue reading...PM blamed both Dominic Cummings and his wife to disguise his own reluctance to take difficult decisions, author claims
Boris Johnson fell out with his former chief adviser Dominic Cummings after growing tired of being treated like a “young and inexperienced king” who needed to be kept in order, Michael Gove has revealed.
The levelling up secretary, who is close to Cummings and was a figurehead of the Vote Leave campaign beside Johnson, said the pair fell out soon after the 2019 election because Johnson no longer wanted to be treated “as a tempestuous thoroughbred, with a strong whip and bridle to keep him in order”.
Continue reading...Latest updates: Tory leadership frontrunner reacts to Sunak comments, saying school closures went too far; pair meet Tory members in Norwich
Lee Cain, who was director of communications in Downing Street during the early phase of the Covid crisis, says Rishi Sunak’s comments about the lockdown policy (see 9.22am and 9.47am) are “simply wrong”.
But Sunak is not saying lockdown should not have happened, as Cain suggests. He is just saying that it was implemented too rigidly, and perhaps for too long, and that more consideration should have been given to the downsides.
Continue reading...Ex-adviser to Boris Johnson holds forth about his hero Otto von Bismarck at Orwell Festival of Political Writing
More than a year since walking out of Downing Street clutching his possessions in a cardboard box, Dominic Cummings has emerged in public again, recasting himself as a political speaker,
From No 10 to a lecture hall in the Darwin Building at University College London, the man who was once Boris Johnson’s senior adviser and de facto chief of staff, appeared on Thursday night in a panel discussion at the Orwell festival of political writing.
Continue reading...Latest updates: PM’s spokesperson clears up that No 10 requested meeting after Simon Clarke suggests it was the other way round
The Downing Street lobby briefing has just finished, and the PM’s spokesperson told journalists that Boris Johnson has still not received the Sue Gray report into Partygate. The spokesperson did not say when it would be arriving, but it is not expected to be published today.
Boris Johnson has recorded a clip for broadcasters during a visit to a school in south-east London. PA Media has written up the key lines.
I’m not attracted, intrinsically, to new taxes. But as I have said throughout, we have got to do what we can - and we will - to look after people through the aftershocks of Covid, through the current pressures on energy prices that we are seeing post-Covid and with what’s going on in Russia and we are going to put our arms round people, just as we did during the pandemic.
Of course, but on the process you are just going to have to hold your horses a little bit longer. I don’t believe it will be too much longer and then I will be able to say a bit more.
It’s basically very rare disease, and so far the consequences don’t seem to be very serious but it’s important that we keep an eye on it and that’s exactly what the the new UK Health Security Agency is doing.
As things stand the judgment is that it’s rare. I think we’re looking very carefully at the circumstances of transmission.
It hasn’t yet proved, fatal in any case that we know of, certainly not in this country.
Continue reading...Adam Wagner, a barrister specialising in lockdown rules, says document shows purpose of meal was political, not social
A barrister specialising in lockdown rules has said a leaked document showing Keir Starmer attended a prearranged meal in Durham during an election could be used to clear the Labour leader of allegations that he broke the law.
The document, published by the Mail on Sunday, shows that an 80-minute dinner with the Labour MP Mary Foy, featuring a takeaway curry, was planned as part of his schedule.
Continue reading...The prime minister has parted ways with key aides seven times since September 2020
All prime ministers lose advisers at various points, but those working for Boris Johnson seem to jump ship or otherwise exit at a faster rate than most. Here is a list of significant people who have left his No 10.
Continue reading...PM hopes to move on from parties scandal with plans to make it easier to scrap EU laws and tackle cost of living crisis
Boris Johnson will attempt to seize back control of the government agenda this week with a policy blitz, a Brexit bill and flying visit to Ukraine, as Westminster remains in the grip of paralysis over the Sue Gray and police inquiries into No 10 parties.
Amid frustration in No 10 at the uncertainty surrounding the report on rule-breaking parties in Downing Street, sources said Johnson was determined to deflect public outrage with a schedule of high-profile announcements and photo opportunities that he also hopes will show MPs he remains focused.
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