Category Archives: Dominic Cummings

UK’s ever more expensive nuclear submarines will torpedo spending plans for years to come

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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.”

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Dominic Cummings ‘held secret election talks with Rishi Sunak’

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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.

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End government by WhatsApp, urges former GCHQ head

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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”.

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Boris Johnson’s legacy will be shaped by Covid inquiry appearance

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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.

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Earlier lockdown could have saved lives of 30,000, Hancock tells Covid inquiry

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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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Matt Hancock ‘was not told about eat out to help out scheme until day it was announced’ – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

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.

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Michael Gove delivers apology to Covid victims and their families for ‘mistakes made by government’ – UK politics live

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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.

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Former UK health secretary Matt Hancock’s early Covid warnings were ignored by No 10, say allies

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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.

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Boris Johnson ‘bamboozled’ by science and Matt Hancock had habit of saying things that were untrue, UK Covid inquiry hears – live

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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.

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Dominic Cummings tells Covid inquiry foul-mouthed messages about colleague weren’t misogynistic – UK politics live

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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.

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‘I am the führer. I’m the king’: new book lifts lid on life inside Boris Johnson’s chaotic No 10

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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”.

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Truss and Sunak face Tory hustings after both say Covid lockdown went too far – as it happened

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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.

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Dominic Cummings attempts career reboot as political speaker

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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.

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No 10 admits PM meeting with Sue Gray was instigated by Downing Street – UK politics live

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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.

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Leaked Beergate memo could clear Starmer, lawyer believes

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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.

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It’s not me, it’s you: the political advisers who left Boris Johnson

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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.

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Boris Johnson to try to regain control with Brexit bill and policy blitz

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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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Lying to parliament a resigning matter, says Raab, amid claims PM misled MPs

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Justice secretary says allegations that Boris Johnson lied about No 10 lockdown party are ‘nonsense’

Dominic Raab has admitted that lying to parliament is “normally” a resigning matter, amid claims that the prime minister deliberately misled MPs over his knowledge of a Downing Street party.

Boris Johnson’s former senior aide Dominic Cummings had earlier accused the prime minister of lying when No 10 denied Johnson had been warned against allowing a “bring your own booze” garden party during lockdown.

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Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his £10-a-month blog

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Since he left Downing Street, Boris Johnson’s former adviser has been setting out his worldview – and settling scores – on his Substack. Could it help us understand the most notorious man in British politics?

Who is the most interesting writer about politics in Britain today? No question, it’s Dominic Cummings. The Substack blog he started in June last year is not cheap – £10 a month for an erratic and irregular output via email – but it’s worth it. Whenever and whatever he does post, you can be sure it will contain plenty of extraordinary ideas, unexpected insights and eye-popping indiscretions. Cummings appears to have little or no filter on his thoughts, with the result that his writing offers as clear a view into the dark heart of contemporary politics as is available anywhere. He has no time for any of the usual pieties. What you get is a voracious intellect – Cummings is interested in everything from 19th-century German history to quantum physics – coupled with a tireless curiosity about anything that lies outside the conventional wisdom. It’s a revelation.

As Boris Johnson’s former right-hand man – and the architect of Brexit and the Tories’ 2019 election landslide – Cummings is nothing if not divisive. Since Johnson fired him in late 2020, Cummings has turned on the prime minister and made it his mission to force him out of office. If your enemy’s enemy is your friend, this makes it hard for many of Cummings’ former critics to know what to think of him now.

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Dominic Cummings makes new claim of party in No 10 garden in lockdown

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Former aide says he put in writing that event – five days after photographed gathering – should not happen

Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings has alleged there was a lockdown-breaking party in the Downing Street garden in May 2020 after an emailed invitation to “socially distanced drinks”.

Cummings, who left No 10 in November that year, said people were invited to the gathering by a senior Downing Street official who he said should have been removed from their job because of failings over Covid.

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