Eye-opening messages sent between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings about the government’s handling of the start of the pandemic have been released for the first time.
In a WhatsApp exchange between the former prime minister and his then chief of staff, released by the Covid inquiry, Mr Cummings described the Cabinet Office as “terrifyingly s***”, and said it had no proper plans in place for lockdowns.
The messages also revealed that Mr Cummings told his boss that some civil servants wanted to delay ordering people to stay at home as they “haven’t done the work and don’t work weekends“.
The shocking messages also reveal Mr Johnson thought it was “wrong” for the prime minister to meet Scotland’s leader Nicola Sturgeon and Wales’s first minister Mark Drakeford regularly during the pandemic.
Mr Drakeford had been frustrated by what he saw as a lack of meetings with Mr Johnson’s government, but the PM believed working closely with the heads of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland would leave the UK looking like a “mini-EU of four nations”.
“That is not, in my view, how devolution is supposed to work,” he said.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Eye-opening messages sent between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings about the government’s handling of the start of the pandemic have been released for the first time.
In a WhatsApp exchange between the former prime minister and his then chief of staff, released by the Covid inquiry, Mr Cummings described the Cabinet Office as “terrifyingly s***”, and said it had no proper plans in place for lockdowns.
In his witness statement to the Covid inquiry, Mr Johnson added that he often left Michael Gove to chair four-nation Cobra meetings, partly because he was a “target of nationalist ire” and did not want to provoke the Scottish National Party (SNP).
Mr Johnson said: “It is optically wrong, in the first place, for the UK prime minister to hold regular meetings with other DA [devolved administration] first ministers, as though the UK were a kind of mini EU of four nations and we were meeting as a ‘council’ in a federal structure.
He added that political advisors including Lee Cain and James Slack were having to “drive and direct” the response.
Dave Penman said: “The only lazy thing here is Cummings’ tired old tropes, self-aggrandising as the only saviour of the country.
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