Dominic Cummings feels the heat at the Covid Inquiry as he is accused of poisoning the pandemic response with toxic briefings against his colleagues

Dominic Cummings was left squirming yesterday as he was accused of poisoning the pandemic response with toxic briefings against colleagues.

In an explosive and expletive-riddled four-hour hearing at the Covid Inquiry, Boris Johnson’s former chief aide was confronted over a string of vicious messages that appeared designed to undermine fellow senior figures.

Gasps were heard as one message was read out in which Mr Cummings used a vile four-letter word to describe the former deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara.

Urging Mr Johnson to sack her for ‘causing trouble’, he offered to ‘handcuff her and escort her from the building’. 

He added: ‘I don’t care how it is done but that woman must be out of our hair. We cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that ****.’

Dominic Cummings was left squirming as he was accused of poisoning the pandemic response with toxic briefings against colleagues

Cummings was confronted over a string of vicious messages that appeared designed to undermine fellow senior figures

Dominic Cummings ranted at the PM in a series of missives as their relationship disintegrated, warning that the government was being consumed by ‘mayhem’

Confronted with the message, Mr Cummings defiantly claimed he was ‘not misogynistic’ and was ‘much ruder about men’.

But he struggled when asked whether he had contributed to the ‘toxic atmosphere’ in Downing Street that has been widely blamed for hampering the Government’s Covid response.

He also became flustered when quizzed about why he took his wife and son on a notorious 25-mile trip to Barnard Castle in Co Durham at the height of lockdown. He had previously claimed – to much ridicule – that he wanted to test his eyesight after catching Covid.

The inquiry heard that the aide, described as the ‘most empowered chief of staff Downing Street has seen’, repeatedly urged the PM to conduct a reshuffle to clear out ‘useless f***pigs’ in the Cabinet, including Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson. 

He described the then health secretary Mr Hancock as ‘sowing chaos’ calling him a ‘proven liar’ and said the Government could not continue ‘with that **** still in charge of the NHS’.

Other senior figures Mr Cummings clashed with were described as ‘morons’, while Mr Johnson was disparagingly referred to as ‘the trolley’ for his tendency to veer from decision to decision, changing his mind.

The packed inquiry room in Paddington, west London, also heard an extraordinary message in which Mr Johnson personally blamed Mr Cummings for ‘demented’ briefings against his wife Carrie and for presiding over a ‘disgusting orgy of narcissism’ at a time of international crisis.

In the message, sent two days after Mr Cummings quit No 10 in November 2020 following a series of rows, Mr Johnson said his wife ‘hasn’t briefed anyone’, contrary to claims being made about her.

Mr Johnson, pictured out running in Oxfordshire on Tuesday, has yet to give his own account to the inquiry

He added: ‘Look at the claims made on behalf of allies of Lee (communications chief Cain) and Dom. That I’m out in six months. That I can’t take decisions. That Carrie is secretly forging lockdown policy!! And about a billion equally demented claims.

‘Are you responsible for all that c***? No? Then look at it from my point of view. This is a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism by a government that should be solving a national crisis.’

Mr Johnson appeared to offer to discuss the issue but Mr Cummings responded simply by blocking further messages from him.

The content of Mr Cummings’ messages forced broadcasters showing the inquiry live yesterday to issue apologies to viewers or drop the sound so often that it became difficult for the casual observer to follow.

Mr Cummings acknowledged that his language was ‘appalling’ but insisted his assessments of colleagues were widely shared in government. Asked whether he had contributed to the ‘toxic atmosphere’ in No 10, he initially appeared to agree, saying: ‘Certainly the atmosphere was toxic in all sorts of ways, I contributed to it in the sense of I’d said the system is broken, a lot of the people need to be removed and it needs to be rebuilt.’

But pressed on whether he was admitting his role in poisoning the atmosphere, he backtracked, saying: ‘No, my answer is not yes.’

He admitted that his views and actions had led to ‘bad relations with some people’ at a time of crisis, but said his interventions were ‘necessary and justified’.

Lee Cain, who also gave evidence at the Covid Inquiry, said that quick decisions were necessary

Mr Cummings denied he was ‘the problem’ but acknowledged it was ‘crackers’ that he had been handed a major role within No 10. The former Vote Leave chief painted a chaotic picture of the Government’s early response to Covid and renewed his attacks on Mr Johnson.

He said Whitehall had been gripped by ‘group think’ and described the Cabinet Office, which was at the heart of the Government’s response, as a ‘dumpster fire’.

Mr Cummings briefly acknowledged that ‘to be fair’, Mr Johnson had faced the greatest challenge of any prime minister since Winston Churchill in dealing with the pandemic, with experts offering ‘wildly different’ advice.

But he accused the PM of destabilising the Government’s response by veering from one policy position to another, saying that ‘pretty much everyone’ referred to him as ‘the trolley’.

In a wide-ranging evidence session, Mr Cummings accused the Cabinet of being ‘largely irrelevant’, and Mr Johnson having an ‘inability to chair it’.

Mr Cummings also said it was ‘pretty insane’ that ‘so many senior people’ – including the prime minister – were on holiday or away during a ten-day period in mid-February as the crisis deepened across Europe.

He said he did not think asking the PM to come back from holiday and talk to Whitehall in general ‘would be productive’ partly because Mr Johnson had effectively dismissed Covid as being no worse than swine flu.

Mr Cummings also said it was ‘pretty insane’ that ‘so many senior people’ – including the prime minister – were on holiday or away during a ten-day period in mid-February as the crisis deepened across Europe

He added: ‘It was part of the general view from the Department of Health and the Cabinet Office that this was all still in the future. They weren’t banging alarm bells at this point, far from it – they were going skiing.’

Mr Cummings said the initial response of ‘the system’, which he blamed for most failings, was to take a ‘herd immunity’ strategy, which would see vast numbers catch Covid at a time when there was no treatment. But he said this became unsustainable in March when it became clear that the number of sick and dying would overwhelm the NHS.

He said that by early March he had ‘an appalling feeling that I’m in one of those historic catastrophes, like July 1914’.

He added: ‘At this point I remember I was sitting in an office and suddenly overhearing people having phone calls about whether local authorities could book out ice rinks and get trucks to carry massive numbers of bodies and store them in ice rinks.’

He said he then battled to persuade Mr Johnson to switch to imposing a national lockdown, which was finally brought in on March 23. The inquiry also heard claims that Mr Johnson described Covid as ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’.

In a diary entry in August 2020, the chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance described a ‘quite bonkers set of exchanges’ with the PM.

Earlier, Mr Johnson’s former communications chief Mr Cain said the pandemic ‘was the wrong crisis’ for Mr Johnson, because his boss was prone to indecision and would ‘oscillate’ between one plan and another.

The inquiry heard Mr Cain and Mr Cummings privately agreed they were ‘exhausted’ with the Prime Minister in March 2020, just before the first national lockdown was announced, after he went ‘back to Jaws mode’.

Mr Cain told the hearing: ‘The PM at the time would refer to the mayor of Jaws from the film who wanted to keep the beaches open. I think he had a routine from previous in his career where he would use that as a joke for one of his after-dinner speeches.’

He praised the PM for his handling of Brexit but added: ‘If you look at something like Covid, you need quick decisions, and you need people to hold the course and, you know, have that strength of mind to do that over a sustained period of time and not constantly unpick things, because that’s where the problems lie.

‘So I felt that it was the wrong challenge for him.’

The inquiry into the pandemic that claimed 230,000 lives in the UK is in its second stage, examining government decision-making.

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