Cummings: Sedwill’s departure ‘set off bomb’ across Whitehall

Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser told the Covid-19 Inquiry he ‘begged’ the then-prime minister not to effectively sack the top civil servant.

Mark Sedwill losing his job as cabinet secretary “set off a kind of bomb across the whole system”, Dominic Cummings has told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser said he “begged” the then-prime minister not to effectively sack Mr – now Lord – Sedwill, despite using obscenities to describe him in WhatsApp messages.

Having been cabinet secretary from 2018, Lord Sedwill announced his departure from the role in June 2020 amid reports of clashes with Mr Cummings.

I begged the PM not to do it

Dominic Cummings

Mr Cummings told the inquiry on Tuesday that his exit “was one of the most disastrous moments of the entire 2020 because it set off a kind of bomb across the whole system.

“I begged the PM not to do it, I knew what would happen – the same as every single HR conversation you’ve ever had with anybody.

“It was a total disaster.”

Earlier, the inquiry heard that Mr Cummings believed Lord Sedwill “did not have visibility of the fundamental disasters that were unfolding inside the Cabinet Office.”

Counsel to the inquiry Hugo Keith KC said: “You use obscenities to describe him, and then in a series of texts and WhatsApps you said he was off the pace, he was unable, essentially, to function at all as the head of the Cabinet Office.”

Mr Cummings said: “I don’t think I actually said that he wasn’t able to function at all, but the rest of what you said is correct.

“And that is not just my view.

“Part of what I was expressing to the prime minister was that other people in the Cabinet Office and crucial people in officials, not political people, in the prime minister’s office, that said to me ‘we fear that both the Cabinet Office has gone dreadfully wrong, and that Mark doesn’t understand how badly wrong this has all gone’.”

The hearing was shown a WhatsApp message from Mr Cummings, dated March 12 2020, in which he complains: “Sedwill babbling about chickenpox god f****** help us.”

Explaining the reference, Mr Cummings said the then-cabinet secretary wanted the then-prime minister to go on television and encourage people to hold the equivalent of “chickenpox parties” to promote herd immunity.

Mr Cummings described this as “terrifying”, saying it made officials question “who on earth is briefing the most important official in the country along these lines”.

After leaving Downing Street Lord Sedwill, who took up his seat in the House of Lords in October 2021, said that “demoralising” anonymous criticism of officials had “risen in the last few years” and was “damaging” to the process of governance.

He was replaced as the country’s top civil servant by Simon Case and as national security adviser by Mr Johnson’s chief EU negotiator David Frost.