Dominic Cummings has spoken – and it turns out this government is even worse than we thought

There are obvious reasons as to why Cummings is speaking now, not least to be the one to sling the first mud, but it paints a picture of a government functioning terribly

Dominic Cummings had promised MPs clear answers during his appearance in front of the health and science select committees – and he has not disappointed.

The signs were there when Cummings prefaced his first answer with a more-than-likely prepped opening statement that set out his own apology for how the Covid-19 pandemic has been handled. Contrition is welcome, given the death toll during the last year or so, but it also opened the door for Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser – or assistant to the prime minister – as Cummings corrected the panel to let rip on his former colleagues and government ministers.

First, the broader elements. Cummings said the UK had failed to “hear the alarm bells” when Covid-19 hit other countries early last year and that he and “senior ministers, senior officials... fell disastrously short” of what the “public expects during a crisis like this”.

“I’d like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am,” he told the gathered MPs.

Then came the more personal elements, exposing a government that appeared even more of a shambles than the reporting in the last few months had suggested. He called the planning in the early stages of 2020 “a classic historic example of groupthink” and that if outside experts were allowed to scrutinise the plans then “we would have figured out at least six weeks earlier that there was an alternative plan” and the original would have been exposed as “complete garbage”.

Cummings said the government had not been on a “war footing” by February – mentioning a holiday Johnson took around that time specifically – and that by March the whole situation had become “like an out-of-control movie”. Johnson himself, according to Cummings, had still seen Covid-19 as a “scare story” in February and that both the prime minister and Cummings himself had not attended early Cobra meetings centred around the virus.

“Certainly, the view of various officials inside No 10 was if we have the PM chair Cobra meetings, and he just tells everyone ‘don’t worry about it, I’m going to get [England’s chief medical officer] Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus, so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of’, that would not help, actually, serious planning,” Cummings said.

Expanding on the competence of Johnson later Cummings said that he was out of his depth and that thousands of people would be able to provide better leadership. He added that it was was “crackers” that Johnson was in his position and that an election system that offered a choice between Johnson and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the 2019 general election had gone “extremely badly wrong”.

There are obvious reasons as to why Cummings is doing this now, not least to be the one to sling the first mud, but it paints a picture of a government functioning terribly – at a time when the country needed it the most.

Cummings appeared to have saved his greatest ire for the health secretary, Matt Hancock, who he suggested should have been sacked. “I think the secretary of state for health should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 things,” said Cummings, “including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly.”

That is a big accusation – and one that Hancock is sure to refute when he gets a chance to respond – but when pressed by MPs, Cummings gave more than one example where he believed lying had occurred and suggested that other officials may have lost confidence in the conduct of the health secretary at the time.

This all adds up to a situation that it's hard not to feel flabbergasted at. Yes, there have been plenty of column inches written about the mistakes the government has made during the pandemic, but it hard to come away from Cummings’s testimony – which is still progressing as I write – without feeling seriously demoralised.