The second round of public hearings examining the UK's handling of the COVID pandemic - Penny Mordaunt says her WhatsApp messages went missing

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The screenshot of the WhatsApp group chat from autumn 2020, provided by Mr Cummings, was displayed on screen during a session in which the senior lawyer for the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC, was drawing attention to what he called “dysfunctionality” at the heart of government.

Lee Cain - Mr Johnson’s head of communications - asks Mr Case what “are we talking about”.

“Whatever Carrie cares about, I guess,” replies Mr Case. “I was always told that Dom [Cummings] was the secret PM. How wrong they are. I look forward to telling select [committee] tomorrow… don’t worry about Dom, the real person in charge is Carrie.”

Mr Cain agrees and adds that “she doesn’t know [what] she is talking about either”.

The messages were sent in autumn of 2020 - around the time the government was reintroducing some Covid restrictions in England.

Carrie Johnson (née Symonds) was in a relationship with Mr Johnson before he became prime minister in 2019. They lived together in Downing Street and married in May 2021.

Mr Keith KC warned the inquiry that “due caution must be applied to the accuracy of WhatsApps which lack nuance and can be intemperate, and also diary entries, which may not accurately reflect the reality of the position day by day and which indeed may have been drafted for a different audience.”

However, he went on to suggest that the messages and other pieces of evidence, including diary entries and notes from Sir Patrick Vallance, demonstrated that factionalism and infighting were prevalent at a time when the government was responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Keith suggested that: "In the early part of the pandemic, the early months, the dysfunctionality… was reflective of the system, the structures, that were in place.

“Latterly the dysfunctionality lay more in the personalities and their working relationships and indeed the people who were in government.”

Naturally, BJ and his cronies will (later) deny that the government was an utter shambles and its reaction to the COVID pandemic was totally shambolic.

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“Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once!”

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There was a “lack of urgency” in government as coronavirus started to spread across the UK, a senior scientific adviser has told the Covid public inquiry.

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Prof Ferguson, director of the school of public health at Imperial College London, became a household name in the early stages of the pandemic with his modelling of the spread of Covid and as a member of the expert committee, Sage.

Giving evidence to the inquiry on Tuesday, he said he realised by late January 2020 that the government’s early policy of trying to contain the virus would not be possible with the limited border checks and other measures in place at the time. In an email to chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty on 2 February, he said it was already “quite likely” the virus had been imported into the UK from China.

Around the end of February he said he knew that the number of hospital cases was likely to overwhelm the NHS without stronger action to reduce transmission. By 10 March he said he was “extremely concerned” about the latest data. He told the inquiry he had been “frustrated” that some government officials had not “comprehended the figures”.

“There was a lack of urgency, let’s put it that way,” he said.

He emailed Ben Warner, a data scientist brought in to Downing Street by Dominic Cummings, asking him to make sure the prime minister was shown graphs with projections of between 4,000 and 6,000 deaths a day “under the strategies being considered”.

“This event is in the natural-disaster category, and the cure (eg massive social distancing, shutdowns) could be worse than the disease,” he said in the email.

Asked why he sent the message, Prof Ferguson said: “It felt uncomfortable, but at the time it felt like it needed to be said. I was increasingly concerned about this disconnect between the numbers we were actually presenting, and the reality of what that would actually look like.”

On 16 March Prof Ferguson and his team published new research suggesting that 250,000 could die without more drastic action. The government started to impose stricter measures around that time.

On 16 March the public were asked to stop all non-essential contact and on 18 March schools were closed, before the full lockdown was announced on 23 March.

BJ and his cabinet were shilly-shallying and dilly-dallying while a storm threatened … :cloud_with_lightning_and_rain:

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It’s a pity that the hearing was after the covid pandemic and not before. If people reckon they could have done better, why didn’t they step up to the plate? It’s easy to be an expert after the event.

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Well, I could have done better and I said so at the time.

It didn’t take an expert to realise that people, like my brother-in-law, were dying from something that was, at that stage, not understood, highly infectious and out of control, but it did require someone with brains in overall charge of the response - unfortunately all we had was BJ, besotted with Carrie, and a bunch of incompetent cronies making it up on the fly … :thinking:

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COVID inquiry: There could have been fewer coronavirus-related deaths with earlier lockdown, scientist says

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Professor Steven Riley, who worked for Imperial College London at the time of the pandemic, told the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, in his witness statement, that the government should have called the lockdown on 9 March 2020 instead of 23 March.

Prof Riley, who now works for the UK Health Security Agency, said subsequent data had shown that people began to change their behaviour on or around 16 March, a few days before the public was ordered to stay at home.

Asked to elaborate, he told the inquiry: “Once we had lab-confirmed deaths in ICUs [intensive care units] with no travel history, no obvious connections to any out of country social networks (1), even a handful of those would indicate that we would be rapidly progressing in our epidemic.”

(1) Like my brother-in-law

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AFAIK, Donkeyman was first to raise a thread about the danger of the then scarcely-known virus:

20 Jan '20 20:10

It ended up with over 5,000 posts.

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I think that might just be missing the entire point here. The experts were giving expert advice before and during the pandemic. The government did not heed that advice.

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This ruddy probing IMO is a waste of money when there are SO MANY homeless and others housed in completely inappropriate almost derelict old buildings. When are we going to get a government people-centric and not self-centred nest feathers :man_shrugging:

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Quite … :+1:

Amid criticism that it was too slow to act, the Government now faces claims that Britain was in a poor state of readiness, calls to order protective gear were ignored and its own scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears.

The Prime Minister is said to have missed the first meeting on January 24, which lasted an hour, and then four more as the virus became a massive threat to the UK.

Mr Johnson attended his first Cobra meeting about the new strain of coronavirus on March 2 - five weeks after the first one - as the UK had about three dozen confirmed cases.

For some of the time BJ was busy with other matters:

Boris Johnson spent nearly two weeks out of the public eye, staying at a taxpayer-funded country mansion with his girlfriend as ministers held emergency meetings on the coronavirus crisis.

As the nation faced the twin crises of flooding caused by Storm Dennis and the rapidly escalating Covid-19 outbreak, the Prime Minister was staying at Chevening, a 115 room lakeside mansion set in 3,500 acres in the Kent countryside.

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The Grade-I listed, 17th century mansion is traditionally the country residence of the Foreign Secretary. But the PM stayed there because renovations were being performed on his own grace-and-favour mansion, Chequers.

After chairing the first meeting of his newly reshuffled cabinet on Friday, February 14, he decamped to Chevening with partner Carrie Symonds.

The UK had already raised the threat level of the virus from low to moderate two weeks earlier, after the first two cases were confirmed on British soil - a pair of Chinese nationals who fell ill at a hotel in York.

NHS England had already declared its first “level 4 critical incident” at the end of January.

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And there are still many in the Tory party who think he is the best PM since Thatcher and would have him back in No 10 immediately if they could.

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Hi

Boris does not do detail, at all, his brain is not wired that way.

He also hates taking decisions.

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Very true. He does neither detail nor decision. Nor truth. He does do bombast very well.
That’s what this country needs - more bombast.

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Sorry to hear about your BiL Omah…
When was it that Prime Ministers had a clue how the common people live? They are all cut from the same Eton/Oxbridge cloth and are money and power orientated. I bet none of them, past and present, could wire up a simple three pin plug…
I agree that at the first sign of the pandemic we should have lifted the drawbridge and stopped all forms of transport into the UK. I still think that all airports should be closed forever.
Flights now…
Flights Now
How can you possibly consider any forms of pollution control until this has been addressed…

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He also hates spending his own money - if he can get something for free then he will, otherwise he will find a “supporter” to pay the bill … of course, he is not averse to rewarding those supporters with positions, titles and government contacts … :roll_eyes:

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Truth - he doesn’t know the meaning of truth:

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The government’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme had been running that summer of 2020. At the time, there was fierce debate about the need for social-distancing measures to control the virus.

On Sunday 20 September 2020, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson called a Zoom meeting of scientists to discuss the government’s response to sharply rising Covid infections.

Dame Angela, then chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, who co-chaired the influential SPI-M modelling group during the pandemic, was one of the attendees, along with her colleague Prof John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

Then Chancellor Rishi Sunak also dialled in, along with senior Downing Street officials including Dominic Cummings, the government’s chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, and the then chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.

And on Thursday, the Covid inquiry was shown a private WhatsApp exchange between Dame Angela and Prof Edmunds, sent at the time of the meeting, which refers to Rishi Sunak as "Dr Death, the Chancellor".

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry he was unable recall if that had been a specific reference to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which had subsidised food in pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues over the summer, while Covid cases had been low.

But in earlier testimony to the inquiry, he said he was “still angry” about the policy. “It was one thing to take your foot off the brake - but another to put your foot on the accelerator,” he told the inquiry.

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry 45,000 people had just died - and while the pub and restaurant sector needed support, the government could have just given them money.

“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk,” he added.

The Downing Street meeting had also involved scientists from what Sir Patrick described in an email as the “let it rip” brigade. That included Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, and his colleague Prof Sunetra Gupta - both of whom were critics of several lockdown-related measures.

And in her WhatsApp exchange, Dame Angela uses an expletive to refer to an individual - thought to be Prof Heneghan - and his evidence, to which Prof Edmunds replies: “Every statistic is wrong.”

Well, whatever Dame Angela said, I’m sure that it suited the individual and I’m delighted that she so harshly judged the incompetent yet deadly Sunak … :clap:

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Simon Case, who has been cabinet secretary since 2020, is expected to return to work in a few weeks. The absence comes as the government grapples with challenges at home and abroad, ahead of a general election expected next year.

Mr Case was appointed to his role when Boris Johnson was prime minister and has been embroiled in a string of controversies, including the Partygate scandal, during his time in post. His name has also come up in reports about the inquiry into bullying allegations against former Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, and the arrangement of an £800,000 credit facility to Mr Johnson.

And last week, WhatsApp messages in which he complained about the influence of Mr Johnson’s wife, Carrie Johnson, were released by the Covid-19 inquiry, which was expected to hear Mr Case give evidence in the coming weeks.

A Cambridge graduate with a PhD in political history, Mr Case ascended through the ranks of the civil service after joining in 2006. He held roles in the UK’s intelligence agency, GCHQ, and in the Royal Household on the way to the job top. At the age of 41, Ms Case became the youngest cabinet secretary in recent times.

Given his relative lack of experience, his appointment surprised senior civil servants and was seen by critics as a political move by Mr Johnson, the then-prime minister.

The inquiry will, presumably, continue.

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I saw the evidence given by Prof Edmunds about the second wave and the advice given to government. Specifically advice given to Johnson. The advice was lockdown for a second time but do it early. The aim was to get control of Covid early or wait for the cases to rise and thus let Covid get control. Which would force a lockdown anyway. And more deaths, and a more exhausted NHS. Guess what Johnson did?

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Obviously, Johnson heeded the advice and went for the hard, fast lockdown thus saving millions of lives … :mini:

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Actually, BJ and Dr Death first opened up pubs, restaurants (Eat Out to Help Out) and hairdressers then later theatres, bowling alleys and soft play areas, thus setting off the second wave of the pandemic … :scream_cat: