Dominic Cummings to reveal only copy of ‘crucial Covid document’
Dominic Cummings has asked Twitter if he should give a “crucial…document from Covid decision making” to a Westminster committee or to auction it off for charity, before quickly backtracking and saying he will do both.
Cummings will appear in front of a House of Commons committee meeting next week to give evidence about the government’s Covid response, with Boris Johnson’s former chief aide expected to blame his ex-boss for the UK’s high death toll.
He tweeted today to say he had “the only copy of a crucial historical document from Covid decision-making”.
He then created a Twitter poll over whether he should post it on his blog and give it to the Science and Technology Select Committee or to auction it and give the proceeds to a Covid charity.
He hastily deleted his tweet and said he was always going to do both of these things.
The former Vote Leave mastermind also criticised the government’s border policy as “a joke” and said there should have been “human challenge” vaccine trials in the summer.
He added: “One of the most fundamental and unarguable lessons of Feb-March is that secrecy contributed greatly to the catastrophe. Openness to scrutiny would have exposed government errors weeks earlier than happened.
“The Covid plan was supposed to be ‘world class’ but turned out to be part disaster, part non-existent. I urged inside government to do a review of other contingency plans for more dangerous things than Covid, a largely open process.”
Cummings has increasingly started to hit out at the government’s Covid response since leaving Number 10 in December last year.
At a Westminster committee meeting in March he said Department of Health was a “smoking ruin” under health secretary Matt Hancock.
He has also said that Johnson’s indecisiveness during discussions whether to implement a second lockdown last October cost lives.
In response to Cummings’ tweets this morning, Johnson’s spokesman said: “I’m not going to speculate about what information individuals may or may not submit to committees.”