Dominic Cummings had his chance in government – on his own evidence, it could hardly have gone any worse
“I think we are absolutely f**ked.”
These were the words, according to Dominic Cummings, that the second most senior civil servant in the country, Helen McNamara, announced to the prime minister in a meeting in early March last year.
She went on, apparently: “I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill a lot of people.”
Dominic Cummings is not, generally speaking, overly generous in his appraisal of the Whitehall establishment, the machinery of the British state. But he did, in his very long hours of very jaw-dropping evidence to a House of Commons select committee, at least give McNamara’s soothsaying abilities the credit they deserved.
By this point, she had been told that the pandemic action plan that had been in place for years kind of didn’t really exist. It also came after other very senior officials had come to view it as beneficial for the nation if the actual prime minister just didn’t attend crucial meetings on coronavirus, as he had a tendency to render them ineffective, by making suggestions such as him being injected with Covid on live television, by Chris Whitty, to reassure the public it was nothing to worry about. (Shortly after this point, you may recall, he nearly died.)
It also came after the only person more senior than McNamara, the cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill, had told Boris Johnson he should go on live television and encourage people to infect one another with Covid – “It’s like the old chicken pox parties.” Sedwill had it explained to him, by Cummings, that it wasn’t quite like chicken pox, because chicken pox wasn’t spreading exponentially throughout the world and killing thousands of people.
The environment in which these discussions were happening also involved, as something of a sideshow, President Trump dialling in to ask for assistance in bombing the Middle East, and the prime minister’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, diverting significant government resources to deal with a story in The Times that she was planning on returning her rescue dog, which the No 10 press office had to work on rebutting.
Or, as Cummings put it: “Part of the building was arguing about whether we were going to bomb Iraq, part of the building was arguing about whether we were going to quarantine or not, and the prime minister’s girlfriend was going crackers about something completely trivial.”
These little vignettes set the scenes that shaped our little lives, or in 150,000 or so cases, ended them. They paint a picture of a government not so much blindsided by Covid as blind blanket bombed. Of being hopelessly out of its depth at the beginning and then choosing, of its own free will, to freedive to the bottom of the ocean.
There was no plan for financial incentives, no plan for isolation. There was no plan, even, “to bury the hundreds of thousands of bodies”.
Events, be they a once in a hundred year pandemic or the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, have a habit of confirming people’s pre-existing beliefs. Dominic Cummings has been saying for several decades that Whitehall is dysfunctional. He was so obsessed with reforming it that Brexit, with all its many misfortunes, was a price worth paying just to have a go at sorting some of it out.
In some ways, it is fortunate, at least for those whose job it will be to dramatise all this in the near future, that Cummings just happened to be in the hot seat at its very hottest moment, seeing all of his suspicions come true.
It was, in his own words, “quite tragic”. Tragic, he explained, that he had seen all this coming, had blogged about it in March 2019, had preached extensively about the need to challenge the Whitehall consensus, but when it came to it, when he was actually there, and expected to do the job he had been brought in to do, and was so trusted by the prime minister to do, he failed to do it.
He admitted this, of course. He over-admitted it. “I am not a smart person,” he said. He even explained that it was a “broken system” that gave the people a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, and “crackers” that someone like him, which is to say Dominic Cummings, not Boris Johnson, was there, at a time like this, making important decisions, when so many better people were available.
Which better people did he have in mind? Maybe Tim Gowers, the Fields Medal-winning mathematician who Cummings admitted he liked to phone every so often, to get his appraisal on Sage advice.
Perhaps there’ll be a time in the future to wonder how it is that Dominic Cummings, and not Tim Gowers, should have ascended to this powerful position. Time to wonder, perhaps, whether Tim Gowers, for example, would have decided that, actually, no, it isn’t worth telling all these outrageous lies about money for the NHS, and Turkey joining the EU, just to get what you want. That the price paid is too high, the corrosion to the system too severe.
There was, possibly, one admission that Cummings didn’t mean to make. It was the point, in early March, when he was aggressively telling the prime minister and others that the plan wasn’t going to work. That you had to lock down now. The thinking, then, was that locking down now would just push the misery into winter, when it would be more severe. “What if I was wrong?” he said. What if he succeeded in convincing the prime minister to lock down, and by the winter things were indeed worse, and that his persuasion had done immense harm.
It was an admission that, maybe, this stuff is harder than it looks. That writing angry blogs about how dysfunctional everything is, is easy. That maybe these complex, slow, organisations are doing a better job than even he still seems able to accept. He had his chance, after all, and, on his own evidence, things could hardly have been worse.
