Dominic Cummings: Political commentator John Rentoul answers 10 of your key questions

Dominic Cummings was still giving evidence to the joint health and science committees when readers started to take part in an “Ask Me Anything” event on The Independent website yesterday. Here is a selection of the questions, with the answers from our chief political commentator.

Pocclondon: Hancock being set up as the fall guy. Johnson will walk away largely unscathed and will still win the next election.

John Rentoul: Dominic Cummings obviously wants Hancock to fall. His demonology seems to put Matt Hancock, the health secretary, at the top. He kept coming back to how terrible he thinks Hancock is and how often he urged Boris Johnson to sack him. Johnson was ranked next as a target of Cummings’s contempt. Then he has his favourites: he praised Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, despite in effect saying that the scientific advisers got it wrong. Professor Chris Whitty often got a subsidiary complimentary mention. The only minister Cummings has time for is Rishi Sunak, which is curious given the extent to which he was an opponent of later lockdowns.

Spinning Hugo: What motivates Cummings’s obvious loathing of Hancock and liking for Sunak? To what extent would it be possible for Tory MPs to keep Johnson as a salesman, whilst leaving others to make the decisions he is so obviously unsuited to make?

JR: It seems to be personal, because Sunak appeared to be on the opposite side of internal arguments about lockdowns. I don’t think Cummings can be motivated by thinking he could get a job working for Sunak if he became prime minister after the fall of Johnson, which is something Cummings seems to be working for. Not even Cummings can be that unrealistic.

But I don’t think Tory MPs are going to get rid of Johnson for at least a while. He is surprisingly popular.

Forthis: Would you agree that the most important thing Cummings has said in terms of the governance of the UK is that it was “crazy” Cummings and Johnson were running the show at all?

JR: It was very odd for Cummings to say it was crackers that Johnson should be prime minister and that he, Cummings, should be working for him. The most unexpected aspect of his evidence was how apologetic and self-critical he was. He said it was terrible that the British people were offered a choice of Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at the last election, which implies that he thought Johnson was better than Corbyn (presumably because he would finally get us out of the EU), but otherwise totally unsuited to high office.

VSLVSL: Cummings has publicly acknowledged that our political system is broken. Do you think if Starmer embraced constitutional reform as a platform issue for Labour it would positively alter people’s perceptions of him?

JR: I’m afraid I don’t. I don’t think most people care much about constitutional reform. Unfortunately, I think people are more likely to agree with Cummings when he said we needed a dictator to run the pandemic response than they are to agree with fashionable causes such as proportional representation and an elected second chamber.

WillyTime: Surely Cummings is doing the spurned lover routine. How can anybody take him seriously?

JR: I think his motive is more about proving that he was right, even though by his evidence today, he was only four days ahead of the prime minister in wanting to shut the country down. He wanted Johnson to urge people to stay at home on 12 March rather than 16 March 2020.

I think we should take him seriously to the extent that he was “in the room when it happened” and he was influential – but we should treat his account and his opinions with scepticism. Recollections may differ. It was interesting that Greg Clark, the science committee chair, opened the session by asking about Cummings changing his blog retrospectively.

Jingscrivvens: Motive is relevant, but not the most important factor. If Cummings provides objective corroboration, as he has done with the whiteboard photo, then his motivation is no longer relevant. The real relevance is the truth of what actually occurred, what was said and who said it. Don’t let this government achieve another massive distraction to blur or obscure the truth.

JR: Absolutely right. I think the more fundamental problem is that Cummings’s criticisms are mostly about what should have been done with the benefit of hindsight. He was arguing for shutting down society just four days before Johnson did it, but now says that the borders should have been closed in early January. I’m not sure how useful that is.

ALH: As far as I am aware, Dom and Boris are very similar ideologically. I think most of what Cummings has done since the end of last year has been ego-driven revenge. Would you agree with me?

JR: I do agree. I think Cummings is more interested in science and in how government works, and probably more committed in principle to Brexit. I think Cummings is obviously ego-driven, although I think it may be more complicated than revenge. His former colleague Sam Freedman, a former special adviser at the education department under Michael Gove, spoke yesterday on Sky News about his fierce determination to prove he was right. That’s an emotion that we can all understand!

Ramned: I thought today’s proceedings were fascinating and in some cases kind of cathartic to me because I thought I was going crackers with some of the decisions the government were making during the crisis.

The thing is in all this whilst the government controls the right wing press and that the BBC is becoming supine towards them, none of this will really affect Johnson and Co in the long term. Am I correct in this?

JR: I think today’s proceedings help us understand what went on, which is valuable, and you are probably right that they won’t have much effect on Boris Johnson’s standing. I don’t attribute that to the right-wing press or BBC bias, though, but to the fact that ultimately Cummings’s criticisms weren’t as damaging as some of the colourful language suggested.

MickyRoh: If anything came out of Cummings today, it’s the need for a public inquiry into why he was leaking information to Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC. This is a national security issue.

JR: I think it is important that politicians and their advisers talk to journalists – I suppose I would say that because I am one, but that is how reporting works. Journalists need to talk to people in power to try to understand what they are doing. If Laura Kuenssberg didn’t talk to the prime minister’s chief adviser, she wouldn’t be doing her job.

Liz2020: What is crucial is the evidence around Johnson’s refusal to order a short lockdown in September 2020, contrary to advice. That led to tens and tens of thousands of what were – at that time – predictable but avoidable deaths and further devastating damage to the economy. If Johnson survives that then our democracy is in serious danger. I think much of the rest of it is distraction.

JR: At one point Cummings admitted that these decisions were difficult because there were arguments on both sides, and he seemed generally complimentary about Sir Patrick and Professor Whitty. They advised a lockdown in September, but obviously didn’t think it was so wrong to wait that they felt they should go public at the time – or resign, which was the ultimate leverage they had.

JR: Thanks everyone for your interesting questions. For me, the bottom line of seven hours of evidence is that Cummings wanted to shut down the country four days before Johnson did it, on 12 March rather than 16 March 2020; everything else about the early response – that we should have copied Taiwan – was what he concluded in retrospect. He hates Matt Hancock, but it is not obvious from Cummings’s account that anyone else would have handled PPE, or test and trace, significantly better. And he loves Rishi Sunak for obscure reasons that appear to cancel out Sunak’s opposition to lockdowns that Cummings supported.