COVID inquiry: No 10 had ‘unbelievably bullish’ approach to pandemic and thought UK ‘would sail through it’
Boris Johnson’s government displayed an “unbelievably bullish” approach to coronavirus early in the pandemic and sat “laughing at Italians” in meetings, a former civil servant has said.
The former prime minister was “confident the UK would sail through” the outbreak of the disease and warned against “over-correcting” on something he thought “was unlikely to have a huge impact and for which – in any case – we were well prepared”, according to Helen MacNamara.
Ms MacNamara, who served as deputy cabinet secretary during the pandemic, told the COVID inquiry there had been a “jovial tone” in early cabinet meetings and that “sitting there and saying it was great and sort of laughing at the Italians was just … it felt how it sounds”.
“I would say that undoubtedly the sort of unbelievably bullish, we’re going to be great at everything approach is not a smart mentality to have inside a government meeting,” she added.
Helen MacNamara spoke to the COVID inquiry on Wednesday
Ms McNamara said that her “injections of caution” in January and February 2020 “did not register” with Mr Johnson.
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She recounted a “scary experience” on 13 March when she realised just how much trouble the UK was in and relayed that to the prime minister’s top team in no uncertain terms.
The alarmed exchange – 10 days before the first lockdown – followed a conversation with Department for Health official Mark Sweeney who “had been told for years that there is a whole plan for this (pandemic)”.
“But there was no plan”, he told her.
Ms MacNamara then walked into the prime minister’s study where Dominic Cummings was sat with other senior officials – and told them: “I think we’re absolutely f****d, I think this country is heading for a disaster, I think we’re going to kill thousands of people.”
Mr Cummings’s reply was: “I think you are right. I think it is a disaster.” He told her he would speak to the prime minister the next day to sketch out a Plan B – diverging from the previous plan to manage COVID in the community.
Ms McNamara confirmed this is an accurate account of events on 13 March
The events were recounted in a statement from Mr Cummings, Downing Street’s former top aide, which Ms MacNamara said was accurate.
She told the inquiry: “I’d spent most of the day that Friday … really trying to gauge how much of a problem I thought we had.
“It was a sense of foreboding, like I hope nobody sitting in that office ever has again actually. It was a very, very scary experience.
“I felt that it wasn’t in any doubt in my mind at that point that we were heading for a total disaster and we had to do everything in our power to make it impact as little as possible in the time we had available in the circumstances we were in.”
The inquiry also heard:
• It would be “hard to pick one day where the regulations were followed” in Downing Street;
• There was an “absence of humanity” in some government decisions, such as over prisons;
• Westminster and Whitehall are “endemically sexist” but this got worse during the pandemic;
• There was a “toxic” culture under Boris Johnson in Whitehall;
• Matt Hancock displayed “nuclear levels” of overconfidence and a pattern of reassuring colleagues the pandemic was being dealt with in ways that were not true
The COVID inquiry is currently examining government decision-making during the pandemic, and has this week heard from a number of senior government figures including Mr Cummings and former communications director Lee Cain.
The officials have painted a picture of chaos, dysfunctionality, incompetence and backstabbing at the heart of government during the COVID crisis.
‘Toxic culture in Downing Street’
Ms MacNamara said “there was definitely a toxic culture”.
She said the “horrible” foul-mouthed messages sent by Mr Cummings about her, including calling her a ****, were “both surprising and not surprising to me, and I don’t know which is worse”.
She added: “It is disappointing to me that the prime minister didn’t pick him up on the use of some of that violent and misogynistic language.”
She also said that Westminster and Whitehall are “endemically sexist” environments but No 10 and the Cabinet Office became even worse during the pandemic when women had to “turn their screens off” on Zoom meetings or were “sitting in the back row” and “rarely spoke”.
She told the west London hearing that areas of policy to suffer as a result of the “macho” culture were issues including domestic abuse, carers and childcare and abortions during the pandemic.
Govt displayed ‘nuclear levels of confidence despite no plan’
Former health secretary Matt Hancock also came in for criticism during the hearing, in which it was said he claimed “time and time again” that there were plans in place to deal with a pandemic.
Matt Hancock displayed overconfidence, the inquiry heard
Ms MacNamara said she was “jarred” by one particular incident in which she went to check to see if he needed help but: “He took up a batsman’s stance outside the cabinet room and said, ‘They bowl them at me, I knock them away’.”
She she said she included this in her evidence as it shows “nuclear levels of confidence that were being deployed which I do think is a problem”.
She continued: “Going back to my humanity point, I think that this failure to appreciate all the time that what we were doing was making decisions that were going to impact on everybody’s lives, and that meant lots of real people and real consequences.
“I don’t think there was ever enough attention paid to that.”
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
Source: Summer Meng
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Source: jmhorp
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
Related: Bitcoin mining using coal energy down 43% since 2011 — Report
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
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Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
OKX was among the first crypto exchanges to receive a license under Europe’s new Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation via its Malta hub in January 2025.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.
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Authorities in the US state of Massachusetts continue targeting unlawful cryptocurrency market practices, with a local court fining crypto financial services firm CLS Global.
A federal court in Boston on April 2 sentenced CLS Global on criminal charges related to fraudulent manipulation of crypto trading volume, according to an announcement from the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office.
In addition to a $428,059 fine, the court prohibited CLS Global from offering services in the US for a probation period of three years.
CLS Global, a crypto market maker registered in the United Arab Emirates, in January pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit market manipulation and one count of wire fraud.
CLS agreed to manipulate the FBI’s “trap token” NexFundAI
The charges against CLS Global followed an undercover law enforcement operation involving NexFundAI, a token created by the FBI as part of a sting operation in May 2024.
CLS Global was among at least three firms that took the FBI’s bait and agreed to provide “market maker services” for NexFundAI, including a fraudulent scheme to attract investors to purchase the token.
In October 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges against CLS and its employee, Andrey Zhorzhes. The US securities regulator also filed complaints against two other NexFundAI manipulators, Hong Kong-linked ZM Quant Investment and Russia-linked Gotbit Consulting.
CLS Global’s profile
According to CLS Global CEO Filipp Veselov, the company was founded in 2017 to fill in a “huge gap in the market for high-quality market-making solutions and trading consulting.”
Prior to CLS, Veselov worked at the Russian cryptocurrency exchange platform Latoken, which is advertised as a “global digital asset exchange” and has about 370,000 followers on X.
The CLS team also includes chief revenue officer Pavel Singaevskii, who previously served as sales manager at Stex, a crypto platform that reportedly ceased operations without warning in 2023.
Source: CLS Global
According to CLS Global’s X page, the platform continues operating and has more than 110,000 followers at the time of publication.
How much wash trading is in crypto?
Wash trading is an illegal practice involving artificially inflating trading volume by repeatedly buying and selling the same asset, generating a misleading perception of demand.
According to a January 2025 report by the US blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the crypto market has at least $2.6 billion in estimated wash traded volumes, or just about 2% of total daily crypto trading volumes, as reported by CoinGecko.
Estimated wash trade volume in crypto. Source: Chainalysis
Related: Russian Gotbit founder strikes $23M plea deal with US prosecutors
Some studies indicate that wash trading makes up a bigger share of the crypto market.
In 2022, the US National Bureau of Economic Research reported that illegal wash trading may account for as much as 70% of average trading volumes on unregulated exchanges.
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