‘Rishi thinks just let people die’: Dominic Cummings’ claim revealed in Sir Patrick Vallance’s COVID diary
Rishi Sunak thought the government should “just let people die” rather than see the country go into another lockdown, Dominic Cummings is said to have claimed.
A diary entry from the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said Mr Cummings made the remark during a heated meeting over whether to impose stricter pandemic measures back in October 2020.
In the extract, shown to the official COVID inquiry on Monday, Sir Patrick said the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, had argued against any lockdown, saying he was for “letting it all rip” and that those who would die from contracting the virus had “had a good innings”.
Politics live: Johnson ‘looked broken’ in COVID meetings, claims adviser
Sir Patrick then detailed a row between Mr Johnson and his chief adviser, with Mr Cummings calling for the PM to act, “arguing we need to save lives”.
The chief scientist described Mr Johnson as “getting very frustrated” and “throwing papers down” in the meeting, before saying: “Looks like we are in a really tough spot, a complete shambles. I really don’t want to do another national lockdown”.
But according to the entry, the prime minister was told “to go down this route of letting go, ‘you need to tell people – you need to tell them you are going to allow people to die”.
Boris Johnson was “frustrated” in meetings and didn’t want to introduce a lockdown in October 2020, says Sir Patrick Vallance
The meeting ended with an agreement to “beef up” the tier system being implemented across the country at the time and to “consider a national lockdown”.
Sir Patrick also wrote: “DC [Dominic Cummings] says ‘Rishi thinks just let people die and that’s OK.”
The scientific adviser concluded it “all feels like a complete lack of leadership” – words he stood by at Monday’s COVID inquiry hearing.
Asked about the extract by the inquiry’s legal team, Sir Patrick added: “It must have felt like a complete lack of leadership and reading it, it feels like quite a shambolic day.”
‘Risk’ of Eat Out To Help Out
Earlier in the hearing, Sir Patrick also revealed the government’s scientific and medical advisers were not told about Mr Sunak’s “Eat Out To Help Out” scheme until it was announced by the then chancellor, saying their advice about the increased risk of transmission would have been “very clear”.
Written evidence from Mr Sunak to the inquiry said: “I don’t recall any concerns about [the scheme] being expressed during ministerial discussions, including those attended by [Sir Patrick].”
PM has to answer serious allegations
Sir Patrick Vallance today detailed the tug of war in government in the run-up to the first and second lockdowns – and in the course of it, made some serious allegations which Rishi Sunak will have to answer when he appears before the inquiry.
Its seriousness is not just that it comes from the chief scientist – who has no political axe to grind – but that much of this evidence is not in hindsight, but from contemporaneous notes in his diary.
The Treasury’s Eat Out to Help Out Scheme has been much picked over in this inquiry and Sir Patrick confirms the department did not seek any scientific advice before launching it and that it would have increased transmission risk.
That brings us up to the most damaging allegation against Mr Sunak
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But asked about the inconsistency with his own statement, Sir Patrick said: “Around that time lots of measures were being released and you will see repeated references in various minutes and notes and emails and indeed, I am sure, in my private notes, to our concern that people were piling on more and more things and this would come to drive R above one and I think that was discussed at cabinet as well.
“So I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this was likely to cause, well, inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk and I think that would have been known by ministers.”
He added: “I would be very surprised if any minister didn’t understand that these openings carried risk.”
A Number 10 spokesperson said they would not be commenting on specific evidence while the inquiry was ongoing.
But they said Mr Sunak believed it was “important that we learn the lessons of COVID, and that where lessons are to be learned, we do that in the spirit of transparency and candour”, adding: The government has submitted more than 55,000 documents in support of their work and continues to fully participate with the inquiry.”
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Rishi Sunak unveiled Eat Out To Help Out in July 2020 – but Sir Patrick Vallance says scientific and medical advisers weren’t told about it beforehand
The division did not appear to be limited to that one scheme, however, with Sir Patrick’s diaries showing how he thought scientific advisers were kept out of strategy meetings by both Number 10 and the Cabinet Office.
The adviser told the inquiry there were “periods when it was clear that the unwelcome advice we were giving was, as expected, not loved and that meant we had to work doubly hard that the science evidence and advice was being properly heard”.
He added: “There were times, because we were giving unpalatable evidence and advice, people would prefer not to hear it.”
Sir Patrick also said “pressure” was sometimes put on advisers to change advice, pointing to a WhatsApp exchange with the then health secretary Matt Hancock.
“[Mr Hancock] asked me to change something and I said no, we are not going to change our advice, because that is where the evidence bit comes in,” said the adviser. “You have got to at least see that even if you disagree with it and don’t want to do it.”
He added: “I am absolutely sure, because politicians are politicians, that there were attempts to manage us and make sure we were not always given the access we might need
“But I think overall we managed to get through all that… and make sure the advice and evidence was heard.”
Matt Hancock was health secretary during the pandemic
Asked for his opinion on Mr Hancock after working with him throughout the pandemic, Sir Patrick said: “He had a habit of saying things which he didn’t have a basis for.
“He would say them too enthusiastically, too early without the evidence to back them up and then have to backtrack from hem days later.
“I don’t know to what extent that was over-enthusiasm versus deliberate. I think a lot of it was over-enthusiasm, but he definitely said things that surprised me because I knew that the evidence base wasn’t there.”
A spokesman for Mr Hancock said: “Mr Hancock has supported the inquiry throughout and will respond to all questions when he gives his evidence.”
Johnson ‘bamboozled’
Mr Johnson’s understanding of the science was also brought into question by Sir Patrick, who said the prime minister was left “clearly bamboozled” during a meeting between the pair about schools in May 2020.
Ten days later, Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Johnson “sways between optimism and pessimism” and he was “still confused on different types of tests (he holds it in his head for a session and then it goes).”
Another extract from June 2020 said: “Watching [the] PM get his head around stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.”
And a further entry from same month said it was “a real struggle to get [Mr Johnson] to understand” graphs.
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‘Science was not Boris Johnson’s forte’
Sir Patrick again stood by his entry when questioned by the inquiry’s legal team, pointing to how Mr Johnson dropped science as a subject aged 15, adding: “He did struggle with some of the concepts and we did need to repeat them often.”
But while the senior scientist said it was “hard work sometimes to try and make sure that he had understood what a particular graph or piece of data was saying”, Mr Johnson did not have a “unique inability to grasp some of these concepts”, adding that it was “not unusual amongst leaders in Western democracies”.
Let’s deal, first of all, with the question many of you will have: after today’s reduction to 4.25% will there be more interest rate cuts to come?
Today, the Bank of England did nothing to sway you – or the financial markets that bet on such things – from the assumption that after today’s quarter percentage point cut there will be further reductions in the cost of borrowing.
Indeed, right now, financial markets assume the Bank will cut UK interest rates down to 3.5% by early next year, and the Bank didn’t contradict that today.
Money blog: What interest rate cut means for your money
But (this being economics, there’s always a “but”) if there was one theme that overarched the Bank’s latest set of forecasts, it was that it’s becoming fiendishly difficult to predict the future.
Take tariffs. In theory, the Bank thinks they’ll actually be much less damaging than many had assumed, with the total impact not enough to push the UK into recession.
But that’s based on a few important assumptions, chief among them that Donald Trump doesn’t re-impose the reciprocal tariffs announced on 2 April – despite the fact that he’s explicitly said they are only temporarily paused. It was based on the assumption that the UK wouldn’t get a trade deal with the US, an assumption that was already out of date by the time the document was published.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
No one really has a clue
The Bank’s forecasts are, in other words, even more uncertain than usual.
Perhaps that helps explain why the nine members of the Monetary Policy Committee had a rare three-way split in their vote this month, with two members voting to leave rates on hold, two voting to cut them by half a percentage point, and the remaining five carrying the decision and reducing them by 0.25%.
Now, even taking this uncertainty into account, there are a few things one can take from today’s Bank of England news, and the update from its American counterpart, the Federal Reserve, yesterday.
While tariffs are expected to push inflation up in the US, they are expected to push inflation down in the UK. The upshot is while the Federal Reserve is pausing its interest rate cuts, UK rates are coming down.
Every Bank of England forecast is, by definition, a historic document. Such things take time to model and write so, by the time they come out, they are always a little bit out of date. But never has this been more true of a Bank forecast than the one published today.
The big picture, however, is that no one really has a clue. No one knows what Donald Trump will do next. No one knows what the impact of his tariffs will be on the UK or, indeed, elsewhere. No one knows what this all spells for inflation or unemployment.
UK
VE Day anniversary: Veteran who lost three brothers in Second World War hopes celebrations offer people the chance to ‘learn from history’
A 101-year-old veteran, who has never publicly talked about her wartime experience, wants the VE Day 80th anniversary events to be a chance to reflect on the “unnecessary” conflicts we see today that she says are driven by “pure greed”.
Pauline Alexander was one of five siblings who all served in the Second World War – with three of them among the four family members she lost during the conflict.
She was encouraged to talk about what she went through by her daughter after she saw the Royal British Legion appealing for more surviving veterans to tell their stories.
80 years ago, as Sir Winston Churchill declared there was finally victory in Europe and the celebrations erupted in London, Ms Alexander was in Chelmsford with her mother and sister-in-law.
Sir Winston Churchill announces ‘victory in Europe’ in 1945
“I was at home on leave,” she said.
“We joined in the celebrations, the singing and dancing. It was very exciting. Everyone in Chelmsford had turned out, well those who were still there. But it was very… how can I put it? A feeling of what next… life had changed completely.
“We started [the war] as a family of seven, we ended as three.”
Like so many, Ms Alexander’s war was punctuated by loss.
Her father died while running the family surgical instrument business in 1943, and three of her brothers were killed.
Peter Kipling, an Army dispatch rider, died in a bike accident delivering a message to the war office in London. He was about to be sent to the front in preparation for D-Day.
Guy and Bernard Kipling, who were twins, were both navigators on RAF bombers.
They were shot down in 1941 and 1943, their bodies never came home.
All three are remembered on Peter’s gravestone in Broomfield Cemetery.
Pauline Alexander with her brother Peter Kipling who died before he was due to be sent to the front for D-Day
Pauline Alexander with her brother Guy Kipling who died in the conflict
Looking at photographs of her brothers, Ms Alexander quietly said: “That’s just how I remember them all, just like that.”
When I asked her how she felt when she heard they had died serving their country, she replied: “In those days of war you just had to accept these things.
“It was bound to happen at some time or other. Bernard served on Whitley bombers, and they were known as flying coffins.”
Ms Alexander’s story about her family, and the clerical work she did in the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) from 1942-1946, including at bomber command at RAF Waddington, only came to light because of the Royal British Legion appeal.
She said she previously just thought: “It was our duty to do what we could and that was life, everyone was losing family… it was just something that happened.
“All part of life and living.”
Children wave flags from the ruins of their homes in Battersea, south London, as they celebrate VE Day in 1945. Pic: PA
Families fly flags and bunting in the street on VE Day in 1945. Pic: PA
I asked her how her mother reacted when she said she wanted to sign up.
Ms Alexander replied: “She said yes. It would do me good. I was getting too spoilt at home.”
She added: “If my brothers were in, I had to be in to do my bit too.”
Her mother, Rosa Kipling, was also a remarkable woman.
She lived until 105 and was recognised for bravery in the first honours list to feature MBEs in 1918, after surviving an explosion during the First World War in a munitions factory.
It is no wonder then that her children were all so committed to do their bit.
An elderly woman gets a hug from a GI in London on VE Day. Pic: AP
Sky’s Rhiannon Mills with Pauline Alexander
The sense of service and the acceptance of the sacrifices that had to be made now feel more important than ever, especially in the context of ongoing global conflicts.
That was something that Ms Alexander was keen to talk about from her home in March, Cambridgeshire, where she will be watching today’s events.
Read more:
New photos show how wartime films were made
Why King’s message to veterans is very personal
VE Day 80th anniversary celebration in pictures
Asked why she believes it is so important that we take time to remember today, she said: “Because it’s all part of history, and history is very important, because we learn from history.
“When you think of all the conflicts that are going on now and how it’s all unnecessary in a sense, just pure greed. Because what they went through [in the Second World War] was absolute hell.”
As I reflected with her that they truly are an amazing generation, Ms Alexander simply replied: “Yes, there’ll never be another one like it.”
The King and Queen have paid their respects to Britain’s war dead at a service to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
The royal couple were among 2,000 people – including 78 veterans – who attended the ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London.
The thanksgiving service, which included music and readings, paused at midday for a national two-minute silence in memory of those who died.
Poppies surrounded the grave of the Unknown Warrior in the abbey
King Charles lays a wreath at the grave of the Unknown Warrior. Pic: Reuters
Followed by his son, the Prince of Wales. Pic: Reuters
State trumpeters play a fanfare during the service. Pic: Reuters
Other attendees included the Prince and Princess of Wales, along with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and some of his Downing Street predecessors, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
The King laid a wreath, which featured the message “We will never forget”, at the grave of the Unknown Warrior, followed by the Prince of Wales.
The Princess and Prince of Wales also paid their respects. Pic: Reuters
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer were among the dignitaries. Pic: Reuters
David Cameron, pictured arriving at the abbey with his wife Samantha, was one of several former prime ministers who attended. Pic: Reuters
At their side, watching from his wheelchair, was veteran Ken Hay, 99, who served in the infantry regiment.
Actor Josh Dylan read a letter from Lance Corporal Fredrick Burgess to his seven-year-old son Freddie, written while he was serving in Italy.
He quoted the serviceman, whose granddaughter Susan was among those in the abbey, as writing: “When I do come home, and it will not be very long now, I’m going to buy you something extra specially nice for being such a good boy.”
Members of the royal family at the thanksgiving service.
Pic: Reuters
Pic: PA
RAF veterans Kathleen, 101, and Roy Lawrence, 101, who have been married for 74 years, share a kiss at a VE Day anniversary event in Staffordshire. Pic: PA
Lance Corporal Burgess also described the rain in Italy and how his small tank, which he named Freddie II after his son, had been damaged with a “whacking big hole” by a bomb.
Dylan revealed: “Seven months after writing this letter, Lance Corporal Burgess was killed.”
An excerpt of wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill‘s 1945 victory speech, in which he declared the war in Europe was over, was also played.
His great-great-grandson Alexander Churchill, aged 10, lit a peace candle and later read a prayer for “peace in Europe and across the world”.
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