Rishi Sunak dubbed ‘Dr Death’ in COVID WhatsApp messages

Published

2 years ago

October 20, 2023

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Rishi Sunak was described as “Dr Death” by one of the government’s top science officers at the height of the pandemic, WhatsApp messages have revealed.

A text conversation between Professor Dame Angela McLean and Professor John Edmunds from September 2020 – shortly after the then chancellor launched his Eat Out to Help Out scheme – was shown to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry on Thursday, with the pair appearing to be talking during a briefing.

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Dame Angela, who was then an adviser to the Ministry of Defence but is now the government’s chief scientific adviser, referred to someone else in the meeting – thought to be prominent lockdown sceptic Professor Carl Heneghan – as a “f***wit” during the discussion.

And COVID modeller Prof Edwards replied by saying: “Every statistic is wrong.”

But a few messages later, Dame Angela then sent a WhatsApp message to her colleague saying, “Dr Death the Chancellor”, followed by: “In ONS you’d see it.”

Prof Edmunds appeared at the COVID inquiry hearing on Thursday and was asked by lead counsel Hugo Keith if the comments were made in relation to Mr Sunak’s scheme.

Eat Out to Help Out offered discounts to diners throughout August 2020 to get them back to restaurants and pubs as people cautiously came out of the first lockdown.

But a study in 2021 later showed the scheme had contributed to a rise in infections.

Replying to the question, Prof Edmunds said: “Honestly, it’s so long ago I wouldn’t know, but it could well be.”

However, earlier in the session, the professor of epidemiology and population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine did say he was “still angry” about Eat Out to Help Out.

“It was one thing taking the foot off the brake, which is what we had been doing by easing restrictions, but to put your foot on the accelerator seemed perverse and to spend public money to do that when 45,000 people had just died,” he told the inquiry.

“I don’t want to blame Eat Out to Help Out for the second wave as that’s not the case, but the optics of it. Yes, the pub and restaurant sector needed support, but this is not really just about supporting them, they could have just given them the money.

“This was a scheme that encouraged people to take an epidemiological risk. It only applied if you went into the restaurant and ate in the restaurant – it didn’t apply to take out.”

A spokesperson for COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, Naomi Fulop, said the public inquiry had already shown there was “absolutely no consultation with the government’s scientific advisers on Eat Out to Help Out, that it contributed to the loss of thousands of lives, put unnecessary pressure on the NHS and plunged the country into a brutal second lockdown”.

She added: “It’s unbearable to think that if it wasn’t for Rishi Sunak’s reckless, unscientific and callous approach, my Mum might still be with me.

“When our current chief scientific adviser has referred to our prime minister as ‘Dr Death’, how can any of us have faith in our government if another pandemic strikes?”

A government source said: “We designed the Eat Out to Help Out scheme to protect two million jobs in hospitality, and statistics show that the scheme brought back 400,000 people from furlough whilst safely restoring consumer confidence.

“Local take-up of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme was not positively correlated with COVID rates in any English region or country.”

Politics

Crypto regulation needs more technologists and fewer suits

Published

2 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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Crypto regulation needs more technologists and fewer suits

The crypto community is missing the opportunity to reimagine rather than transpose rulemaking for financial services. More technologists must join the regulatory conversation.

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Whitehall officials tried to cover up grooming scandal in 2011, Dominic Cummings says

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2 hours ago

June 16, 2025

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Whitehall officials tried to cover up grooming scandal in 2011, Dominic Cummings says

Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.

Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.

In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.

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The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.

In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.

The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.

Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.

Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.

“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’

“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…

“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”

The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.

A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.

One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.

There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.

Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.

Read more on grooming gangs:
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A timeline of the scandal

Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.

He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”

He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.

Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.

“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.

The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.