In his rambling, incoherent 115-page witness statement to the Covid-19 inquiry, Dominic Cummings, the disgraced former senior adviser to disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson, puts the blame for the Covid lockdowns on ‘the blob’ or as he describes it “insiders refusing to accept the referendum result”.
His claim is that so much government effort was taken up by the “constitutional and political crisis” which occurred between 2016 and 2019, it meant “critical planning and capabilities were ignored”.
UK government was on the ‘back foot’ in 2020 due to Brexit
Cummings’ former colleague, deputy cabinet secretary, Helen Macnamara appeared to partly back his claim, suggesting in her written statement that “in January 2020 the UK government was already on the back foot” due to Brexit. She described it as a once-in-a-generation event, about which Cummings was “monomaniacal”. However, Macnamara didn’t apportion blame.
This is paragraph 43 of Cummings’ statement:
If indeed critical planning and capabilities were ignored for years after the referendum, and I think it’s hard to argue otherwise, given the sheer amount of government and parliamentary time taken up by Brexit after June 2016, Cummings needs to look at himself.
Cummings rejected the idea of a Brexit plan
As campaign director of Vote Leave he vetoed any idea of preparing a plan or even the vaguest sense of direction that Britain would take if the vote was to leave the EU.
A year before the referendum, Cummings was writing in his blog:
“Creating an exit plan that makes sense and which all reasonable people could unite around seems an almost insuperable task. Eurosceptic groups have been divided for years about many of the basic policy and political questions.”
He rejected the idea, and went on:
“Even if one succeeded [in getting an agreed plan], the sheer complexity of leaving would involve endless questions of detail that cannot be answered in such a plan even were it to be 20,000 pages long, and the longer it is the more errors are likely. On top of the extremely complex policy issues is a feedback loop – constructing such a plan depends partly on inherently uncertain assumptions about what is politically sellable in a referendum, making it even harder to rally support behind a plan.”
So, if the debate to resolve those Eurosceptic divisions was to be avoided before the referendum, when did he expect it to take place? Nobody was better placed to understand just how difficult a task it would be to bridge the deeply entrenched views inside the Conservative Party.
Forcing the debate before the referendum would have exposed those divisions and Cummings knew that would risk losing the vote, so he chose to ignore it.
He is highly critical of others being unprepared for the unforeseen but Cummings wasn’t even prepared for events which he himself must have realised would come, or for the rancorous arguments which would be needed to “rally support behind a plan”. And these were largely between those who supported Brexit for all sorts of different, contradictory reasons.
It was perhaps worse than that, because he had actually thought about the issue and dismissed any idea that a plan should even begin to be developed.
Cummings was behind the no-deal threat and the negotiating deadlines
The inquiry has heard how much civil service time was taken up in no-deal preparations, something which the UK government never really contemplated, but used simply as a negotiating lever. Brussels didn’t take the threats seriously and it didn’t help secure a better deal in any event.
Neither did the setting of ultra compressed deadlines for the withdrawal and trade negotiations. That only absorbed yet more civil service effort. Cummings was the ‘mastermind’ behind all of it.
The undeniable constitutional and political crisis in the three years after the referendum almost certainly did result in critical planning and preparations for a possible pandemic being ignored, but the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of one man.
Dominic McKenzie Cummings.
