A toxic culture of government incompetence, backstabbing and misogyny was laid bare at the Covid public inquiry on Tuesday with messages revealing Boris Johnson’s dismissive attitude to millions of old people at risk from the virus.
The former prime minister’s top aide Dominic Cummings was accused of “aggressive, foul-mouthed and misogynistic” abuse after messages showed he tried to sack the senior civil servant Helen MacNamara, saying No 10 was “dodging stilettos from that cunt”.
Johnson’s chaotic indecisiveness delayed lockdown measures, the inquiry heard, while he had told senior advisers the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic.
Bereaved relatives reacted to the fresh evidence with horror after a bruising session of the Covid inquiry, with Cummings and Lee Cain, the former No 10 director of communications, questioning Johnson’s suitability for leading the country during the pandemic.
Susie Flintham, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said: “The nastiness, arrogance and misogyny at the heart of government during the pandemic is core to the awful decision-making that led to thousands of unnecessary deaths and tore families like mine apart. When you see that these figures had such a shocking disregard for each other, you can only imagine the disregard they had for families like mine.”
In a lengthy session before the inquiry, Cummings claimed the cabinet had been “largely irrelevant” to Covid policy in 2020, and that he was “reflecting a widespread view” that if anything understated the problem, when he used expletive-laden descriptions of ministers including “useless fuckpigs”, “morons” and “cunts”.
WhatsApp messages and documents seen by the inquiry showed that he had brutally mocked and criticised the former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill and his deputy MacNamara, while casting particular disdain on the former health secretary Matt Hancock.
“Hancock is unfit for this job,” he wrote. “The incompetence, the constant lies, the obsession with media bullshit. Still no fucking serious testing in care homes his uselessness is still killing god knows how many.”
In another message in August 2020, Cummings said: “I also must stress I think leaving Hancock in post is a big mistake – he is a proven liar who nobody believes or [should] believe on anything. We face going into autumn crisis with the cunt in charge of NHS still.”
Cummings claimed that Sedwill “hasn’t a scooby whats going on”, warning that the Cabinet Office was “terrifyingly shit” in a WhatsApp message to Johnson in March 2020, as the pandemic ramped up. The inquiry’s lead counsel, Hugo Keith KC, said Cummings had “denigrated and insulted” the former cabinet secretary.
However, it was his messages about MacNamara that attracted the most criticism from the senior lawyer, after Cummings suggested in them that he would “personally handcuff her and escort her from the building” if he had to spend time responding to her questions about government propriety and ethics.
“I don’t care how it’s done. But that woman must be out of our hair. We cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt,” he had written.
Cummings apologised for his language towards MacNamara, who appears before the inquiry on Wednesday, saying it was “obviously appalling” but denied that it was misogynistic because he was “much ruder about men”. He added: “A thousand times worse than my language was the underlying insanity of the situation in No 10.”
In his final WhatsApp message to his former closest aide on 15 November 2020, Johnson described the infighting surrounding Cummings’ departure from Downing Street two days earlier as a “disgusting orgy of narcissism”.
The government’s handling of the pandemic continues to hang over Downing Street even though it is more than a year since Johnson left No 10, with the former prime minister joining Rishi Sunak and other senior figures to give evidence before Christmas.
However, the Guardian revealed last month that Sunak has failed to hand over his own WhatsApp messages from his time as chancellor to the Covid inquiry despite the high court ruling that ministers should disclose their communications for scrutiny.
Cummings told the inquiry how the “dysfunctional system” during a “meltdown of the British state” had failed to deal with the crisis, while Cain, who served as No 10’s communications director, criticised Johnson’s tendency to “oscillate” between decisions for slowing down the government’s response.
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In his evidence, Cain said Johnson had the wrong “skill set” to lead the country through the pandemic, leaving his senior aides “exhausted” by constantly changing his mind on crucial decisions. He said that Downing Street decided a full lockdown was needed in March 2020 a full 10 days before it was announced.
The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from August 2020 during which Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting young people get on with their lives.
Another note from Vallance, after a cabinet meeting in December 2020, hinted at the power wielded by the right of the Conservative party during the pandemic: “PM told he has been acting early and the public are with him (but his party is not).
“He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”
In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.
Cummings also told the inquiry that “pretty much everyone” called Johnson “the trolley” due to his constant veering about on the pandemic, while vulnerable people such as the poor and victims of domestic abuse were “almost entirely, appallingly neglected” at the start of the crisis.
However, he had no regrets about putting Johnson in office despite thinking he was unfit to be there, adding: “Politics is about choices … We thought [the] combination of [a] second referendum and [the former Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn was so bad [ahead of the 2019 election] that we should roll the dice.”
Cummings was unapologetic about his lockdown-busting trip to Durham in Spring 2020 but admitted regret for Downing Street’s “absolute car crash” handling of the row, which he said had caused “huge pain” to many people.
Messages released to the inquiry showed that Johnson denied he had ever been told by Cummings about the trip, accusing him of being a “total and utter liar” even though he had “tried my very best to defend him” after the Guardian and Daily Mirror broke the story.
The former top adviser criticised Johnson’s focus on the media throughout the pandemic, suggesting it was “extremely bad and extremely damaging” to the government’s Covid response.
He flagged particular concerns about Johnson’s relationship with the Daily Telegraph, which pushed against lockdowns, and said there was “possible corruption” in his relationship with the Evening Standard, then edited by the former chancellor George Osborne and owned by the Tory peer Evgeny Lebedev, in reference to generous advertising spending.
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