Dominic Cummings doubles down on claim government planned ‘herd immunity’ response to Covid.

Dominic Cummings said Boris Johnson's ex-aide gives dramatic evidence to MPs. 

Dominic Cummings says senior officials “fell disastrously short of the standards the public has a right to expect”.

He added “When the public needed us most, the Government failed."  Cummings says there was "no sense of urgency" in No10 until the end of February, suggesting it was too late by the time the Government started taking the outbreak seriously Some senior officials were "skiing" in mid-February and the Prime Minister and others went on "holiday" that month, he said 

Mr Cummings says he should have hit the "panic button" earlier  Cummings says he regrets that he “did not follow up” and “push” on pandemic preparations at the end of January.

He said it was not until the end of February 2020 that it was realised the plans were “hollow”.

Mr Cummings has said “many institutions” failed early on in the coronavirus crisis The former chief aide to the PM told the Commons committee: “When it started, in January, I did think in part of my mind, ‘Oh my goodness, is this it? Is this what people have been warning about all this time? The Prime Minister saw coronavirus as a "scare story" in the early stages of the outbreak and missed key meetings, Mr Cummings claims.

The PM's former adviser also claims Mr Johnson said he would get Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, to inject him with Covid on live TV to show the public there was nothing to be scared of.

Cummings said nations including Britain “completely failed” to see the warnings about the coronavirus pandemic in January last year.Mr Cummings said he attended some meetings of Sage, of which the first meeting regarding Covid was on January 21.

He said he “couldn’t understand” some of the modelling and what was being said and sent other experts to the meeting instead. Herd immunity was the Government's official plan in the early stages of the pandemic, Mr Cummings has insisted.

The Prime Minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings said that information from Cobra meetings was often leaked to the media.

When asked if these were leaks from Cobra, he said “Leaking from Cobra, leaking from practically everything.

“So when I wanted to have sensitive conversations that I didn’t want to see appear in the media I did not have those conversations in Cobra.”

Mr Cummings has said that herd immunity was “seen as an inevitability” across Whitehall early last year.

At a critical time in March, when the Government was considering a lockdown, Donald Trump and Mr Johnson's fiancee Carrie Symonds created distractions, Mr Cummings claims. 

Mr Cummings said earlier that Whitehall had made a series of wrong assumptions in their planning of the pandemic in relation to the inevitability of herd immunity early last year.

“Essentially the logic of the official plan from the Department of Health was that this disease is going to spread, vaccines are not going to be relevant in any way, shape or form over the relevant time period." 

Cummings claims Carrie Symonds was "going crackers" over a story in the Times about her and Mr Johnson's dog Dilyn, and had demanded that the No10 press office deal with it