BORIS JOHNSON ASKED top UK scientists Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a “special hair dryer” up noses, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
In a “low point” while British prime minister, he allegedly sent a video of a man using such a purported device to the men serving as England’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer and asked what they thought.
Cummings, his former chief adviser turned nemesis, made a series of claims in his witness statement handed to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
He said Johnson also asked him to find a “dead cat” to get the coronavirus pandemic off the front pages of newspapers because he was “sick” of it.
A so-called dead cat strategy is the political meddling of circulating striking claims in order to divert attention away from an unwanted story.
Cummings said that in autumn 2020 Johnson asked him to “put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead-cat Covid”.
“I’m sick of Covid, I want it off the front pages,” Johnson said, according to Cummings.
The adviser, who worked with Johnson on the Brexit campaign, says he replied that “no campaign could ‘dead-cat Covid’”.
In the alleged hairdryer episode, the then-prime minister was said to have sent a subsequently deleted-from-YouTube video to a WhatsApp group with his top scientists.
Cummings wrote: “A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill Covid’ and asked the CSA and CMO what they thought.”
He also repeated a suggestion that Johnson was working on a biography of William Shakespeare rather than the pandemic on a two-week holiday in February 2020.
“He was extremely distracted,” Cummings wrote.
“He had a divorce to finalise and was grappling with financial problems from that plus his girlfriend’s spending plans for the No 10 flat (which he raised repeatedly from early January).
“An ex-girlfriend was making accusations about him in the media. His current girlfriend wanted to finalise the announcement of their engagement. He said he wanted to work on his Shakespeare book.”
Meanwhile, the inquiry also heard that a handwritten note reading “We are f*****” was passed between two scientific advisers to the Government at a meeting over the emerging pandemic in March 2020.
The assessment of Britain’s readiness for the impending turmoil was made by data expert Ben Warner, who worked in No 10 and attended talks held by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
President of the Behavioural Insights Team Professor David Halpern said the meeting on 13 March had been a moment when the “penny dropped” for him that there were “lots of grounds for concern”.
Speaking at the inquiry, he cited evidence that the NHS would be overwhelmed, a lack of preparedness in relation to testing, and “overconfident” modelling of the impact of the virus as issues that were weighing heavily on him.
During the meeting, he had written: “We are not ready” in capital letters on a piece of paper, before Downing Street colleague Warner leaned over his shoulder and crossed out “not ready”, replacing it with “f*****”, the inquiry heard.
“I really felt quite shocked and depressed,” Halpern said today.
“I felt that it’s not our role to do all those things, we’re working on the behavioural aspects.”
He added: “I felt that on people’s faces in the room, there was some realisation of it – a cracking in the confidence.”
Others in the meeting had felt, like him, that the Government should be pursuing suppression strategies, he said.
It came ten days before the first national lockdown was announced on 23 March and three days before Boris Johnson told people to stop non-essential contact and travel.
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