USELESS.. CALLOUS

Cummings lifts lid on chaos of Boris' rule

- JOHN STEVENS and DAVE BURKE

BORIS Johnson failed to take action that could have saved thousands of lives because he did not think Covid-19 was a "big deal", Dominic Cummings told the Covid Inquiry.

Cummings, who had branded the Cabinet "useless f***pigs" "c***s" and morons in WhatsApp messages, suggested the first lockdown could have been avoided if Mr Johnson had acted quicker after Covid struck in China.

On a day of jaw-dropping revelations at the inquiry, Lee Cain, who was his top spin doctor in No10, declared Mr Johnson was the "wrong" PM to deal with the crisis.

And diary entries written by Sir Patrick Vallance, who was then the Chief Scientific Adviser, exposed Mr Johnson's callous attitude to the elderly as the pandemic played out.

Sir Patrick complained about "quite bonkers" conversations with Mr Johnson, who he wrote was "obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life".

In December 2020, Sir Patrick noted how the PM had told him Tory MPs thought "the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature's way of dealing with old people".

In a WhatsApp message in October 2020, Johnson wrote: "Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Cummings, looking progressively unnerved as he was grilled for painstaking hour after hour yesterday, and former No10 director of communications Cain, both told the inquiry how Johnson dithered over key decisions.