Dominic Cummings Covid evidence

[Newtonianmechanics]

Is anyone going to watch this man give evidence today?

Apparently there is a vigil in Barnard Castle ahead of this.

The shopping trolleys emoji seems to mean they think Carrie was controlling Boris from the last few days. Wonder if this will feature.

From the Guardian live blog

Sunak was urged by Treasury to 'strongly' resist calls for circuit breaker lockdown in autumn 2020, Covid inquiry hears

Treasury officials strongly advised Rishi Sunak to resist calls for a short, “circuit breaker” lockdown in the autumn of 2020, the Covid inquiry was told.

Clare Lombardelli, chief economic adviser at the Treasury, is giving evidence to the inquiry this morning and she has just been asked about this memo to Sunak urging him to “push back strongly on the circuit breaker proposal” on the grounds that its economic impact might be severe, and that it might last longer than the two or three weeks envisaged.
Lombardelli said it was the job of the Treasury to consider the economic aspects of this proposal. She said other departments would have been looking at issues like the health case for the policy, or the impact on schools.

Treasury did not have estimate for economic impact of lockdown, Covid inquiry hears

Clare Lombardelli, chief economic adviser to the Treasury during coronavirus, told the Covid inquiry that the department did not have an estimate for the cost of lockdown. She said:
I wouldn’t say there was no meaningful modelling. There was a lot of analysis and modelling that happened.

What I would say is there was no estimated cost of a lockdown, if you like. There was no way to basically say a lockdown will cost you X, or indeed a lockdown of this form will cost you X but of a different form will cost you Y …

I think it’s a bit too far to say there was no meaningful modelling done, there was a lot of useful modelling … But there wasn’t was an estimate of, the lockdown will cost X in terms of jobs or economic activity.

Thank you.

I'm not an economist, so sometimes it's difficult to follow.
But Joanne is asking questions in a way that makes it easy to understand.

I'm.about 1 hour behind, but essentially her evidence is
" we did the best we can to model how covid and lockdown would impact the UK economy. It was available for everyone to see, but its not our job to develop policy".

Which is true.

Clare from the Treasury clearly was not going to get involved in the in-house Tory name calling; Dr Death and all that.

She just said she was unaware Rishi was called Dr Death, but I'm 100% sure I saw a very small wry smile 😁

I'm.slowly catching up.

so, next we have Stuart Glassborow Who was rhe Deputy private secretary to BJ

And we have a new KC Dermot Keating

Tamara Cohen is tweeting from the Inquiry

https://x.com/tamcohen/status/1721465845220544955?s=20

Johnson joked about Treasury being the 'pro death squad' during pandemic, Covid inquiry toldAt the Covid inquiry

Stuart Glassborow, deputy principal private secretary to Boris Johnson during coronavirus, has been giving evidence.
Dermot Keating, counsel for the inquiry, was asking the questions, and he has just asked Glassborow about an entry in Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary in which Vallance, the chief scientific adviser at the time, records Boris Johnson as referring to the Treasury as the “pro death squad”. Johnson reportedly used the phrase in January 2021, when he wanted the Treasury to back him in arguing for an early lifting of lockdown measures.
Johnson was referring to the Treasury being in favour of prioritising the economy in internal debates on lockdown policy.
Glassborow told the inquiry he did not recall that phrase being used.

I remember that and I remember that manufacturer’s frustrated Tweets. People were asking “why don’t you contact the Dept of Health?” and he was saying “I HAVE! Over and over again, and they don’t want to know.”

The Government were determined to give contracts to “entrepreneurs” like Dyson to design and produce ventilators, despite those people not knowing a thing about them. They are complex life support machines, with complex control systems, not just pumps that blow air in and out of a patient’s lungs.

I saw a couple of hilariously bad “novel designs” for cheap ventilators by people who had not a single clue. It was yet another reminder of how many people have a “how difficult can it be?” mindset and think they can have a go. Unfortunately a lot of people in the government had that very mindset.

Government decided to launch 'eat out to help out' without scientific advice on potential Covid impact, inquiry told

During his evidence his morning Stuart Glassborow, deputy principal private secretary to Boris Johnson during coronavirus, admitted that the government decided to go ahead with the “eat out to help out” subsidy scheme for restaurants in the summer of 2020 without getting scientific advice on the impact it might have on Covid transmission.

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, was personally associated with the scheme, and he was embarrassed by subsequent evidence showing it led to a rise in the number of people getting Covid.

Glassborow told the inquiry that during July 2020, before the scheme was launched, he and others in No 10 “did become aware that there hadn’t been direct CMO [chief medical officer], CSA [chief scientific adviser], Sage [scientific advisory group for emergencies] analysis on this policy”.

Asked if a decision was taken to persist with the scheme anyway, without scientific advice, Glassborow said:
I can’t speak on behalf of all people who would have had an interest in this. I don’t recall significant representations being made to in some sense revisit the policy – that’s not to say some people didn’t have views one way or another at that time.Last week the inquiry was told that Prof Chris Whitty, the CMO, called the scheme “eat out to help out the virus”.

Hugo Keith KC is a bit of a deadly assassin, isn't he? Ben Swain Warner is being led to say he attended to SAGE to learn not contribute. That's fine on one level - but he was representing No 10 and he's now coming a bit unstuck on who did what and who knew what and when.

'Lack of scientific capability generally across government' - Ben Warner

'NHS fucked in any scenario' - from Ben W's notes

Fascinating exchanges in autumn 2020 between Ben Warner and Lee Cain (Johnson's comms chief) about fears the govt had been too slow with a winter wave.
Cain: We are so fucked... should have done a circuit breaker.
Warner: I feel that we have accidentally invented a time machine.

https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1721559019796516952?t=470yVrYDP97RedZ35DBeOA&s=19

(Screenshots in tweet)

Oof

Ben Warner wrote to a colleague, Tom Shinner in Feb 2021: "I am waging my own small war against HMT [Treasury"].

"My new favourite whenever they mention value-for-money is "well it is only x per cent of eat out to help out and probably won't have such a terrible effect."

And from the Guardian

At the Covid inquiry Warner was asked about a message he sent to Tom Shinner, another official working on coronavirus policy, in which they both complained about the Treasury. This was in February 2021. In the message, Warner said his view was that the culture of the Treasury was “fucked”.

Asked about the comment, Warner said he was referring to how the Treasury managed certain topics, like advanced analytics and data. He said the comment “doesn’t necessarily reflect my entire views of what is a complex organisation”. In other respects the Treasury was “unbelievably helpful”, he said.

Extract from Photograph: Covid inquiry

Warner was responding to a message from Shinner, who had posted a link to this comment article published by the Guardian on 5 February 2021. In it Sam Bowman praised Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, for introducing furlough, but said that “ever since that point [he] has been the most powerful voice in government pushing for returns to ‘normal’ before time, with disastrous consequences”. Bowman concluded by saying:

Sunak’s failure to push for elimination of Covid last summer, when only 0.3% of Covid tests in the UK were returning positive results and some parts of the country had come close to eliminating it altogether, may have contributed to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and hundreds of billions of pounds of lost economic output. If he has still not grasped that the only way to get back to normal is to eliminate Covid, and argues for a premature reopening that lets a vaccine-resistant variant emerge, he may be about to make the biggest mistake of his life.

Is Rishi Sunak the most dangerous man in government?
Sam Bowman
Read more

Commenting on the article, Shinner said:

Depressingly I think there’s quite a lot of truth in this about Treasury approach

Yes! That's the one!

It was crazy. All I could remember was a Tory friend, but that's right, it was Dyson.
They didn't produce any ventilators.

Dyson got a whole load of money from the taxpayer and nothing was produced.

I remember now, James O'Brien, in his normal calm way (😁) was completely shocked. He said something like "I knew it was bad, but this is even worse than I thought".

IIRC, Ireland ended up contacting the company, and they manufactured top quality, excellent ventilators for Ireland, as well as the rest of the EU.

Apparently there are very very few manufacturers and suppliers of ventilators, for good reason. It’s not like the NHS can get some cut price Value Range ones, and tell the critical care doctors to give them a go. “Sorry chaps, we’re sending these back, they didn’t work too well, but on the plus side we now have several free beds on the intensive care ward!”

I'm just catching up with Special Adviser Dr Ben Warner now.

What strikes me is, this man is a scientist, but his memory is really bad.
He can't remember very much from Jan/Feb 2020.

There could be 2 reasons for this:
Either, he genuinely can't remember- which in that case maybe he needs to take better contemporaneous notes, in the future.

Or, he is only going to admit to things that are in writing and he can't deny. Unless the KC have evidence, he is going to take the whole "I can't remember" line.

Yes, @minou123 - at one point Ben Warner was saying 'I have no memory of that ... except that I have no memory of the detail' or something very similar. He was doing a bit of a Ben Swain with Paxo impression from early on.

If I had to guess I'd say he knows he was part of a group of people that massively stuffed up and ran out of control and to whom he owes no loyalty, so he's only barely admitting to the existence of what's in the notes.

Ben Swain is exactly it! 😁

If I had to guess I'd say he knows he was part of a group of people that massively stuffed up and ran out of control and to whom he owes no loyalty, so he's only barely admitting to the existence of what's in the notes.

You've summed it up perfectly.

He kept saying there was no scientific capability in No10, ie. nobody at No10 understood the science, and that's why things went wrong
I was just screaming at the TV "But surely that was your job, Ben!".
He is a scientist, and was Special Adviser to BJ, he was in prime position to translate the complex sciencey blurb to easy language.

In fact he wrote in his own notes from a SAGE meeting in Feb 20, something like 'NHS is fucked'. Yet, he didn't say anything until 13th March, which by then everyone has cottoned on, and it was too late.

Ooohh, I am cross. I've met people like him before.
Extremely clever, but only when it is theory. When it comes to actually doing anything, they do naff all and then only after it is all over, they pipe up "I knew at the time lots of mistakes were happening".

Then why didn't you say anything at the time? 😡

Thanks all for posting the updates.
It's terrifying and fascinating all at the same time.

Why would you expect someone who has never had a job that involved doing anything useful or saying things that weren't just what their audience wants them to tell them to be any different during a crisis?

Oh, I don't know why I do it to myself @jgw1

Everyday I watch the Covid Inquiry, and everyday I have this optimistic hope that today will be the day, the person will have done the thier job properly, especially during the crisis.
Everyday I am disappointed.

I think you're right, I need to face reality now and extinguish all hope. 😫

We are in this mess because most of them have never done a job, whether properly or not.

Working in politics is itself a proper job, you get good SPADs.

What matters is how the politics was being done IMO, the values of those at the top. If you're led by someone who says the elderly should 'accept their fate' and the rest of the cabinet seem to be AWOL, this is what happens.

The evidence about the Treasury is concerning because their seems to have been no comparitive modelling of what the costs would be of not locking down, which is how it felt at the time - like they were comparing lockdown costs with the normal economy. But once COVID transmission was high we couldn't have the normal economy anyway, so the 'cost' of locking down is actually not as great as the Treasury (and Sunak presumably!) were saying it was.