The UK government failed in public with Covid's response,Dominic Cummings said

Former Boris Johnson aide says ministers 'fall short' at the levels of society they were entitled to expect

Covid-19 epidemic

Dominic Cummings has apologized for the mistakes made by the Boris Johnson government during the Covid-19 epidemic, acknowledging that he and his colleagues have failed miserably in British society.

The former prime minister's adviser has been testifying in opposition to the health and science and technology committees of the opposition, chaired by former Conservative cabinet ministers Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt.

Hitting what appeared to be a deliberately humble tone, Cummings began his testimony by saying that he and other advisers and ministers had failed to understand the gravity of the situation in January until February.

The reality is that senior ministers, officials, advisers like me, have fallen short of the standards the public has to expect from their government in a crisis like this, Cummings told Clark, the committee's chairman.

When society needs us most, we have failed. And I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily, I am very sorry for the mistakes made, and for my own mistakes.

Cummings' testimony on Wednesday was widely viewed throughout Westminster, following a series of highly critical tweets in recent days in which he criticized the decisions made by his former boss, and Whitehall's readiness for the crisis.

He said he had seen how serious the situation could be in Wuhan, China in January, and read letters he sent to health secretary Matt Hancock on January 25, asking about the government's preparedness for the epidemic.

The UK government failed in public with Covid's response,Dominic Cummings said

He said Hancock had assured him that the government had a plan to perpetuate the epidemic - and that other institutions, including Public Health England and the World Health Organization, were confident at the time.

But he admitted that at the time he was not pressuring the issue - saying Johnson continued to not see the magnitude of the problem.

Cummings made the unusual claim that he and other officials deliberately kept the prime minister absent from Cobra's emergency government meetings in the early days of the disaster, because they thought Johnson would shed light on the virus.

Indeed, the opinion of various officials within the No 10 was that if we had the Prime Minister's Cobra meetings, and he told everyone 'don't worry about it, I'll get [Chris Whitty the medical officer in England] live on TV with coronavirus, so all one sees that it is not something to be afraid of ', that would not help, in fact, good planning.

He said Downing Street's attention at the beginning of February was focused on other issues, including cabinet reshuffle, and that by mid-February a number of key figures were real skiing.

He added: "We did not receive this until the end of February''.

Cummings described it as "very bad" that someone who spent so much time urging people to avoid thinking as a group, that he hadn't sounded the alarm too much.

Clark pressured Cummings about why he had not attended key decision-making and advisory meetings, Cobra and Sage, during the outbreak of the epidemic.

Cummings said he had sent his colleagues, including his colleague Ben Warner, to other meetings and said it did not help him to attend all Sage meetings because they were involved in technical forums.