The PM on Hancock: 'totally fucking hopeless'

Some evidence re my and Hancock's testimony to MPs.Dominic Cummings June 16, 2021, Aid the Boris Johnson.1/4

Detailed analysis of all Hancock said to MPs would take days. I’ll focus today on just a few things to support what I told MPs and show that No10/Hancock have repeatedly lied about the failures last year.

No10 and Hancock are seeking to rewrite history:

1. They are trying to ‘memory-hole’ the original Q1 2020 debacle. The reality of the ‘optimal single peak strategy’ with herd immunity by September is in SAGE documents, COBR documents and was briefed by Hancock, CSA, CMO and No10 press office at the time and SAGE members explained it on TV. The reality is reflected in many emails/WhatsApps. Covid was the biggest crisis faced by Westminster since WWII. The No10/Hancock line now is as if No10 had said in summer 1940, ‘yes, our appeasement plan A was a great success on Hitler as you can all see, we didn’t need any Plan B, appeasement then fight them on the beaches was the original plan’.

2. Hancock is creating a new version of reality in which he came up with the idea to ramp up testing before 14 March, in an inspired and heroic move he announced his 100k target on 2 April to provide leadership, and this was responsible for the change in testing capacity. The reality: as part of the transition to Plan B No10 forced a new testing plan on Hancock, who was still operating under Plan A / herd immunity assumptions in the week of 16/3 according to which community testing was pointless (hence why it was briefly officially stopped); our plan was to build capacity on the scale of millions; the 100k then 1m target had already been set before he announced it; his behaviour in April distracted attention from testing in care homes and the PPE debacle. A public announcement was in principle definitely right but he did what he always did — he focused on the media and himself then lied. Testing, like vaccines, was removed from his control in May because of his incompetence and dishonesty March-April. You can’t understand what really happened on test-trace in the rest of the year without understanding what actually happened in March-April.

3. Hancock is creating a new version of reality in which the government really did ‘throw a protective ring’ around care homes. The reality: covid patients were sent untested from hospital to care homes and Hancock neglected care homes and testing throughout April partly because Hancock was trying to focus effort on his press conference at the end of April claiming success for his announcement on 2/4.

4. Hancock and No10 are creating a new version of reality in which: ‘there was no shortage of PPE’ and on 11 April Hancock removed procurement restrictions imposed by HMT. The reality… DHSC failed to plan for PPE demand and their procurement operation collapsed. They rejected chances to buy things because of sticking to the old rules. No10 insisted on removing these rules and HMT did remove their standard rules in March. Hancock told us PPE was ‘all under control’ in the week of 23 March. This meant further weeks were wasted instead of used to solve the problems. Hancock then sought to blame Simon Stevens, the Chancellor and the Cabinet Office for the PPE disaster in April. The Cabinet Secretary told the PM’s office that Hancock’s claims were false. The lack of PPE killed NHS and care home staff in March-May.

5. On the original ‘plan’, testing, PPE, procurement, care homes and more, Hancock gave a fictitious account to MPs last week and portrayed himself as a heroic figure who had been in agreement with the PM throughout the crisis. The PM has supported this fiction and ordered the No10 press office to support many arguments he knows are lies. At the time, the PM agreed with me and all serious people around No10 and the Cabinet Office — in his own words, Hancock’s performance on critical issues was ‘totally fucking hopeless’ and he had to be removed from crucial decisions: PPE to Lord Deighton, vaccines to Bingham, ventilators to Agnew, testing to Harding.

6. Hancock has also given a fictitious account of what happened on masks but I’ll leave that to another day.

Why is this important?

A.If No10 is prepared to lie so deeply and widelyabout such vital issues of life and death last year, it cannot be trusted now either on covid or any other crucial issue of war and peace.

B.Hancock continues to have direct responsibility for things like dealing with variantsand care homes. Having such a Secretary of State in a key role is guaranteed disaster. It is urgent for public safety that he is removed.

C. The PM is trying to influence officials/advisers to support the re-writing of history and is encouraging ministers to give false accounts to Parliament….

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/the-pm-on-hancock-totally-fucking

>>18451000

2/4

D. The PM’s defence of Hancock sends an unmistakeable signal across the system: a Secretary of State will be rewarded despite repeated incompetence and dishonesty and the government machine will seek to rewrite history in Orwellian fashion because the PM thinks it in his personal interests to do so. Any decent person in Westminster ought to be appalled by this behaviour.

E. The public inquiry cannot fix this. It will not start for years and it is designed to punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone — unlike other PMs, this one has a clear plan to leave at the latest a couple of years after the next election, he wants to make money and have fun not ‘go on and on’. So we either live with chronic dysfunction for another ~5 years or some force intervenes. tools, preparing a team and so on — made in 2018-spring 2019 proved vital July-December 2019.

From the perspective of good government and ethics the Cabinet and MPs should intervene but this is unlikely while the polls have the Conservatives ~40%+ because our political system incentivises party loyalty over good government and ethics. Senior civil servants will wait for the polls to move before trying to ‘push what is falling’. But the systemic incompetence surrounding the PM is such that his operation is programmed to unravel — he always does, No10’s structure makes it impossible for anybody to govern properly, and he rejected the plan to change how No10 works. Just as I said 2017-19 ‘this No10 will unravel, some of us should prepare for what comes next’ the same is true now.

This No10 will unravel — it would already be unravelling if Starmer were not also useless. People need to prepare for what comes next. Preparations — planning, building

I was wondering about the issue of publishing private WhatsApp messages.

1) No10 and Hancock are openly lying even about what was briefed on-the-record, so clearly nothing is beyond their attempted rewriting of history.

2) To further their lies, PM/Hancock are spinning distorted versions of my messages from internal WhatsApp groups to the PM’s favoured stooges such as Playbook Wiki.

3) Hancock challenged me at the Select Committee to provide evidence and said my failure to publish anything was ‘telling’ evidence that my account was false.

4) The Select Committee has asked me to provide evidence and clearly what MPs see the public should also see — transparency on covid is crucial.

Clearly the government cannot reasonably complain about me publishing evidence. Given this I will publish some internal messages. There are many more I could publish but below and in future I will publish only ones that further the question of ‘what went wrong and how do we learn’. I won’t publish private messages just to embarrass the PM or others. My goal is to force the system to face reality and change, not to embarrass people for the sake of it.

Memory-hole for ‘herd immunity’

Plan A was described in official documents as ‘the optimal single peak strategy’ with all descriptions and graphs tailing off by September when ‘herd immunity’ was attained.

This is why there was no serious border policy Jan-March. (The border policy remains a joke because the PM personally opposed repeated attempts by me and others to implement something based on the successful East Asian approach. This has contributed to the spread of the ‘delta’ variant and will continue to create unnecessary risks not just on covid.)

This is why community testing was dropped in March until the shift to Plan B reversed the decision.

This is why nobody started thinking seriously about an East Asian style test-trace plan until we shifted to Plan B (see my PM study whiteboard of 13/3 with ‘crash program for testing’ scribbled on, below). (Jeremy Hunt has wrongly inferred that this thinking did not happen until May — it started in March.)

This is why there was no serious vaccine plan — i.e spending billions on concurrent (rather than the normal sequential) creation/manufacturing/ distribution etc — until after the switch to Plan B.

I spoke to Vallance on 15 March about a ‘Manhattan Project’ for vaccines out of Hancock’s grip but it was delayed by the chaotic shift from Plan A to lockdown then the PM’s near-death. In April Vallance, the Cabinet Secretary and I told the PM to create the Vaccine Taskforce, sideline Hancock, and shift commercial support from DHSC to BEIS. He agreed, this happened, the Chancellor supplied the cash. On 10 May I told officials that the VTF needed a) a much bigger budget, b) a completely different approach to DHSC’s, which had been mired in the usual processes, so it could develop concurrent plans, and c) that Bingham needed the authority to make financial decisions herself without clearance from Hancock….

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/the-pm-on-hancock-totally-fucking

>>18451005

3/4

This is why even on the 18 March the crucial SAGE meeting did not even have a lockdown planto discuss, as I texted No10 officials from inside SAGE: neither DHSC nor Cabinet Office had provided such a plan nor had they asked SAGE to model such a plan (No10 did this direct with Vallance/SAGE/SPI-M as we bodged together Plan B).

This is why Hancock said to me, still delusional about us being ‘the best prepared country in the world’ (this was not one of his lies, he really did believe this because he had not properly investigated the preparations), on 12 March (the day of ‘chickenpox parties’ / Dilyn’s bad PR / Trump wanting us to bomb the Middle East): We’re better prepared than other countries, Wuhan will see a second wave when they lift their lockdown. (Also on 16 March in COBR, Hancock tried to delay the announcement on household quarantine ‘because the helpline isn’t ready’. Sturgeon also supported this delay. I and others warned the PM in advance this would happen and he overruled them. Both of them have misled the public about this.)

This is why even on 18 March, a SAGE member emailed me, the Cabinet Secretary and Hancock’s Permanent Secretary saying we would look back on SAGE discussions as ‘a strange dream’ because lockdown had not even been discussed: ‘Literally all the models assume that there will be a full-blown epidemic, and its just a matter of how much it can be drawn out, compressed, or the herd immunity directed to one section or another of the population’ because thinking was based on assumptions (no test-trace, population won’t listen to tough rules, reinfection from abroad etc) and ‘Once you take these assumptions for granted, the only paths that exist are to achieve herd immunity’.

But, he rightly said,suppression should be considered partly because the imminent collapse of the NHS was so horrificand because ‘prior models and assumptions are WRONG [emphasis in original]. We could do this, ie a total lockdown. We’ll look back on it like a strange dream, but we could – and should – do it.’

And the DHSC Permanent Secretary responsible for pandemic planning responded with the logic of Plan A: ‘The virus will still exist in 3-4 weeks time and won’t we just start again with reinfection and re-spread?’ [bold added by me above] Even on the afternoon of 18/3, after SAGE (mostly, not unanimously) were pushing for urgent lockdown at least in London), the apex of power in the DHSC was still operating under the assumptions of Plan A, i.e suppression was counter-productive. This is four days after I proposed Plan B to the PM in his study (noon, 14/3) and five days before ‘stay at home’.

COBR documents on herd immunity plan

This COBR document (in multiple meetings in the week of 9/3 and 16/3) shows the logic of herd immunity by September: suppression means a disastrous second peak when the NHS is annually overstretched and the ‘advised approach’ (i.e advised by DHSC/SAGE/Cabinet Office to No10) ‘seeks to avoid this’ by getting herd immunity by September.

Another graph from the same mid-March COBR pack is here: N.B the red line is NHS ICU capacity, it appears to be lying almost on the x-axis because at ~5,000 it seems very near 0 when the y-axis stretches to 200,000. It shows the official Plan A as of 12-15 March involving at most the three actions which a) supposedly push the peak out into June (this thinking contributed to the lack of urgency before 16/3) but b) still totally overwhelmed ICU capacity.

Note there is no line for a lockdown scenario because, contra Hancock’s false claims to MPs last week, DHSC had not developed a plan for it nor asked SAGE to model it (as the Cabinet Secretary’s reply to the email of 18 March above pointed out).

This graph from the same COBR pack shows the effect of Plan A’s three interventions: ~250,000 dead after the ‘optimal single peak strategy’, with herd immunity by September. N.B this projection, awful as it was, was obviously too optimisticbecause it did not take into account that in this scenario there would be no NHS for any other patientsfor months until it was rebuilt.

Versions of this graph were in many official documents in the week of 9/3 and 16/3. As we pointed out to the PM in the ‘Goldblum’ meeting on 14 March in his office, in this scenario many more than 250,000 would die and, I said, the public would march up Downing Street and lynch him. (We discovered in April that DHSC did not have plans to deal with the number of dead we were facing after switching to lockdown — never mind what would have happened if it had been x5-x10 worse.)…

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/the-pm-on-hancock-totally-fucking

>>18451025

Too long to post the whole post, but Hancock is responsible for

the majority of deaths in UK

4/4

Below are whiteboards from the evening of 13/3 and 14/3. Both were in the PM’s study and were shown to him at noon on 14/3 as I and Marc and Ben Warner explained why official thinking had gone so badly wrong and why we had to switch to Plan B. Both show ‘our plan’ (i.e Plan A) overwhelming the NHS. Plan B is different: suppression + crash programs on testing, drugs + increasing NHS capacity etc — which everybody can see is what actually happened. The graph with the squiggly line (‘Plan B’) is the first time No10 had a ‘document’ that ditched all the previous graphs with either a single peak ending by September or a second winter peak and showed instead us managing covid permanently below NHS capacity.

(Some have asked ‘what does “who do we notsave?” mean?’ I meant: on 13th it was already clear we’d made terrible errors and many would die, I was forcing people to consider: ‘on whom are our errors going to fall worst, who is not going to be saved in this disaster, and if forced to choose because of NHS collapse how does the system do this (e.g prioritise mothers of small children)?’ because only by facing such awful questions could we have a chance to change plan fast, e.g we turned shielding around on 19/3.)

I told MPs how, literally as I was sketching the whiteboard above in the PM’s study on 13 March in preparation for the meeting I planned the next day with the PM, the deputy Cabinet Secretary walked in and told us thatDHSC clearly had no serious plan and was imploding. When asked last week by MPs re my testimony, Hancock said that the disproof of what I’d said was ‘we had a plan, we published it on 3 March’ and this plan discussed lockdowns. He is referring to the laughable contain-delay-mitigate ‘plan’ published on 3 March. This document was based on the logic that we would not do suppression. Obviously this embarrassingly awful document, which will be remembered as a case study in failure for decades to come, in no sense set out what we actually did, as everybody can see…

Journalists were briefed on the ‘herd immunity’ plan in the week of 9/3 by Hancock himself, by senior officials including the CSA and CMO, by the No10 press office, and SAGE members went on TV and radio explaining it.

On 13 March, as I was sketching the whiteboard above, the PM texted me, Hancock, Vallance and Whitty asking: how do we win the herd immunity argument? On 14th in his study, using those whiteboards, I told him: forget winning that argument, we have to switch to Plan B.

Hancock’s claim that the 3/3 document disproves my claims is, as the evidence shows above, entirely untrue. As the evidence above shows, that ‘plan’ was sending us to catastrophe so we ditched it.

TESTING

• As we sketched Plan B it was clear mass testing and test-trace would be crucial.

• This was part of our discussions on Plan B 13-15 March in the PM’s study.

• No10 was very unhappy with what we heard from Hancock on testing before and after we started shifting to Plan B. I and others including the PM insisted on a much more radical scale-up than PHE/DHSC had considered and it was clear that PHE’s senior management was totally unable to meet the challenge and Hancock had no plan to fix this. Obviously Plan A had been effectively ‘do nothing’ on community testing because the herd immunity plan had no place for it, hence it was officially stopped on 12 March and the concept of moving to 100k then 1 million did not exist before Plan B.

In the morning meeting on 24 March I and others quizzed a very slippery Hancock on progress with testing to see where he was after which I sent this to a No10 group:

Steve O = Oldfield. TomS = Shinner. I’d asked Tom to ditch his job and join No10 over the crucial weekend of 14-15 March. He started on Monday 16th. He had worked on ‘no deal’ Brexit etc for two years and had huge knowledge of Whitehall systems and great people who could be shuffled into critical roles.

He played an enormous part in recovering from the collapse of No10 in March and built an entirely new team — effectively a joint No10-Cabinet Office team — in March-July which evolved into the ‘covid taskforce’ there now.

Before this there was no effective central entity to manage the crisis — as I told MPs, the Civil Contingencies Unit collapsed in March and had to be rebuilt with new skills and tools. (He also did a very valuable review of the whole ‘delivery’ mechanism of No10/Cabinet Office, which I will explore another time.) Shinner worked with officials in DHSC and elsewhere and recruited a new team including Alex Cooper to speed everything up.

So Hancock had told the morning meeting on 24th: 10k by Monday 30/3, 100k ‘within a month’ of 24/3….

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/the-pm-on-hancock-totally-fucking