Former aide will accuse Boris Johnson of fatal second lockdown delay

Allies of Dominic Cummings said that he had documents that he could use in evidence when he appears before MPs on May 26.

Boris Johnson practises his soccer skills during a visit to Hartlepool United Football Club last Friday. Picture: AFP

Former British prime ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings is to accuse Boris Johnson of having been prepared to let more people die rather than impose a second lockdown last autumn.

Allies of Mr Cummings said he had documents from his time in No 10 Downing Street that he could use in evidence when he ­appears before MPs on May 26.

Most damaging to Mr Johnson is the claim that the Tory Prime Minister refused to back a so-called circuit-breaker lockdown in late September, despite clear scientific evidence that an exponential rise in infections would be the result.

Mr Cummings is said to be preparing to reveal private remarks made by Mr Johnson that made clear he was prioritising keeping the economy open over a rise in death numbers.

The government was later forced to impose a lockdown in England in November and again in January after case numbers continued to rise. Mr Cummings, Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock were among those pressing for Mr Johnson to take earlier action.

An ally of Mr Cummings said: “He’s going to be forensic. He’s going to say things that are verifiable, that are backed up by documents and emails.”

Another said Mr Cummings had “boxes and boxes” of documents from his time in Downing Street.

“Boris is just making it more likely that Dom’s evidence will be more forthright than it otherwise would have been,” one of his allies said.

A source on the joint corona­virus inquiry by the House of Commons health and science committees, before which Mr Cummings is due to appear, said he could submit written evidence before the hearing and the MPs would then decide whether to ­publish it.

They added, however, that Mr Cummings’s evidence would be restricted to lessons learnt from the coronavirus crisis and he would not be allowed to make broader attacks on Mr Johnson and the government.

“We will obviously be looking at how we approach the hearing closer to the time,” the source said. “But it should be an interesting session.”

In his attack on Mr Johnson last Friday, Mr Cummings made clear that he was determined to go public with the detail of private Whitehall discussions about the handling of COVID-19.

He said he would be prepared to release all his emails from July 2019, when he joined the government, to last November, when he left after a power struggle, and would answer questions for “as long as the MPs want”. He also called for a formal parliamentary inquiry into the crisis with access to Whitehall documents.

No 10 is concerned that although Mr Cummings is not a sympathetic public character, after his own lockdown-breaking came to light last May, any alle­gations that he makes could still damage the government.

Internal polling shows that claims of sleaze have yet to cut through but this could change if Mr Johnson is accused of deliberately having made the death toll in the pandemic worse.

One government figure suggested that Mr Cummings could not be trusted to tell the truth.

“I think most people will be somewhat sceptical given that he also claims he drives to test his eyesight and edits his own blogs to pretend he predicted the COVID crisis,” they said.

Nevertheless, the public timeline of case numbers suggest that the government did not initially respond effectively to evidence of rising case numbers. At the start of September, new coronavirus cases had been averaging about 2200 a day but by the week of September 14, they had risen to 4000 a day.

By the point at which Mr Johnson decided against a circuit-breaker lockdown the following week, new cases were averaging more than 6000 a day.

“He didn’t believe that lockdowns worked: he thought that the economic damage outweighed the public health benefits. He thought things would get better,” a source told The Times last month.

Mr Johnson is likely, however, to argue that it was the emergence of the new variant of the virus in Kent, which was not identified until November, that drove the second wave.

Downing Street sources say he had to balance the risks of the long-term damage to people’s livelihoods associated with lockdown alongside the risk of higher death rates.

The Times