Dominic Cummings tells MPs it was ‘crazy’ that he and Boris Johnson had so much power during Covid pandemic – live

Starmer says the Cummings evidence has got to Johnson. He says Cummings accused Matt Hancock of misleading colleagues. Did the cabinet secretary tell him he had lost faith in Hancock’s honesty?

No, says Johnson. He says people want the government to focus on reopening the economy. That would be much more profitable line of inquiry for Starmer, he says.

Starmer says Cummings says Johnson dismissed this as “another scare story, like the swine flu”. Will the PM apologise for being complacent?

Johnson says no one can accuse the government of being complacent about the threat posed. Labour has flip-flopped, he says. Meanwhile the government has got on with. the job.

Sir Keir Starmer starts by saying Dominic Cummings said the government failed when the public needed it most. Does the PM agree?

Johnson says handling the pandemic has been one of the hardest things for government. It has tried to save lives, and followed the best scientific advice.

Starmer says a year ago Johnson praised Cummings. Now Cummings says ministers fell “disastrously short”. Does the PM accept that, and that his inaction led to needless deaths?

No, says Johnson. He says the inquiry will look at this. He says Starmer is “fixated on the rear view mirror”.

He says everyone over 30 can now come forward for a vaccination.

The Cummings hearing is taking a short break, just as PMQs starts.

Boris Johnson begins by paying tribute to the former MP Mike Weatherley.

In the Commons chamber PMQs is about to start. The Cummings hearing is due for a short break soon, but for a while I may be flitting between one event and the other, posting the most interesting exchanges.

Greg Clark is asking the questions again.

Q: Were you part of No 10 groupthink? Or did you know it was wrong, but felt too junior to protest?

Cummings says, although the original plan looked terrible, one big peak looked better than another peak in the winter.

There was a better alternative. But he says people did not start discussing that until 12/13 March. Until then, people thought the alternative approach (lockdown) was possible.

And even after that there were people on Sage who thought the lockdown policy was a mistake. The scientists were still arguing about that at the meeting on 18 March.

Cummings says he does not think of himself as a whistle-blower.

He thinks “it’s a disaster that I acted too late”.

But he was frightened of acting, he says. He says he was asking himself if he hit the panic button, and persuaded the PM to change, whether he would be responsible for thousands of deaths.

Q: Are you here to settle scores?

Cummings says he was invited to give evidence. He says the relatives of people who died deserve the truth.

Q: Why did you go into No 10? Was it for your agenda or the PM?

Cummings says there would have been a crisis if Brexit had not been implemented from the second half of 2019. He says reasonable people can take different views on Brexit, but there was a crisis in 2019. He says “God only knows” what would have happened if Covid had struck then (when parliament was deadlocked).

Cummings says, if you had dropped Bill Gates or some of the most competent people in the world, into No 10 in early March they would have found it a complete nightmare.

He says there is no doubt that Boris Johnson made “some very bad judgments and got some very serious things wrong”.

But he also says Johnson was “extremely badly let down by the whole system”. He says he played a role in that.

Aaron Bell (Con) is asking the questions now.

Q: If you knew there was no plan, what were you doing in the first two weeks of March when you could have been drawing one up?

Cummings says, from about 25 February, he was having meeting after meeting, trying to find out what was going on.

He says the meeting with Helen MacNamara was focused on the NHS. (See 10.32am.) At that point there was not even a plan to bury all the bodies.

Asked about the No 10 data system, Cummings says originally he was just using the white board featured in his tweet this morning. Simon Stevens from the NHS came in with figures for people in intensive care. Cummings says he would write them on the white board, and then get his iPhone out to work out the doubling time.

Cummings says the civil contingencies secretariat in the Cabinet Office “completely collapsed” under the pressure of what was happening. They did not have the people, they did not have the skills and they did not have the data, he says.

He says the whole way the Cabinet Office handles national security issues needs to be changed.

He also says the Cobra system does not work. He says people cannot take phones or laptops into the meetings. That is to stop people like the Russians spying. But it did not work for Covid, he says, because people with laptops with the relevant data were not allowed in.

The last Cobra meeting he attended was a Potemkin meeting. He says the devolved authorities were there. But people know that, as soon as it was over, Nicola Sturgeon was just going to go out and announce what she wanted to do anyway.

Cummings says that one problem with Whitehall is that ministers cannot fire officials.

He says it would be better to have some sort of “dictator” in charge. If he had been prime minister, he would have put Mark Warner (his data scientist colleague) in charge of everything, giving him “kingly authority” over Whitehall.

The Telegraph’s Gordon Rayner points out that it is going to be a long day.

Cummings says he thinks there needs to be a thorough review of risk register planning. As an example, he cites the plans for a terrorist anthrax attack. He says he is concerned the plans are not as robust as they should be.