Cummings is singing like the proverbial Canary. Many revelations about the incompetence of government. This is interesting:
” We are sitting in the prime minister’s office, the Cabinet were talking about the herd immunity plan. The cabinet secretary said ‘Prime Minister you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity plan and that it’s like the old chicken pox parties, we need people to get this disease because that’s how we get herd immunity by September’.
I said ‘Mark [Sedwill], you have got to stop using this chicken pox analogy, it’s not right’ and he said ‘why’ and Ben Warner said ‘because chicken pox is not spreading exponentially and killing hundreds of thousands of people’.
To stress, this wasn’t some thing that cabinet secretary had come up with, he was saying what the official advice to him from the Department of Health was.”
Elsewhere:
“Like in much of the government system, there were many brilliant people at relatively junior and middle levels who were terribly let down by senior leadership.
I think the secretary of state for health should’ve been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly.
There’s no doubt at all that many senior people performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect. I think the secretary of state for health is certainly one of those people.
I said repeatedly to the prime minister that he should be fired, so did the cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people.”