No 10 staff realised full lockdown was necessary 10 days before it was announced, inquiry hears – UK politics live

Keir Starmer is about to give a speech on the Israel-Hamas conflict in which he will try and patch over the growing divisions in his own party over the issue.

Unsurprisingly perhaps a few dozen protesters have gathered outside the Westminster thin tank where he is due to speak.

They are chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – almost exactly the phrase Labour has just suspended the MP Andy McDonald for referencing. McDonald says his words have been misrepresented.

O’Connor asked Cain if he agreed with Cummings that Johnson was not up to the job of being prime minister.

Cain said Covid was “the wrong crisis for this prime minister” given his skill set.

Hallett complained about the term “skill set”, urging Cain to speak in plain English.

Elaborating on his point, Cain said Johnson was someone who often delayed decisions. He said this worked during Brexit, when he let others take decisions and “jumped in the last minute to take political advantage”.

But with Covid there was a need for quick decisions and certainty, Cain said. “So I felt it was the wrong challenge for him,” he went on.

O’Connor asks Cain if he agreed with Dominic Cummings when he said that working with Johnson was impossible because he kept changing his mind.

Cain replies:

I think anyone that’s worked with the prime minister for a period of time will become exhausted with him. Sometimes he is quite challenging character to work with, just because he will oscillate, he will take a decision from the last person in the room. I think that’s pretty well documented in terms of his style of operating.

Heather Hallett, the inquiry chair, intervenes again to ask a question about the meeting on Saturday 14 March.

Q: If there was a decision taken to go into full lockdown, did that message go out to government? Had the decision been taken properly?

Cain says the decision had to be taken by cabinet.

Q: But a cabinet meeting could have been called very quickly.

Yes, says Cain.

Q: Was it?

Cain says he thinks a cabinet meeting was held within days.

Q: A lockdown is difficult. But if, on top of that, you have indecision, that makes it worse, doesn’t it?

Cain says indecision was a problem in No 10.

O’Connor asks about an exchange Cain had with Dominic Cummings.

In this exchanges Cummings complained about Johnson being in “Jaws mode wank”. That is a reference to Johnson’s claim that the real hero of Jaws was the mayor who kept the beaches open when there was a shark risk. Cummings also said he had to intervene to stop Johnson saying “stupid shit”.

(I have been watching on Sky News which, rather irritatingly, interrupts every time there is swearing to apologise to viewers.)

Heather Hallett, the chair, intervenes at this point. She asks Cain if he is defending the 10-day gap. She says she finds that curious if he is.

Cain says locking down the country is a huge, huge undertaking. In government terms, that is government acting at speed. But it was “longer than you would hope”, he says.

Q: The inquiry has heard evidence that Sage scientists were realising in February that NHS capacity could be overwhelmed by a pandemic. Why was that message not getting through to No 10?

Cain accepts that message was not getting through. He says Sage was a broad church, with members having different views.

Q: Around 13 March No 10 advisers were saying the NHS could be overwhelmed. That was news to you?

Yes, says Cain.

Q: On Saturday 14 March there was a meeting in No 10. In your witness statement (see below) you say people at that meeting agreed a full lockdown was necessary. But there was no decision to impose one.

That’s correct, says Cain.

Q: And that lockdown was not announced until Monday 23 March – 10 days later. Was that longer than you expected?

Yes, says Cain. But he says locking down the whole country is complicated,

O’Connor quotes from a message sent by Dominic Cummings on 12 March when he said he and communications officials were having to take the lead because the Cabinet Office was “terrifyingly shit”.

Cain says in his experience communications people often had to take the lead, because they were aware of the questions that could not be answered.

Q: Did you think Covid was a big deal by early March?

Cain says they all thought at that point it was a significant challenge.

But there was no serious plan in place, he says.

O’Connor says Cain is “fairly dismissive” of the Covid action plan published in early March. He says people in government referred to the document as a plan for managing the pandemic. But the document had little detail, and was just a communications device.

Q: Did you see this just a piece of PR?

Cain says anyone who reads the document can see it is not a plan for managing Covid.

He says people in government were concerned because “if this is the plan, then we clearly don’t have a plan”.

Q: You says the document showed the government did not have a proper plan in place. Is that what you felt at the time?

Yes, says Cain.

Q: Did you raise concerns at the time?

Cain says he cannot recall what concerns he raised.

He remembers that, when asked by the media for detail, No 10 was not able to give it.

Q: Did you know Dominic Cummings was asking for a proper plan?

Yes, says Cain. He says at the time Cummings was the only person forcefully asking for a better plan.

O’Connor shows a paragraph from Cain’s witness statement. At the end of January an adviser to the health secretary told Cain the UK might not be prepared for the threat posed by Covid. The adviser mentioned supply chain issues.

Cain says he was involved because he realised No 10 did not have answers to some of the questions the media might be asking.

O’Connor refers again to Cain’s witness statement, and says Johnson took at two-week holiday at this point (mid February). Hugo Keith KC referred to this yesterday, although he did not describe it as a holiday.

Cain defends Johnson’s actions at this point. He says Johnson had been assured that the government was making plans for Covid.

O’Connor asks if Johnson said over-reacting could be more of a threat. Cain confirms that. He says Johnson had a “colourful phrase of language” sometimes.

Q: Where did Covid fit in the hierarchy of concern in January and February 2020?

Cain says it started as a low base issue.

The view was that the UK was well prepared to deal with a pandemic.

The Department of Health was in the lead, he says. But as they moved through January into February, it moved up the agenda.

Q: In January/February you were not worried about the priority being given to Covid?

Cain says in early January he felt it was getting the right about of attention.

In late January and early February, he felt the balance was not quite right.

He says No 10 was “probably complacent”, thinking work was being done elsewhere.

Lee Cain is now giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. He is being questioned by Andrew O’Connor KC, counsel for the inquiry.

Cain starts by confirming details of his career. He worked as head of broadcasting for Vote Leave, before working as an adviser for Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary.

Q: Was Boris Johnson a friend?

Cain says Johnson was his boss. They had a good relationship.

He says he had a good understanding of how Johnson would react to something.

At the Covid inquiry yesterday Hugo Keith KC, counsel for the inquiry, said that, judging by the paperwork seen by the inquiry, Boris Johnson did not get any submissions about Covid for a period of 10 days in the middle of February 2020 – when the pandemic was becoming a global crisis, and only a month before the UK had to go into lockdown. The two private secretaries giving evidence did not contradict this, although they said they did not know if anyone else was speaking to him at the time about coronavirus. (Johnson was at Chequers.) They could not explain why he was avoiding the issue.

This morning Lord Bethell, a junior health minister during the pandemic, told the Today programme that he thought Johnson was avoiding the topic because he did not like bad news. Bethell said:

I was aware that during the early days of the pandemic, it was extremely difficult to get any response from Downing Street, and we could see this train coming down the tracks at us.

It was put to us there were other priorities including Brexit. I personally found that completely unexplainable and baffling.

I know [Boris Johnson] found the prospect of a pandemic personally very difficult to focus on, it was bad news of a kind he doesn’t like to respond to, and he did everything he could to try to avoid the subject.

Jamie Grierson has the full story.

Good morning. The Covid inquiry started taking evidence from witnesses in person in June, but only this week is it starting to interrogate members of Boris Johnson’s inner circle who were in the room with him as key decisions were taken at the start of the pandemic. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, who were in WhatsApp groups with him as key decisions were dodged, fudged or overturned. Yesterday’s hearing provided fresh evidence of the extent to which No 10 was in chaos at the time and today we’ve got two witnesses who potentially could be even more interesting.

In 2020 Dominic Cummings was Johnson’s chief adviser at No 10, and Lee Cain was his director of communications. They were involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and at the time Cummings was arguably the most powerful unelected person in the country. Ultimately he decided Johnson was a disastrous liability, and in 2021 he spent seven hours telling a Commons committee why. (For a reminder of what he said, skim the individual blog post headlines at the top of our blog covering the hearing.) It is hard to believe he has anything more to say, but his capacity for destructive criticism is inexhaustible, and the inquiry hearing will provide us with some of his WhatsApp messages, which did not happen two years ago.

Cain is a close ally of Cummings, but he has said much less about Johnson, and what happened during this period, in public, and so it is harder to predict where he will go. Some observers may also find him a more credible witness than Cummings, whose view of the world is often constrained by the assumption that he is always right and everyone else (with a handful of exceptions – normally geeks) is always useless.

The hearing starts at 10am. I will be covering it most of the day, although there will also be coverage of Keir Starmer’s speech on the Israel-Hamas war. Jamie Grierson has a preview of what he will say here.

This morning Richard Holden, a transport minister, was doing the broadcast round for No 10 and he had to defend the government’s handling of Covid in the light of the evidence revealed at the inquiry. He argued that the WhatsApp revelations were just “tittle-tattle” and that, if Churchill had had an iPhone during the second world war, similar disobliging comments may have emerged. He told Times Radio:

If there was conversations between people and they were recorded throughout history, as they are on WhatsApp, then would it be similarly embarrassing? Would Churchill and Chamberlain have faced a similar, what their colleagues said about them on X or Y day? I’m absolutely positive they would have done. I think that’s tittle-tattle. I don’t think that’s the important issue here. The important issue at stake is what we can learn as a country from our response.

Holden is right to the extent that WhatsApp means there is now a public record of exchanges that in the past might not have been recorded for posterity (although a lot of Churchill’s contemporaries kept and published very detailed diaries). But if he was trying to suggest a stronger parallel between Johnson and the great wartime leader – well, that’s probably best avoided. There is no record of any of Churchill’s colleagues saying he was making Britain look like a “a terrible, tragic joke”.

You might think this is just an argument about the past, but Holden’s response also shows how hard it is for Rishi Sunak to present himself as a “change” prime minister. If No 10 were serious about that, it would have sent Holden into the studios with orders to disown Johnson, trash his record, and stress that Sunak was doing things differently. But No 10 can’t say that because it would not sound plausible and Tory MPs would object, and so instead Sunak’s reputation remains shackled to Johnson’s.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

10am: Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former communications director, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.

11am: Keir Starmer gives a speech “on the international situation in the Middle East”. He will also take questions.

Late morning: Dominic Cummings is expected to start giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. After a break for lunch at 1pm, the hearing will resume at 2pm.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, speaks at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.