You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 10, 2021.
Over the past several months, interview sessions that the House of Commons select committees have conducted generally concern an aspect of coronavirus.
Their interviews and subsequent reports will feed into a wider inquiry on the pandemic to be held in 2022.
On Wednesday, May 26, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former special adviser Dominic Cummings appeared before the Science and Technology Select Committee for an inquiry that lasted over seven hours.
Cummings’s testimony included allegations that Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, should be fired and that he was a liar.
He agreed to provide evidence by June 4 to the select committee to substantiate those serious allegations, but he never did. Pictured on the right is Jeremy Hunt MP, co-chair of the Science and Technology Select Committee:
TimesRadio interviewed Jeremy Hunt on June 6:
Guido Fawkes has the key quote. Hunt said of the upcoming session with Matt Hancock:
Dominic Cummings made some very serious allegations against [Matt Hancock] in particular, saying that he lied repeatedly. So we will put those allegations to him [Hancock], but you know we haven’t received the written evidence to back those claims up that we were expecting. But we’ll be putting [..] all those allegations to him to give him his rightful chance to respond.
Guido commented (emphasis in the original):
Guido spent about 7 hours watching Cummings insist that the government is an incompetent cabal led by donkeys, and now the same man appears to have forgotten to hand in his homework. Maybe the Select Committee should check if Cummings has decided to upload the evidence to Twitter instead…
I checked Cummings’s Twitter feed today but couldn’t find anything.
Today, June 10, 2021, Matt Hancock appeared before the Health and Social Care Select Committee, co-chaired by Hunt and Greg Clark MP. Other MPs on the committee also asked questions. The co-chairs and the MPs are the same as those on the Science and Technology Select Committee.
The session lasted four and a half hours and is available for replay. Skip over the first four minutes which are in private, then fast forward 15 minutes when they take a break at around 90 minutes in:
Channel 4 also broadcast it:
Guido Fawkes has video clips of and principal points from Hancock’s testimony.
The session also trended on Twitter.
I haven’t listened to all of it yet, so cannot comment. What follows are tweets and excerpts from Guido’s post:
09.35: Greg Clark points out Cummings has missed all deadlines to submit evidence to substantiate his claims made against Hancock during his committee appearance. Cummings has not explained the absence of his submission.
Greg Clark asked Hancock about Cummings’s animosity towards him:
09.36: Hancock denies ever saying something to the PM that he knew to be untrue
09.37: Hancock denies blaming Treasury for blocking purchasing of PPE. Says it is “Not a fair recollection” of the truth.
09.49: Clark: “Did you know that [Cummings] wanted the PM to fire you?”; Hancock: “Yes because he briefed the newspapers at the time”
Questions turned to testing:
10.10: Hancock defends the 100,000 target says it was needed to galvanise the Whitehall machine.
10.12: Hancock claims countries that experienced SARS & MERS were better prepared, though Covid-19 was very different on account of asymptomatic transmission.
Hancock talked about the (duff) modelling numbers:
Hancock’s department had no list of care homes:
I find this next line surprising:
10.29: Hancock stresses that only 1.6% of cases from care homes came from hospitals.
This, too, was surprising:
Contrary to what Cummings said, Hancock said there was a plan early on:
He discussed China:
10:49: Insists that closing the borders last year would have made little difference: “The only way the world could have stopped this virus getting out of China is if China itself had stopped people leaving China.”
11:28: Hancock claims he first heard about asymptomatic spread in January 2020: “I arranged a call with the World Health Organisation. I was told on that call with respect to China this was ‘likely a mistranslation’ […] I bitterly regret that I didn’t overrule that scientific advice.”
Hancock talked about lockdowns.
We should not have been so compliant, because they’ll lock us down again:
With regard to our present situation:
13:31: The Delta/Indian variant now makes up 90% of cases in the UK.
He agreed with Greg Clark on these preliminary conclusions:
One would think that Dominic Cummings watched Matt Hancock’s testimony.
Hancock has agreed to supply the select committee with copies of documentation and data from the early days of the pandemic.
Cummings is now in a position to critique what Hancock said. Many of us await further developments with interest.
Churchmouse Campanologist 