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LONDON — It’s little surprise that the former boss of Vote Leave can deliver a good quote.
Dominic Cummings’ blockbuster evidence to the science and health committees of the House of Commons lived up to its billing with a blistering series of attacks on former colleagues in government. He painted a picture of incompetence at the heart of Downing Street, where he was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser until he was fired in November.
Beyond the shocking revelations, Cummings peppered his testimony with references to big-budget Hollywood movies, comic-strip characters and colorful language that will seriously challenge news editors over which headlines to go for.
Here are some of the best:
On Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as 2019 election options: “There are thousands of people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two.”
Also on Johnson: “The prime minister already is about 1,000 times far too obsessed with the media in a way that undermined him doing his own job.”
And another on the prime minister’s indecision: “It doesn’t matter if you’ve got great people doing communications if the PM changes his mind ten times a day and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy day after day after day. You’re going to have a communications disaster-zone.”
And another in a similar vein: “Nobody could find a way around the problem of the prime minister [who was] just like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other.”
On Health Secretary Matt Hancock: “I think that the Secretary of State for Health should have 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.”
On himself: “In any sensible rational government, it is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position, in my personal opinion. I’m not smart. I’ve not built great things in the world. It’s completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just like it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there.”
On how wrong things got: “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’.”
The apology: “The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this. When the public needed us most, the government failed. I would like to say to all the families of those who died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and for my own mistakes at that.”
On who was responsible for various parts of government during the COVID crisis: “You have that meme with both Spider-Man’s pointing at each other – it’s like that but with everybody.”
And on where they were at the start of the crisis: “A lot of key people were literally skiing … the PM was on holiday for two weeks.”
On the chaos: “It was like a scene from ‘Independence Day’ with Jeff Goldblum saying ‘the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken and you need a new plan’.”
More on the chaos: “Helen MacNamara [then deputy Cabinet secretary] said, ‘I’ve come through here to the prime minister’s office to tell you all,’ quote, ‘I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we’re going to kill thousands of people’.”
And more: “The Times had run a huge story about the prime minister and his girlfriend and their dog, and the prime minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that. So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq, part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not doing quarantine. The prime minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial.”
On borders: “Fundamentally, there was no proper border policy because the prime minister never wanted a proper border policy.”
On what should have happened: “In a well run entity what would have happened here is essentially, in my opinion, you would have had a dictator in charge of this.”
On hopes for the future: “What would happen if terrorists attack with anthrax? Personally, I would be extremely concerned that that plan is not as robust as it should be.”
Not so hopeful: Cummings said the prime minister agreed with him that, “I am more frightened of you having the power to stop the chaos than you are of the chaos. Chaos isn’t that bad. Chaos means everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.”
On the EU’s vaccines plan: “The EU plan just looks like the classic EU-Brussels thing. It’s going to get completely bogged down in bureaucracy. They’re not going to take the right financing decisions … and thank goodness that was, I think, one of the few things that we got right.”
On herd immunity: “It’s totally bizarre and incomprehensible to me that the government would be trying to deny that … that was the original plan, but we realized what the consequences of it were going to be and we decided that it was intolerable and we would have to try something else.”
On the trip to Durham: “I made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake which I’m truly sorry for. What I said at the [Downing Street rose garden] press conference was true — but the whole thing was a disaster and undermined public confidence.”
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