Cummings defends ‘weird’ Barnard Castle eye-test claim

Dominic Cummings has defended his “weird” explanation for why he broke lockdown rules last year, telling MPs he could have made up “a hell of a lot better story” had he chosen to lie.

At the height of the first lockdown Boris Johnson’s then chief of staff faced a barrage criticism for driving to the historic town of Barnard Castle, a visit said to coincide with his wife’s birthday.

Mr Cummings had claimed that he took the drive with his family to test his eyesight before a longer trip home, after having suffered from Covid-19.

“If I was gonna make up the story I’d have come up with a hell of a lot better story than that one, right?” He told MPs at a mammoth meeting of the joint health and science select committees on Wednesday.

“I mean it’s such a weird story … the truth is that only a few days before then I’ve been sitting in bed writing a will. What to do if I die.”

Mr Cummings, who was staying in Durham at his father’s house after a previous breach of lockdown rules, said he had wanted to drive back to London to return to work in the coming days.

“I then was thinking about coming down on the 12th, the Sunday, but I was basically too ill to do that. My wife said ‘you’re a real state, you can barely walk, are you sure you’re OK to go to work?’

“I tried to explain this at the time: it seemed to me like OK, if you get to drive 300 miles to go to back to work the next day, then probably down the road for 13 miles and back to see how you feel after you’ve just come off what you thought might be your deathbed … didn’t seem crazy to me at the time.”

Mr Cummings claimed his communications around the story had been mangled because he had chosen to omit details about the security of his family. He said he had originally taken his family out of London to avoid death threats.

However he admitted that he and the PM had “made a terrible Horlicks” of the situation and undermined public trust, adding: “I deeply apologise for it.”

He told the MPs: “The whole thing was a complete disaster … and then it undermined public confidence in the whole thing. When the prime minister said … we can’t hold this line, we’re going to have to explain things’, if I had just basically sent my family back out of London and said here’s the truth to the public, I think people would have understood the situation.”

Behavioural experts at the time measured a “Dominic Cummings effect” on compliance with lockdown and said the perceived lack of enforcement of the regulations against government figures had undermined public confidence in the policy.