Boris Johnson, after watching a YouTube video suggesting it, asked scientists if humans might kill Covid by blowing a hairdryer up their nose. The clip was shared by the then-PM on a WhatsApp group that included government health experts and senior officials. Dominic Cummings accused Johnson of spreading misinformation during the pandemic in a written statement to the COVID Inquiry.
“A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill COVID’ and asked the CSA (Chief Scientific Adviser) and CMO (Chief Medical Officer) what they thought,” the former No10 adviser wrote.
A No. 10 official was prepared to prevent Mr. Johnson from driving to visit the Queen
Cummings elaborated on his claim that Boris Johnson was barred from seeing Queen Elizabeth II in person on March 18, five days before the first lockdown was announced. He claimed that No10 personnel were ready to stop him from getting into his automobile. “He rejected our advice,” Cummings wrote. “I was desperate and said something like, ‘If you’ve got COVID and you kill the queen, you’re finished’. [No10 adviser] Cleo [Watson] said she would not let him get in the car. He agreed not to go.”
Boris Johnson said he felt like Inspector Clouseau from Pink Panther
Boris Johnson told officials that he felt like Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther when recovering from COVID in May 2020. Mr. Cummings stated: “He repeatedly said versions of a Clouseau analogy: ‘the British state has failed; it’s been a humiliating disaster; the government machine isn’t a Rolls Royce; I feel like Clouseau in the Pink Panther in that scene where he pulls the brake and it comes off in his hand, then pulls off the steering wheel and chucks it out the window; that’s what being PM has felt like in this crisis’.
“Unfortunately, his approach was the worst of all words: he would depress everybody with his Clouseau analogy and, by implication, offend officials, many of whom had made tremendous efforts in public service, but then swerve real action to solve the problems. This encouraged despair, anger, and leaks from all sides to pressure ‘the trolley’.”
“I’m sick of COVID; I want it off the front pages”
Johnson asked that Cummings manufacture a “dead cat” to divert public attention away from COVID in the autumn of 2020. “My relations with the PM were in a bad state, and they were getting worse,” the former adviser noted in his witness statement. “By June, he was blaming me for, in his words, ‘bouncing’ him into the first lockdown and saying he should have been the Mayor of Jaws. He wanted to declare COVID ‘over’ even though this would backfire, not just on him but on government credibility generally.
“At one point in autumn, he told me to ‘put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead cat Covid; I’m sick of Covid; I want it off the front pages’. I said that no campaign could ‘dead cat COVID’ and I would not spend my time on such a project.”
Cummings’ 115-page witness testimony had a phrase from War and Peace on the cover
Cummings also described how, when the epidemic approached in February 2020, Johnson took a fortnight’s vacation to focus on a book he was writing about William Shakespeare. “He was extremely distracted. He had a divorce to finalize and was grappling with financial problems from that plus his girlfriend’s spending plans for the No10 flat,” he wrote. “An ex-girlfriend was making accusations about him in the media. His current girlfriend wanted to finalize the announcement of their engagement.
“He said he wanted to work on his Shakespeare book.” In 2015, Johnson negotiated a book deal to write Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, but it was never published.
Cummings’ 115-page witness testimony had a phrase from War and Peace on the cover. “Nothing was ready for the war, which everybody expected,” it went on to say.