Who has the most to lose from Dominic Cummings’s testimony?

Ahead of Cummings’s long-awaited appearance at a select committee hearing on Wednesday, Sean O’Grady considers who will come out of it unscathed – and who is in the cross hairs of the PM’s ex-aide

Cummings has tweeted that the PM locked down too late (Getty)

Like an FA Cup Final or a WBA title fight, Westminster is greatly looking forward to Dominic Cummings’s appearance at the Health and Social Care Committee. Even though the rest of the country might have heard more than enough from the PM’s former chief adviser, what he says about what various senior figures did – and did not – as the Covid crisis mounted last year will make a difference to careers and reputations. He also happens to be great theatre, as his appearance in the sunny garden of Downing Street one year ago demonstrated, and as his high-profile departure from No 10 in the shadows last year confirmed.

So who might the losers and winners be?

Losers

1. Boris Johnson. The general public seems to have become used to the notion that they have a lazy feckless man leading the country, but have given him the benefit of the doubt because of the success of the vaccine programme and the paucity of the alternatives. Should Cummings substantiate the rumour that Johnson spent time when he should have been in emergency Covid meetings instead writing a book about Shakespeare, their patience might be tested a little more. Cummings is also likely to repeat the claim that the PM locked down too late and relaxed lockdowns too soon. Though in his recent tweets, he also acknowledges that the prime minister was hardly alone in his misjudgements (if misjudgements they are). The broader point is that it is probably already widely accepted that some errors were committed last year, but the vaccine success has tended to lessen the political damage. All the same, it’s unlikely to be a comfortable set of revelations from Cummings, and he may yet have some real surprises.

2. Dr Jenny Harries. The former deputy chief medical officer for England was recently promoted to be head of the new UK Health Security Agency, much to Cummings’s dismay and proof, so far as he’s concerned, that Whitehall rewards failure, and in this case getting it wrong on herd immunity, masks and other controls.

3. Other experts. Virtually the entire official scientific community will get it in the neck for their supposed adoption of an objective of achieving herd immunity as official policy, rather than a hard preventative immediate lockdown. Cummings says that advice by the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) in early 2020 has since been presented as merely statements of the well-known orthodoxy about herd immunity limiting the spread of a disease. It is fair to say that early remarks by officials about “cocooning” the vulnerable have been forgotten. Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser, and Professor David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team, have already been named, if not shamed, by Cummings, and other Sage figures may be added to the Cummings’ list of suspects.

4. Matt Hancock. As the man in charge of what Cummings has styled the “smouldering ruin” of the Department of Health and Social Care, Hancock cannot expect any encomia from the PM’s ex-aide. The story of how the management of the vaccine project was taken out of the Health department and handed to a task force won’t be a complimentary one. The chief executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, may also be caught by the flak from Cummings’s evidence.

5. Dido Harding. As the head of the test and trace system, Baroness Harding has already had a difficult press. While Cummings may well vaporise what’s left of her reputation, she is in the odd position of not having much more to lose from having Cummings slag her off.

Winners

1. Michael Gove. Cummings’s old patron and mentor may have some vestigial loyalty and respect for him, and certainly in comparison with his ill-disguised contempt for the prime minister. Cummings’s testimony may be useful in promoting the idea that Gove was the “adult in the room”, assiduous and rational and willing to follow to scientific advice, in contrast to their nominal boss, Johnson, with his senseless boosterism.

2. Keir Starmer. The Labour leader and his colleagues could do with a bit of ammunition as they fight a rearguard action against the Tory assault in some of their heartlands, and ahead of the by-election in Batley and Spen. As with the row about the Downing Steet flat and his holidays, this image of Johnson as a grifting, bone-idle dilettante may yet cut through as the drip-drip-drip of evidence that he’s taking folk for a ride starts to erode his public appeal. Certainly it will make some in his own party think again about how valuable an electoral asset he will be if these kind of revelations continue to surface.

3. Dominic Cummings. But of course. Not that it matters to a man of independent means and independence of mind, but Cummings could hardly but improve his public standing and popularity by giving a candid and honest account in what has been, after all, a national tragedy that has taken so many lives. They made never forgive him for his famous drive to County Durham during lockdown, but he may find the dogs don’t bark at him quite so much as he saunters down the street. Is it impossible he might one day make a comeback?