Dominic Cummings should be held to account for his Covid-19 mistakes – not just Boris Johnson

The prime minister’s former chief adviser likes to think that he can see the future better than the blinkered mortals with whom he has to work – but he is his own unreliable narrator, writes John Rentoul

‘I can’t imagine that Dominic ever had any respect for Johnson,’ says one of Cummings’s former colleagues (AFP via Getty Images)

We have to respect Dominic Cummings’s dedication to open government, putting himself forward for three – or possibly four – hours of questions on the subject “coronavirus: lessons learnt”. We ought to be in favour of people in powerful positions in government being accountable for their conduct, as soon as possible after the events, even if they are no longer in a powerful position.

But too much of the pre-publicity seems to assume that the prime minister is bang to rights, guilty of the most appalling mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that all Cummings needs to do is to turn up at the committee and reveal “The Truth”, namely the secrets that prove what his critics think they already know.

That takes it for granted that Cummings is a reliable witness, which is a thesis that deserves to be tested rather than accepted uncritically. So although Boris Johnson will be on trial tomorrow, his chief accuser ought to be too.

So far, Cummings has been accepted as a truth-teller because he seems to subscribe to the popular myth that Johnson is to blame because he failed to lock down quickly enough. If that was true in March 2020, however, it was because Johnson was following the advice of Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the government’s scientific advisers, and it is not clear to what extent Cummings thinks they got it wrong.

There is much about Cummings’s own pre-publicity on Twitter that is unclear. He said that if the right preparations had been made, and if competent people had been in charge, there would have been no need for any lockdowns at all. That seems to come quite close to saying that if we had known the precise nature of this particular coronavirus in advance the government would have handled it better. Talk about Captain Hindsight.

And that is the problem with Cummings. He likes to think that he can see the future better than the blinkered and incompetent mortals with whom he is unfortunately condemned to work, but he is his own unreliable narrator.

Sam Freedman, a former special adviser at the Department for Education who worked with Cummings for Michael Gove, was damningly sympathetic to his former colleague in an interview on Sky News. He was asked what he thought Cummings’s motive was in criticising Johnson’s handling of the pandemic. Freedman thought he had two: that he was keen to show how dysfunctional Whitehall is; and that “he wants to clear his own name and show that he was right all along, and none of these mistakes were down to him”.

It was interesting that Freedman did not include revenge as one of Cummings’s motives, although he did say “I can’t imagine that Dominic ever had any respect for Boris Johnson – he saw him as a route to power”. And the determination to be proved right can come close to seeking revenge on those who persisted in the “wrong” course.

Which is awkward for someone who enjoyed the status of Johnson’s chief adviser. Cummings refused to accept a more formal title, such as chief of staff, yet he seems to have thought at one and the same time that he was indispensable to the No 10 operation and that he was little more than an observer at the heart of power whose views were overruled by an incompetent prime minister.

Freedman thought that Cummings was probably “on the right side of a lot of those debates” in government over the early response to the coronavirus, “but he’ll not shy away from embellishing the narrative”. And that is the crux of the matter. The committee tomorrow will be interviewing a witness who last year edited his blog to make it look as if he had some idea that a new coronavirus was coming.

It is just as well that the chairs of the two committees inquiring into the lessons to be learnt from the pandemic are two of the best interrogators in parliament. Greg Clark (science) and Jeremy Hunt (health) need to ensure that it is not just the prime minister but also Cummings who is on trial.