Johnson dismissed lockdown as those dying were ‘all over 80’, Cummings says

Dominic Cummings has claimed that Boris Johnson thought the first national coronavirus lockdown was a “disaster” and resisted imposing a second one.

“His attitude at that point was a weird mix of partly ‘it’s all nonsense, lockdowns don’t work anyway’, and partly ‘well, this is terrible but the people who are dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80,’” the prime minister’s former chief adviser said in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

Cummings left Downing Street during a bitter row in November.