All the later Covid lockdowns were “unnecessary”, Dominic Cummings has claimed. During a podcast interview with the Spectator published this week, the former Number 10 chief adviser said it was “unarguable that there never needed to be any lockdown or anything approaching a lockdown in Quarter 3, Quarter 4 of 2020, or in 2021”. Had the Government learnt more quickly from its early pandemic response, he suggested, “there would never have been any need for further lockdowns and all of the huge economic and other damage that they did.”

Cummings, who was working for then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Downing Street when Britain first entered a national lockdown in March 2020, told the Spectator’s Quite Right podcast that the initial measures were “very different” from those which followed. “The first [lockdown] was defensible in the sense of: there was no system, there was no testing, there was no nothing,” he said. “All the officials who thought they had the world’s best pandemic plan then suddenly admitted to us: ‘it’s all bollocks and there is no plan. We don’t know what we’re going to do.’”

According to the UK Covid Inquiry’s second report, published in November, Cummings had warned Johnson in March 2020 that a lockdown was required in London to stop NHS services from “collapsing” within days. The political strategist reiterated this position during the Spectator interview, arguing that the NHS “was overwhelmed in places” and that “there’s no hypothetical world in which” the then-PM would have gone against the policies of other European governments and refused to impose lockdown that spring. For Cummings, “some kind of short emergency measure was necessary in the circumstances.”

Britain’s two main successes during the Covid era, in his view, “were doing vaccine research faster and doing rapid testing”. If “the system had got its act together properly in summer 2020,” Cummings told the podcast, “you’d have had a huge rapid-testing build-up” and “absolutely no need for lockdowns” later that year. While he stated that it was “very hard for me to see how the first one could have been avoided” in the context of the British Government’s inadequate preparation, Cummings acknowledged that “there would definitely would have been no need for the first lockdown” had advisers and ministers engaged in “proper pandemic planning”.

During the new interview, Cummings also criticised the Covid Inquiry, which he accused of “completely botch[ing] its reporting over the whole thing”. He added: “Either it’s confused or it’s lying — who knows which, because it’s so bad.” The Inquiry reported last month that the adviser “poisoned the atmosphere” in 10 Downing Street during the response to Covid, insisting on making “key decisions […] which were for the prime minister to make”. Speaking to the Spectator, Cummings claimed that “all the later lockdowns were unnecessary and happened only because the pathological system itself just kept collapsing and couldn’t find its way out of that.”