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| - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's former top aide Dominic Cummings on Wednesday painted a damning picture of dysfunction, lies and indecision in the government's early handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Here are three of the principal areas covered in his testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating lessons learned from the crisis, which has cost Britain nearly 128,000 lives, the worst toll in Europe: In February 2020, despite the World Health Organization having declared a public health emergency, Johnson saw the crisis "as just a scare story" and went on holiday, according to Cummings, who called the former journalist "unfit for the job". Even as the scale of the crisis became clearer by early March, the government stuck to what Cummings described as a weak plan to manage the virus rather than attack it in the hard-hitting way that China and others in East Asia were doing. "This is like a scene from 'Independence Day' with Jeff Goldblum saying, 'the aliens are here and your whole plan is broken, and you need a new plan'," he recalled. Britain has "thousands" of people better equipped to be prime minister, Cummings said, while conceding that he himself let down Johnson amid a wider "system failure" in government. Johnson is "obsessed" by media coverage, "changes his mind 10 times a day", and had to be forced into a nationwide lockdown in March 2020 in the face of forecasts pointing to 500,000 deaths without firm action. Cummings said that afterwards, despite nearly dying himself of Covid, Johnson regretted the decision and said he should have acted like the mayor in "Jaws", who keeps the beaches open despite a monstrous shark lying in wait. He said the prime minister then ignored scientists' advice to implement another lockdown in September, belatedly acting in November as infection rates surged again, too late to stop a winter wave of deaths. The performance of Johnson's government as a whole fell "disastrously below" acceptable standards, according to Cummings, but Health Secretary Matt Hancock came in for blistering criticism in particular. Hancock "should've been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly", the former adviser said. Senior figures including Cummings felt that unless Hancock were dismissed and failures in Covid testing rectified, "we are going to kill people and it will be a catastrophe". Johnson "came close" to firing the health minister in April 2020, "but just fundamentally wouldn't do it", Cummings said, highlighting thousands of deaths in elderly care homes after infected patients were discharged from hospitals. Responding to the testimony, Downing Street said Johnson continues to have confidence in Hancock and does not believe the minister has been untruthful. "It's true that I hit the panic button (in March 2020) and said we've got to ditch the official plan... I think it's a disaster that I acted too late. The fundamental reason was that I was really frightened of acting," Cummings said. "I apologise for not acting earlier and if I had acted earlier then lots of people might still be alive." The former adviser was also grilled about his lockdown-busting, cross-country drive to his family home in northern England in April 2020, after his wife contracted Covid. At a subsequent news conference, Cummings was unrepentant, and provoked widespread scorn when he explained that he took one drive to a tourist landmark because he needed to test his eyesight. He admitted on Wednesday that his defence of the trip then "undermined public confidence", but said that he made the journey due to threats against his family. "The prime minister and I agreed that because of the security things, we would basically just stonewall the story and not say anything about it," he said. But that approach turned into a "complete disaster" and full disclosure would have been better, Cummings conceded. jit/phz/har
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