64 Comments
Jun 16, 2021Liked by Dominic Cummings

I’ve subscribed purely to thank you.

I lost both of my shielding parents to Covid. Their names were Cliff & Jean Anderson.

My father, carer to my Mum, sat in his home in 2020, watching the news saying this was a cull of the elderly. We saw the discharge of the elderly first hand. We saw them moved to care homes untested. We saw the lies peddled each night. We saw the lack of testing of non Domiciliary care workers & their exemption from the rules. My father was scared. He never went out. We lost that year entirely, forced to FaceTime daily as we desperately sought to keep Dad’s spirit up, to keep them safe. But we couldn’t.

Dad died first. Likely an asymptomatic carer. They weren’t tested. They had to “self declare”. He had an enormous Covid induced stroke. He was taken away on Jan 11 in an ambulance after 4.5hr wait. I never saw or spoke to him again. I caught Covid giving him first aid. My Mum followed him 36 days later.

Collateral damage. Cannon fodder to the incompetents. Numbers chirped out at 5pm on Hancock’s grim reaper clapometer. His nightly death roster while he lied about how good a job he was doing. They don’t belong on that list, they were my irreplaceable loved ones. They were my children’s everything. A hole has been ripped in our hearts. Life will never be the same. I never understood what bereft meant until this.

I wrote to you in the days before your select committee appearance, telling you a little of their lives & asking that you speak honestly and freely. For those of us who are bereft but have no voice. Against a PM & Hancock who lie, who mislead, who cannot even be bothered to have the respect to attend the memorial opposite Parliament. Lest they be shamed by the reality of a symbol of their abject failure. Those nightly numbers sure have added up quickly.

So thank you. From the bottom of my heart. I hope you continue to divulge what you know, until it cannot be ignored, or swept away, or hidden. You were challenged by that fool to produce the evidence, please continue to do so. I have no wish to wait 5-10 years for a whitewash inquiry. The time is now.

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Jun 16, 2021Liked by Dominic Cummings

You are now effectively “the opposition”. I hope that you have or are developing a plan for how to construct some form of structure around that, so that we don’t just end up with other incompetents taking over from the ones you have the dirt on.

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Imagine being so bereft of ideas that Michael Gove seems like the answer to anything.

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This is very long meaning a vanishingly small number of people will work through it. Please consider setting up a Kickstarter and finding the kind of documentary team who worked with Navalny on Putin's Palace - 117,252,579 views on YouTube, one in four Russians have watched it. Lay out the story in a 2021 audience-friendly way.

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Agree with most of this (I had a sleepless night on 15th March 2020 over the insane "herd immunity" plans, thinking we were being led by crazy people into an abyss of chaos and ruin.)

I feel like there is a glaring hole in all of it though: Italy locked down on 9th March. It should've been obvious to you and everyone in the UK government that it was just a matter of time before we ended up like Italy, and the logical thing was to lock down immediately then. If we had locked down the day after Italy, we could've probably avoided 80% of the first wave, and reopened a lot quicker.

I think a large part of why this didn't happen was a kind of "British exceptionalism" that is epitomised by Brexit. Somehow what was happening in Italy just didn't apply to us! It would be different here. But why? What is materially different between the UK and Italy that meant that the pandemic couldn't possibly blow up _here_, or overwhelm _our_ health service!? A massive blind spot for you, No.10, the Cabinet Office and government in general. You don't even mention Italy!

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“Matt Hancock is totally fucking hopeless” is hardly revelatory. Your intention in exposing the liars which grace the table at number 10 is admirable – but a tad hypocritical. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the cabinet in situ were selected to Get Brexit Done. Covid outcomes would have been very different under Rory Stewart, Sajid Javid and Phillip Hammond. To what extent do you acknowledge your influence in gathering the current bunch of half wits and charlatans as a force to run the country?

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It feels like the media is extremely unwilling to hold our elected representatives to account.

Lying is the easiest way out of difficult questions, and doesn’t seem to bother either the media, or the general population.

Have you any thoughts on how this could change?

Having a political class that just want to be loved, rather than metrics and outcome based policies, is always going to result in slippery weasels at the top.

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Hi Dom, Finding your insight into the last 18 months fascinating, and pleased to have subscribed, it's certainly easier to get into the detail and digest the discussion over the constraints of twitter.

What's your prediction on whether the Public Inquiry would indeed be brought forward as a result of a campaign? Similarly, do you see a scenario whether the Spring date could indeed be pushed back if we see another wave during Winter '21 whilst a future variant is suppressed.

Thinking ahead to the inquiry, is there a danger that given you're putting evidence and testimony into the public domain ahead of the inquiry (now), whether your appearance would merely be scrutinisation of information you've already put forward, or will you actively hold back on detail / topics ahead of this.

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Very interesting to read what it looked like from the top. I had a view from the bottom/coalface running a network of private PCR testing labs, initially (March,April) providing free asymptomatic PCR screening to GPs and care homes on a charitable basis, later commissioned by the DHSC (for care homes, LA/hard to reach and later Pillar 2).

Your post helps make explicable some of the bizarre decision making we saw and I can say first hand that the system failings had real impact on quantity, quality, and impact of testing.

I have loads of questions but my first would be:

When was it clear that asymptomatic transmission was a thing? To us it was blindly obvious from the “start” (and could evidence because we were doing regular asymptomatic screening) but were constantly facing hurdles with DHSC/PHE that asymptomatic testing was not necessary. Did DHSC/PHE really believe there was no asymptomatic spread? or was it just because they would rather ration finite test capacity another way?

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You mentioned that the app would be a 'trivial cost that just requires brains and data', however it took 6 months from that text to release one and it cost £40mn (based on news articles I've seen, please correct if I'm wrong). Considering the hard bit was built by Google and Apple, why did this take so long/cost so much? Harder to do than expected? Incompetence? Considering it still has issues - you can't check out of a place so you're there till close - I wouldn't be surprised if this contract went to Hancocks mates again.

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There should be a Royal Commission, ideally an agile one not staffed by the great and the good, but by ordinary people randomly selected for their common-sense and experience of 'getting stuff done'.

Even were our political 'people' or their 'ideas' of the requisite calibre, our COVID response has demonstrated irrevocably (and at terrible cost) that our 'machinery' of state is irredeemably and systemically unfit for purpose. However, when the music stops, there will be the ensuing economic 'pandemic' which is likely to evoke the same, inadequate state response and be as bad if not worse than the biological one. How will we meet that? With the same failing state?

Who else wants to help and be on team Cummings?

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Look: I’m all for holding Mr Johnson to account.

But there is a time and a place. This evidence should be saved for a forensic inquiry, headed by one of the top minds in government who really knows where the skeletons are buried (Mr Heywood naturally comes to mind).

Posting screenshots of private conversations is not a good look Mr Cummings. Not a good look at all.

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Tour de force. Clearly systemic crisis at heart of decision making. Not really a surprise if we examine H1 2020 decisions made by Downing Street and all others concerned. In the business world many would have been fired. In government and public sector the lack of leadership and accountability is an in-built failure of the system. Latter appears during crises. So no real surprise. Moving on it remains clear the entire system is rotten to the core.

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Please read what I write below based on devil's advocate - you say you welcome that and I believe is important to shed more light on truth.

First thoughts on this:

1. The revelation you make that the PM has a time limit on his time in office will make others less likely to challenge him. Wondering why you would reveal that if you hope he leaves?

2. The PM now needs to defend Hancock - writing this could mean Hancock stays in the job for longer.

3. Why on earth is the Government doing 'Government by WhatsApp'? WhatsApp is the absolute worst place to run projects and communicate. An asynchronous tool like Basecamp could massively help No 10's operations.

4. The question seems to me to be less about the PM and Hancock and more about how we systematically ensure good governance. How do we attract the best candidates to join Parliament instead of staying in the private sector? My concern with your attempts to de-stabilise the people in the system is that, should it succeed, they will be replaced by people who are unlikely to be more competent than them. You say yourself that you see Starmer as useless and no MP noticed the problem with Hancock's testimony about 11th April.

That's all for now as I don't want to make too many points at once.

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Surely for Hancock, and others, prosecution for misfeasance in a public office must be a real possibility? 1. Public officer acting as such. 2. Willful neglect of duty / willful misconduct. 3. To such an extent as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust in that officeholder. 4. Without reasonable excuse or other justification. In this case causing death, injury (long covid etc) and economic damage. Maximum sentence - life.

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What are your thoughts on the cost - benefit of lockdown now, when most are vaccinated? Why have the goal posts moved so much - is it media induced? The US has moved on, why cant we

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