Boris Johnson has blocked his two most senior scientific advisers from answering questions on whether his senior aide, Dominic Cummings, broke the lockdown.
At No 10’s daily press conference, the prime minister twice prevented questions from journalists who wanted to know whether Prof Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, believed Cummings had stuck to the rules.
Johnson said he wanted to “draw a line” under the Cummings affair, after Durham constabulary said the aide might have committed a “minor breach” of the rules.
“I’ve said quite a lot on this matter already and what I also note is that what Durham police said was that they were going to take no action and that the matter was closed,” he said, without mentioning Cummings’ name.
The prime minister then said he would not allow Vallance or Whitty to answer questions on the row to “protect them from what I think would be an unfair and unnecessary attempt to ask any political questions”.
“It’s very, very important that our medical officers and scientific advisers do not get dragged into what I think most people would recognise is fundamentally a political argument,” he said.
On a third time of asking, Whitty and Vallance said they did not want themselves to get involved in politics.
Whitty replied: “The desire to not get pulled into politics is far stronger on the part of Sir Patrick and me than it is in the prime minister.”
Vallance added: “I’m a civil servant, I’m politically neutral, I don’t want to get involved in politics at all.”
But their silence on the matter will fuel suspicions that they are not willing to back up the prime minister’s assertions that he believes Cummings did not break the lockdown rules.
There have been questions over the absence of the UK’s senior experts from the daily press conference since revelations of Cummings’ journey from London to Durham while his wife had suspected coronavirus and a 60-mile round-trip to a beauty spot.
Whitty and Vallance were due to appear at Monday’s press conference but they were replaced at the last minute by Prof Pauline Doyle, an expert from Public Health England. The deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, previously made an appearance and answered questions about the rules about Cummings’ actions, saying: “If you’re symptomatic, you stay at home, take yourself out of society as quickly as you can and stay there, unless there’s extreme risk to life.”
Cummings said in his statement on Monday that while he suspected he and his wife could have contracted the coronavirus, neither of them had classic symptoms before they travelled to Durham.
Speaking after the press conference, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said it was “extraordinary that the prime minister had stopped the scientists being able to answer a question put to them by journalists”.
Answering questions on one of his regular Zoom Q&As with voters, Starmer said this reflected badly on Johnson. He said: “The government has been saying for weeks on end, this is about transparency, it’s about answering whatever questions you’ve got. And then on the question people want to hear an answer on, he stops them answering – it’s the wrong thing to do.
“I don’t think he’s going to have impressed anybody with that tonight. I don’t think he’s impressed anybody over the past week.”
Cummings’ actions and the defence of them by No 10 had stirred something “personal and emotional” in the public, Starmer said. “Lots of people are beating themselves up because they’re not doing something for somebody they love, and that’s why, when they saw Cummings apparently saying, ‘That’s your rule, but I don’t necessarily have to follow it,’ it really struck not a party political chord but something deep in everybody.”
