What is the Covid row between Cummings and Johnson about?

What are Dominic Cummings’s reported allegations about Boris Johnson’s failings amid the Covid pandemic?

Amid a furious row, the prime minister’s former chief aide is expected to accuse Johnson of allowing the death toll to rise in the pandemic, leaving the UK with one of the worse death rate among all major economies.

Cummings is thought to blame the prime minister for blocking proposals to close Britain’s borders early last year and for delaying the introduction of a second England-wide lockdown in autumn. Cummings is due to evidence to MPs as part of an inquiry into the UK’s Covid response on 26 May.

What was the issue on border controls?

Cummings is said to have supported plans put forward by the home secretary, Priti Patel, in March 2020 to reduce the risk of travellers bringing the virus to the UK by halting daily flights from Covid hotspots such as China, the US and Iran. At the time, many European countries were considered less risky because domestic lockdowns were in place.

Between January and mid-March, travellers from designated high-risk countries such as China, Iran and Italy, but not Spain, were issued non-mandatory advice to self-isolate for 14 days on arrival. That guidance was withdrawn on 13 March. Four days later, the EU announced it was banning nearly all travel from outside the bloc for at least a month.

What was the advice from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage)?

Sage discussed the value of travel restrictions on 3 February 2020. They stated that halving imported infections would delay an epidemic in the UK by five days, while cutting them by 75% would push the epidemic back 10 days. The committee advised that “only a month of additional preparation time for the NHS would be meaningful” but that this would require “draconian and coordinated measures” that blocked at least 95% of imported cases – with knock-on effects for supply chains.

The Home Office went back to Sage on 22 March, the day before the first national lockdown, and asked if the advice on borders should change given the coronavirus response had moved from containment to delay. The following day, Sage minutes reiterated the message that “closing borders would have negligible effect on spread”, adding that the number of cases arriving from other countries was estimated to be “insignificant” at about 0.5% of cases.

Discussions around border restrictions continued throughout the lockdown and the Home Office went back to Sage on 28 April to see if the advice should be updated. In a letter to the committee, the Home Office noted that Sage had previously concluded there was “little scientific justification for implementing any measures at the border at that point”. In response, Sage advised that as cases fell in the UK, the proportion coming in from other countries might rise. Measures at the border could “change the level of risk” and these were reviewed.

What do we know now?

The UK had a poor understanding of the state of the outbreaks in European countries, and failed to detect tens of thousands of infected people who entered the country, largely from the continent.

Of the 18.1 million people who arrived in the UK by air in the three months before lockdown, only 273 were quarantined. In May, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, revealed that in early March that year the UK had seen a “big influx” of thousands of infections that “seeded right the way across the country”. Genetic analysis of the imported cases showed that about a third came from Spain, another third from France, and about 14% from Italy. The percentage of cases from China was minimal, at about 0.1%.

In August, a damning report from the home affairs select committee branded the government’s failure to impose border measures, such as mandatory self-isolation before the lockdown, “a serious mistake”.