Boris Johnson asked experts if you could kill Covid by blowing hairdryer up nose
Boris Johnson asked scientists if people could kill Covid by blowing a hairdryer up their nose after he watched a YouTube video suggesting this.
The then-PM shared the clip on a WhatsApp group including Government health experts and senior No10 officials. In a written statement to the Covid Inquiry, Dominic Cummings accused Mr Johnson of spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
“A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill Covid’ and asked the CSA (Chief Scientific Adviser) and CMO (Chief Medical Officer) what they thought,” the former No10 adviser wrote.
No10 official was ready to stop Mr Johnson getting in car to see Queen
Mr Cummings gave more details on his claim that Mr Johnson had to be stopped from going to see Queen Elizabeth II in person on March 18 - five days before the first lockdown was announced. He said No10 officials were prepared to prevent him getting into his car. “He rejected our advice,” Mr Cummings wrote. “I was desperate and said something like, ‘If you’ve got Covid and you kill the Queen you’re finished’. [No10 adviser] Cleo [Watson] said she would not let him get in the car. He agreed not to go.”
Mr Johnson complained that he felt like Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther
Mr Johnson complained to officials that he felt like he was Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther as he recovered from having Covid in May 2020. Mr Cummings wrote: “He repeatedly said versions of a Clouseau analogy: ‘the British state has totally failed, it’s been a humiliating disaster, the government machine isn’t a Rolls Royce, I feel like Clouseau in the Pink Panther in that scene where he pulls the brake and it comes off in his hand, then pulls off the steering wheel and chucks it out the window, that’s what being PM has felt like in this crisis’.
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“Unfortunately his approach was the worst of all words - he would depress everybody with his Clouseau analogy, by implication offend officials many of whom had made tremendous efforts in public service, but then swerve real action to solve the problems. This encouraged despair, anger and leaks from all sides to pressure ‘the trolley’.”
Mr Cummings was told to come up with 'dead cat' to distract from Covid
Mr Johnson demanded that Mr Cummings create a “dead cat” to distract the public from Covid in autumn 2020. “My relations with the PM were in a bad state and getting worse,” the former adviser wrote in his witness statement. “By June he was blaming me for, in his words, ‘bouncing’ him into the first lockdown and saying he should have been the Mayor of Jaws… He wanted to declare Covid ‘over’ even though this would obviously backfire, not just on him but on government credibility generally.
“At one point in autumn he told me to ‘put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead cat Covid, I’m sick of Covid, I want it off the front pages’. I said that no campaign could ‘dead cat Covid’ and I would not spend my time on such a project.”
Mr Johnson wanted to write book on Shakespeare as Covid spread across globe
Mr Cummings also told how Mr Johnson went on a fortnight long holiday in February 2020, as the pandemic was about to hit, as he wanted to work on a book he was writing about William Shakespeare. “He was extremely distracted. He had a divorce to finalise and was grappling with financial problems from that plus his girlfriend’s spending plans for the No10 flat,” he wrote. “An ex-girlfriend was making accusations about him in the media. His current girlfriend wanted to finalise the announcement of their engagement.
“He said he wanted to work on his Shakespeare book.” Mr Johnson signed a book deal in 2015 to write Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, but it has never been published.
Mr Cummings included a quote from War and Peace on the cover of his 115-page witness statement. “Nothing was ready for the war which everybody expected,” it read.
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