Boris Johnson has declined to rebut Dominic Cummings’ explosive claims that he bungled his Covid response, leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Quizzed one day after the allegations, the prime minister ducked an invitation to reject them as false – instead saying: “I make no comment on that.’
Asked if the death toll soared because of his government’s blunders, Mr Johnson replied: “No I don’t think so, but of course this has been an incredibly difficult series of decisions, none of which we’ve taken lightly.”
And, asked, if he was “arguing with the things he [Mr Cummings] said” in his damning evidence given to MPs, he gave the reply: “I make no comment on that.”
On Mr Cummings’ statement that he is not a fit person to lead the country, the prime minister urged the media “to focus on what really matters to the people of this country”.
“What people want us to get on with is delivering the road map and trying – cautiously – to take our country forward through what has been one of the most difficult periods that I think anybody can remember,” he said.
Mr Johnson also cast fresh doubt on his plan to lift all Covid restrictions on 21 June, as infection rates surge and more people are taken to hospital.
“I don’t see anything currently in the data to suggest that we have to deviate from the road map, but we may need to wait,” he told reporters on a hospital visit.
“Don’t forget the important point about the intervals between the steps of the road map. We put that five weeks between those steps to give us time to see what effect the unlockings are having.”
The prime minister acknowledged there are “signs of an increase in cases”, particularly of the B1617.2 Indian variant of concern.
“But I want to stress that we always did expect to see an increase in cases, that was always going to happen,” he added.
“What we need to understand is to what extent the vaccine programme is starting to make a real difference in interrupting the link between infection and hospitalisation and serious illness and death.”
Earlier, in the Commons the health secretary Matt Hancock failed to deny “signing off’ the policy of discharging patients into care homes without testing – or that he told Mr Johnson they were being tested.
Mr Cummings alleged an angry prime minister then demanded to know: “Hancock told us in the Cabinet Room that people were going to be tested before they went back to care homes, what the hell happened?”
Asked about that claim, Mr Johnson said: “We did everything we could to protect them.
“We did not know quite the way in which the virus could transmit asymptomatically and that was one of the reasons we had the problems we saw in care homes”.
