Matt Hancock should have been fired for at least “15-20 things” including “lying” to officials, Dominic Cummings has insisted.

Answering MPs’ questions at a joint inquiry into the handling of the pandemic, the former No 10 adviser credited some officials in the Department of Health, but insisted they “were terribly let down by senior leadership”.

Taking aim at Mr Hancock, he said: “I think the secretary of state for health should have been fired for at least 15-20 things, including lying to everybody in multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the Cabinet room and publicly.”

Pressed on whether people should be be worried about facing “corporate manslaughter charges”, Mr Cummings said he was unsure because he was not sure of the law behind such charges.

But he added: “I think that there is no doubt many senior people performed far, far disastrously below the standards which the country has a right to expect.

“I think the secretary of state for health is certainly one of those people. I said repeatedly to the prime minister he should be fired, so did the Cabinet secretary, so did many other senior people.”

Asked to provide evidence of the cabinet secretary’s “lying”, the prime minister’s most senior adviser until the end of 2020, said: “There are numerous examples. I mean in the summer he said that everybody who needed treatment got the treatment that they required.

“He knew that that was a lie because he had been briefed by the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer himself about the first peak, and we were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.”

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