Boris Johnson asked the top scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nose, according to Dominic Cummings.
Johnson’s former senior political adviser described this moment as a “low point”, with the ex-prime minister circulating a YouTube video of a man using a device for this purpose.
Cummings said Johnson had also asked him to find a “dead cat” to get the coronavirus pandemic off the front pages of newspapers, because he was “sick” of it. The “dead cat” refers to a strategy for political meddling by circulating striking claims in order to divert attention away from an unwanted story.
The former adviser made these claims in his witness statement submitted to the Covid inquiry.
In the alleged hairdryer episode, the then prime minister was said to have sent a video, subsequently deleted from YouTube, to a WhatsApp group with his top scientists.
Cummings wrote: “A low point was when [Johnson] circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hairdryer up his nose ‘to kill Covid’ and asked the CSA [chief scientific adviser] and CMO [chief medical officer] what they thought.”
He also repeated a suggestion that Johnson was working on a biography of William Shakespeare rather than the pandemic while on a two-week holiday in February 2020.
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“He was extremely distracted,” Cummings said. “He had a divorce to finalise and was grappling with financial problems from that plus his girlfriend’s spending plans for the No 10 flat, which he raised repeatedly from early January.
“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.”
It comes after Cummings told the Covid inquiry on Tuesday how the “dysfunctional system” during a “meltdown of the British state” failed to deal with the crisis, as Johnson downplayed the pandemic.
Cummings said vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities and domestic abuse victims were “entirely appallingly neglected” during lockdown considerations. He said “one of the most appalling things” was the lack of a shielding plan in March 2020, “and the Cabinet Office was trying to block us creating a shielding plan”.
The former adviser was forced to deny claims of misogyny after referring to the then deputy cabinet secretary as “that cunt”. The inquiry was shown Cummings’ expletive-laden WhatsApp messages about Helen MacNamara from 2020, in which he said he would “handcuff her and escort her” from Downing Street.
The counsel to the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC, put to Johnson’s former adviser on Tuesday that he “denigrated women”, to which he replied: “No, that’s not correct. I was not misogynistic.”
Cummings apologised for the “deplorable” language he used in the messages.