Dominic Cummings has said his Downing Street defence of his lockdown breaking visit to Barnard Castle last May was a “terrible, terrible, terrible mistake”, but has revealed the trip was essential due to death threats made against him and his family outside his London home.
Providing evidence to the Parliamentary inquiry into the Government’s handling of the Covid pandemic, he said his family had been forced to stay with his parents near Durham following the threats made during the early stages of the pandemic.
He said he stood by his decision to visit County Durham due, but added he was “extremely sorry” for not telling whole story during his press conference in the rose garden at Downing Street a year ago.
However, he did concede that he had undermined public confidence by travelling to Barnard Castle.
He continued to defend his visit to Barnard Castle on his wife’s birthday to test his eyes, saying: “If I was going to make up a story, I would have come up with a hell of a lot better one than that one right? It’s such a weird story.”
He added it “did not seem crazy” that he was testing his eyesight with his wife and child in the car but apologised for “the whole debacle”.
He added: “The truth is only a few days before then I had been sitting in bed writing a will, what to do if I die.
“I tried to explain this all at the time, it seemed to me like, okay, if you’re going to drive 300 miles to go back to work the next day then pottering down the road for 30 miles and back to see how you feel after you have come off what you thought might be your death bed didn’t seem crazy to me at the time.”
He said in February his wife had told him there was a gang outside the family home “saying they’re going to break into the house and kill everybody inside”, and it was decided with the backing of the Cabinet Office that he would move his family out of London to his parents’ home in County Durham regardless of lockdown rules.
The trip became a major source of embarrassment for the Government, with Mr Cummings working as Boris Johnson’s top adviser at the time.
Mr Cummings added: “The whole thing was a complete disaster and the truth is – and then it undermined public confidence in the whole thing – the truth is, if I just when the Prime Minister said on a Monday, ‘we can’t hold this line, we’re going to have to explain things’, if I just basically sent my family back out of London and said here’s the truth to the public, I think people would have understood the situation.
“It was a terrible misjudgment not to do that. So I take … the Prime Minister got that wrong, I got that wrong.”
Pressed by MPs from the health and science committees as to why he did not apologise during the rose garden press conference, Mr Cummings said: “Well, as I have tried to explain there were multiple things going on in my head. I couldn’t really tell the whole story, I felt like I couldn’t, but I should have done, and I didn’t.
“I think my behaviour in leaving London at the time was perfectly reasonable and other people in the cabinet office and other people agreed with me I could move my family out to Durham.”
This constituted a 264-mile trip while the national guidance to everyone in England was not to travel except in exceptional circumstances.
“I wasn’t sorry about moving them out of London,” added Mr Cummings. “I didn’t think it was a mistake I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Obviously, I am really sorry about the way things worked out. The reality of it I had to move my family back out of London twice again, but I did not leave London.”
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