Boris Johnsons ex-top aide accuses British leader of putting queen at risk early in the pandemic

Toby Melville Reuters Dominic Cummings, then-special adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, arrives at Downing Street in London on Nov. 13, 2020.

LONDON â€" Dominic Cummings, a former top adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who was once called “Boris’s Brain,” told the BBC in an hour-long interview Tuesday night that his former boss was a reckless semi-incompetent who early in the pandemic insisted that he be allowed to meet with Queen Elizabeth II, even as infection rates soared.

On March 18, 2020 â€" just a week before the British government declared its first national lockdown â€" Johnson was keen on attending his weekly face-to-face session at Buckingham Palace with the monarch, who was 93 at the time, Cummings told the BBC.

Cummings claimed that Johnson said, “Sod this. I’m going to go and see her,” employing a British swear word.

Cummings said he advised the prime minister that infections were ripping through 10 Downing Street. (Cummings himself would soon catch the virus and violate lockdown orders to flee north with his wife and son).

“I just said, ‘If you give her coronavirus and she dies, what are you going to [do]? You can’t do that. You can’t risk that. That’s completely insane,” Cummings told BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg in his interview.

The special adviser â€" known as a “spad” in British government speak â€" said the prime minister agreed. “He basically just hadn’t thought it through,” Cummings said.

Five days later, Johnson announced the first of three national lockdowns. A few days after, he revealed that he was infected with the coronavirus, which eventually saw him hospitalized and sent to an intensive care unit.

Cummings’s claim that Johnson was ready to meet with the queen does match the prime minister’s relaxed statements early in the pandemic, including his boast in early March 2020 that he had visited a coronavirus ward and shaken hands “with everybody.”

Downing Street denied the queen incident. The prime minister’s spokesman stressed that the government took “all necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods, guided by the best scientific advice” as it safeguarded the nation’s health-care system “from being overwhelmed through three national lockdowns.”

As for the queen’s take? “That’s not something we’d comment on,” a Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said.

Cummings’s latest remarks have stunned Britons â€" but only slightly, given the recent fast-and-furious torrent of “Dom Bombs” excoriating Johnson’s performance.

Cummings has been on a tear â€" some see it as vendetta, others as truth-telling â€" since he left 10 Downing Street in November 2020. He has blog, on Substack, to which one can subscribe, but his most sensational charges are quickly printed in the British press.

The former top adviser, an ardent Brexiteer who was a central figure in the campaign to urge voters to exit the European Union, came up with slogans such as “Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done.”

He was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in an HBO drama about Brexit that aired in 2019, which portrayed Cummings as a kind of fevered libertarian PR genius in a hoodie.

[U.S. warns against travel to Britain as coronavirus cases surge, restrictions lift]

Cummings launched Johnson into top office and served as his top aide, “the man in the room,” as the BBC describes it. But since being pushed out of 10 Downing â€" the photo of him departing with a cardboard box containing his stuff became a meme â€" Cummings has doled out a steady stream of embarrassing reveals about and texts from Johnson.

In the BBC interview, Cummings contends:

Johnson was prepared to sacrifice the over-80 generation to the virus. Cummings said Johnson noted that those dying of covid-19 were “essentially all over 80,” a claim that data have largely borne out. The prime minister wrote, according to Cummings, “That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and Live longer.”

Johnson also questioned the central premise of the lockdowns, which was to protect National Health Service (NHS) hospitals from being overwhelmed by covid sufferers. Cummings said Johnson messaged him to say: “I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff.”

Johnson “always referred” to the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph newspaper, where Johnson once had a lucrative column, as “my real boss.”

Cummings told the BBC that the prime minister once wanted to let covid infections “wash through the country” to save the economy, essentially pursuing a strategy to reach “herd immunity faster,” the point where the virus has no place to go because the percentage of people vaccinated or protected by past infection breaks the chain of the contagion.

The British government denies pursuing herd immunity, even though many scientists say that this is essentially the policy being deployed.

On Monday, England ended all legal requirements to mask and socially distance, which unsurprisingly led to revelers partying and dancing in nightclubs without masks.

Some health experts have called it a reckless experiment with dangerous consequences for the world. Others say it is reasonable.

In the past, Cummings has said that Johnson “lies so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly” that he sees “no real distinction.”

The former aide claimed in a blog post that Johnson himself “regularly admits it’s ludicrous he’s prime minister.”

So why did Cummings stand by his man for so long â€" and help get him elected?

Cummings told the BBC that his boss’s ignorance and his “desire to enjoy himself rather than work hard” provided a “very weird opportunity to force through certain important things that the system, left to itself, won’t do,” which was free itself from the European Union and remake the government bureaucracy.

Cummings was pressed in the interview to provide more proof for his charges, which he said he will do before a formal inquiry into the government's pandemic response.

Kuenssberg wrote Tuesday, “The interview might make you want to throw rocks at the TV. He might provoke you, in the way that winding his opponents up became his political trademark. His picture of what went on in Downing Street might alarm you too.”

She concluded, “Whatever you think of Dominic Cummings, when big things happened, he was in the room.”

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