The prime minister’s former top aide said he is “not surprised” by the current confusion over the government’s traffic light travel system.
When asked by MPs on Wednesday if he was surprised about the confused messages surrounding the green, amber, and red lists of countries Dominic Cummings said he was not.
“I’m afraid it’s deja vu all over again,” he said.
He also said he was not surprised at all by the delay in adding India to the red travel list earlier this year.
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“That is completely in the character of Number 10,” he told MPs who are investigating the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked whether people should have been allowed to travel last year, he said: “Lots of things we did last summer were complete mistakes.”
He also accused prime minister Boris Johnson of not wanting a proper border policy as the pandemic emerged in early 2020.
“Fundamentally, there was no proper border policy because the prime minister never wanted a proper border policy,” he claimed.
“Repeatedly, in meeting after meeting, I and others said: ‘All we have to do is download the Singapore or Taiwan documents in English and impose them here.’
“We’re imposing all of these restrictions on people domestically but people can see that everyone is coming in from infected areas: it’s madness, it’s undermining the whole message that we should take it seriously.”
“At that point he was back to: ‘Lockdown was all a terrible mistake, I should’ve been the mayor of Jaws, we should never have done lockdown one, the travel industry will all be destroyed if we bring in a serious border policy’.
“To which, of course, some of us said there’s not going to be a tourism industry in the autumn if we have a second wave, the whole logic was completely wrong.”
He spent seven hours on Wednesday giving evidence to the joint inquiry by the science and technology committee and health and social care committee.
Cummings accused Johnson of being unfit for his role and said there had been tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the pandemic.
He was particularly scathing about health secretary Matt Hancock, saying he should have been fired.
More: Northern Ireland to adopt traffic light system from Monday