Dominic Cummings had an 'axe to grind' says Newbury MP Laura Farris

NEWBURY MP Laura Farris has said Dominic Cummings was speaking with an “axe to grind” in his testimony in front of a select committee on Wednesday – but accepted there were issues with testing and PPE in care homes.

In an explosive seven hour session, Mr Cummings alleged the Government – including himself – had fallen “disastrously short” on what the public should expect, that the first lockdown was delayed as there was no plan and that health secretary Matt Hancock should have been fired for lying on multiple occasions.

Perhaps the most damning accusation was the claim that, despite Government rhetoric claiming a shield had been put around care homes, residents had in fact been sent back to them without being tested for the virus.

More than 40,000 care home residents, including 92 in West Berkshire, have died after contracting coronavirus.

Speaking yesterday, Mrs Farris said Mr Cummings’ analysis was “very simplistic” and his criticisms of himself “self-serving”.

She said: “He’s obviously wanted to have his say for some time.

“He is an ex-employee with an axe to grind.

“Of course he was a senior advisor at number 10 but I did think his analysis of the good guys and the bad guys was very simplistic.

“Everybody was trying their best in very difficult circumstances, in the context of something they didn’t know how to respond to.

“His primary criticism of himself was that he was right all along and he should’ve pushed the fact that he was right harder.

“I couldn’t totally avoid the view that that was quite a self-serving explanation of his own contribution.”

However the Conservative MP, who was elected in December 2019, spoke of feeling “powerless” in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, with care homes contacting her over issues with testing and PPE.

She added: “I’m not denying there were issues in the early days.

“Issues were raised with me and I was honest about that at the time – my team and I did the best we could to get more PPE and more testing.

“I felt my own powerlessness as the MP as I tried to help resolve them, but I didn’t feel it was a situation where they were ignored and abandoned in a way that Dominic Cummings put it.

“When I contacted central government, they tried to work with me but they didn’t have the resources needed for the issues being raised.”

Mrs Farris also disagreed with Mr Cummings’ claim that Boris Johnson wasn’t fit to be Prime Minister.

She continued: “I think he’s fit to be Prime Minister.

“He was confronted with an unprecedented crisis and there was definitely a period of getting to grips with it.

“But in all the things he was able to look into the future and plan for - and the vaccination programme is probably the biggest example of that – within nine months of us going into national lockdown, we were already injecting people with a vaccine for a novel virus.”

Mr Cummings also alleged Mr Johnson had said to “let the bodies pile high” rather than impose a third lockdown, and also claimed Mr Johnson offered to get injected with coronavirus live on TV to show it was nothing to be afraid of.

However Mrs Farris said Mr Johnson had denied the first comment, and that many people had downplayed the seriousness of the virus at the beginning.

She added: “I think it’s true to say when news of the coronavirus first broke, there was quite a lot of reporting on BBC News that it was less than it was and something that only affected elderly people and was like flu.

“In the early days when it was first emerging as a news story, the idea that it was less serious than it was, was not an unusual view.”