Boris Johnson asked top scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a “special hair dryer” up noses, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
In a “low point” while British prime minister, he allegedly sent a video of a man using such a purported device to the men serving as England’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer and asked what they thought.
Mr Cummings, his former chief adviser turned nemesis, made a series of claims in his witness statement handed to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.
He said Mr Johnson 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.
A so-called dead cat strategy is the political meddling of circulating striking claims in order to divert attention away from an unwanted story.
Mr Cummings said that in autumn 2020 Mr Johnson asked him to “put your campaign head back on and figure out how we dead-cat Covid”.
“I’m sick of Covid, I want it off the front pages,” Mr Johnson said, according to Mr Cummings.
The adviser, who worked with Mr Johnson on the Brexit campaign, says he replied that “no campaign could ‘dead-cat Covid’”.
In the alleged hairdryer episode, the then-prime minister was said to have sent a subsequently deleted-from-YouTube video to a WhatsApp group with his top scientists.
Mr Cummings wrote: “A low point was when he circulated a video of a guy blowing a special hair dryer up his nose ‘to kill Covid’ and asked the CSA and CMO what they thought.”
He also repeated a suggestion that Mr Johnson was working on a biography of William Shakespeare rather than the pandemic on a two-week holiday in February 2020.
“He was extremely distracted,” Mr Cummings wrote.
“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.”
