In Leaked Messages, Johnson Called His Health Secretary ‘Hopeless’ - The New York Times

A trove of material released by the British prime minister’s former chief aide, Dominic Cummings, shows a government in chaos as the pandemic exploded last year.

LONDON — On the night of March 26, 2020, as the coronavirus was engulfing Britain and its leaders were struggling to fashion a response, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ridiculed his government’s health secretary, with a profanity, as totally “hopeless,” according to a text message posted by his former chief adviser.

Johnson’s former aide, Dominic Cummings, reignited a debate over how Britain handled the early days of the pandemic — a period when Mr.

Cummings said it lurched from one course to another and failed to set up an effective test-and-trace program.

Cummings pinned much of the blame for the disarray on the health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom he accused of rank incompetence and serial lying.

Cummings that the aide did not pick up.

Cummings said Mr.

Cummings said, the situation improved: Mr.

Johnson deputized his foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, to chair meetings in his absence, and Mr.

Cummings wrote.

Hancock said he did not know why Mr.

Devi Sridhar, the head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh, said the latest information “reinforces that testing capacity was a bottleneck, though they never admitted it publicly.” But Professor Sridhar said she doubted that a “vast majority of the British public are interested in these exchanges.

Cummings seem largely designed to shape the narrative in advance of a Parliamentary inquiry into how the government handled the pandemic, which he predicted would not be completed before Mr.

Cummings cited two other incidents that he said demonstrated Mr.

Johnson’s lack of faith in his health secretary.

Cummings texted the prime minister to say the government had turned down offers to buy ventilators because suppliers had raised their prices.

The prime minister floated the idea of reassigning responsibility for that to another Cabinet minister, Michael Gove