The former head of the civil service, Lord Mark Sedwill, will give evidence to the COVID Inquiry today, after claims surfaced that he wanted people to hold “chicken pox parties” to promote herd immunity at the start of the pandemic.
The ex-cabinet secretary made a surprise exit from Whitehall in September 2020 amid reports of clashes with Boris Johnson and his top team – including the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings.
Now Mr Cummings has claimed to the inquiry that Lord Sedwill told the then prime minister to “go on TV” and “explain that this is like the old days with chickenpox and people are going to have chickenpox parties”, adding: “The sooner a lot of people get this and get it over with the better, sort of thing.”
Mr Cummings said the incident was “terrifying” and made officials question “who on earth is briefing the most important official in the country along these lines”.
But in a later inquiry hearing, the answer appeared to be Sir Christopher Wormald, who remains the most senior civil servant in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
WhatsApp messages between him and Lord Sedwill during the early days of the pandemic revealed the pair were privately agreeing on the strategy, with the crossbench peer saying: “Indeed presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it and develop herd immunity before the next wave.”
Sir Christopher replied: “Exactly right. We make the point every meeting, they don’t quite get it.”
Lord Sedwill was a diplomat before he took over the civil service, racking up over 20 years at the Foreign Office – including a stint as the British ambassador to Afghanistan.
He became cabinet secretary in November 2018 after the death of his predecessor, Sir Jeremy Heywood, as well as taking on the role of national security adviser.
Despite being kept in post by Mr Johnson when he took the keys to Number 10 in July 2019, cracks soon began to appear, and by June 2020 he had announced his upcoming departure – later denying it was a resignation, but instead an “agreement” between him and the prime minister.
The general secretary of the FDA civil service union at the time, Dave Penman, accused Number 10 officials of giving negative briefings against Lord Sedwill to the press in the run-up to his resignation, saying he had been undermined in a “cowardly” way.
Lord Sedwill said such briefings were a “regrettable feature of modern politics”, but civil servants were now “in an era where some of us are fair game in the media and I’m afraid it goes with the territory now”.
Messages presented to the inquiry showed Mr Cummings describing Lord Sedwill as “miles off the pace” as coronavirus began to spread at the start of 2020, saying he hadn’t got “a scooby” about what was going on, and was part of a Cabinet Office that was “terrifyingly s***”.
But despite these claims and expletive-laden texts, the former adviser also said his exit from the civil service was “one of the most disastrous moments” of the year as it “set off a kind of bomb across the whole system”.
The former chief aide also told the COVID inquiry he “begged” the prime minister not to effectively sack him.
Lord Sedwill will appear at the COVID inquiry at 10am. You can watch his appearance live on Sky News and via the Politics Hub online.