Did anything new come from the Covid inquiry?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews |
| 0:05.5 | of unrivaled authority. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription |
| 0:11.6 | in print and online. Plus a £20 Amazon gift voucher. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.co.uk |
| 0:20.4 | forward slash voucher. Welcome to Covey House Shots. The Spectator is the |
| 0:27.9 | early politics podcast. The Covid in Māori is hit one of its more dramatic stays today, |
| 0:32.5 | with Dominic Cummings, formerly the Prime Minister's Chief Strategist, giving evidence. |
| 0:36.8 | People have been looking forward to this for weeks, perhaps months. Now he's been in there, |
| 0:42.2 | but as he detonated in the way that people expected, watching him has been my colleague Michael |
| 0:47.6 | Simmons who joins me now. So Michael, what have we learned? Not a lot that we didn't already know |
| 0:53.4 | unfortunately. The inquiry seems a lot more kind of interested in essentially the politics of what |
| 1:00.5 | went on and what various people were saying on WhatsApp. So a lot of the start of Dominic Cummings' |
| 1:06.2 | evidence was about the language he used to describe colleagues, which is not for repeating on the |
| 1:11.6 | podcast, but that seems to be kind of what they're interested in. And it's moved on now slightly |
| 1:17.3 | to structural failures, how different things were done, but we're essentially not learning things |
| 1:23.5 | we didn't know. We're learning that Cummings and his colleagues didn't think much of, |
| 1:27.6 | you know, how the internal structure of a government was running, Lecane didn't think much of |
| 1:32.6 | Boris Johnson. Lecane's the Prime Minister's former official spokesman who gave evidence before |
| 1:37.6 | Dominic Cummings, but basically it's just simply then, look, we've got your emails, |
| 1:42.6 | here's some rude words you used, we're going to revel in these rude words, is it that kind of |
| 1:47.8 | that's the sort of the gist of it. I would say that there there was nuggets of interesting |
| 1:53.5 | information. So one was that Dominic Cummings said that vulnerable people were appallingly neglected. |
| 2:00.4 | So vulnerable does he mean those in care homes or what? Yes, so those in care homes he mentioned |
... |
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