UK failed in Covid 'disaster', PM Johnson's ex-chief adviser says

London - 'The secretive British state was woefully unprepared for the pandemic'

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's former chief adviser said the government failed in the Covid-19 crisis and fell "disastrously short" of the standards the public had a right to expect during the most devastating global pandemic in decades.

With almost 128,000 deaths, the United Kingdom has the world's fifth worst official Covid toll, and Johnson was slow to appreciate the significance of the threat from the virus in early 2020 as it spread from China towards Britain's shores.

Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind the 2016 Brexit campaign and Johnson's landslide election win in 2019, began giving evidence to British lawmakers on the lessons that can be learned from the pandemic.

Cummings, who left the government late last year, has said the British health ministry was a "smoking ruin", that Western governments failed during the crisis, and that the secretive British state was woefully unprepared for the pandemic.

"The truth is that senior ministers, senior officials, senior advisers like me, fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this," Cummings told lawmakers.

"When the public needed us most, the government failed," he said. "I think it's obvious that the Western world, including Britain, just completely failed to see the smoke until the alarm bells in January, there's no doubt about it."

Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film "Brexit: The Uncivil War", casts the British state as an outdated system run by incompetent amateurs who are resistant to any innovation that would bring them closer to the modern world.

British officials, he said, failed to learn the early Covid lessons from Asia, were resistant to new ideas from young scientists, overly secretive, overly bureaucratic and lacked any real scrutiny from a compliant domestic media.