‘Trivial’ story about Carrie Symonds’ dog distracted from Covid focus, Dominic Cummings tells MPs

‘Trivial’ story about Carrie Symonds’ dog distracted from Covid focus, Dominic Cummings tells MPs

Carrie Symonds' anger over a "completely trivial" story about their dog derailed focus early in pandemic, Dominic Cummings has claimed. Mr Cummings, the Prime Minister's former chief adviser, told the Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees on Wednesday that on March 12, 2020, he had warned Boris Johnson that there were "big problems coming" if self-isolation measures were not announced immediately, warning of "100,000 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios“. However, he said Mr Johnson was distracted by a "trivial" story in The Times newspaper about the Jack Russell cross he had adopted the year before with Ms Symonds, as well as a potential bombing campaign in the Middle East at the request of Dominic Trump. Mr Cummings said: "It sounds so surreal it couldn't possibly be true... [but] that day, The Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog. "The Prime Minister's girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that. "So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying 'are we going to bomb Iraq?', part of the