This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a day of high drama, Boris Johnson’s former top aides — ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings and former director of communications Lee Cain — took the stand, shedding light on how the British state struggled to get to grips with the magnitude of the crisis that unfolded in 2020 and 2021.

Just weeks before the country was plunged into a full-scale lockdown, Johnson — who Cain said had likened the virus to “swine flu” and initially feared creating media panic by amping up the dangers — unveiled a “coronavirus action plan” on how the government would contain the spread.

Cain put it diplomatically, saying COVID was the “wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skillset.” Johnson, he said, showed “great strength” during Brexit in allowing competing ideas to flourish before making a decision — but that “oscillating” didn’t work for coronavirus.

A key player referenced several times in Tuesday’s evidence was Mark Sedwill, who served as Britain’s most senior civil servant — known as the Cabinet secretary — before he was replaced by Simon Case in a Johnson clear-out.

Messages from Cummings claim Sedwill spent a meeting in the early days of the pandemic “babbling about chickenpox,” which the former No.10 aide said showed a fundamental lack of understanding about the severity of the virus in the vital Cabinet Office.

“If I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit with PET [the government’s propriety and ethics team] — designed to waste huge amounts of my time so I can’t spend it on other stuff — I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building,” Cummings wrote.

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