The former senior aide to the Prime Minister launched into a series of bizarre accusations and revealed what was really going behind the scenes during key decision making moments of the pandemic. The National have picked out the top six weirdest moments from the committee session so you don’t have to.

POP AT STURGEON

CUMMINGS criticised the First Minister for diverging from the PM’s coronavirus plans, and said that Cobra meetings became “potemkin” – having a false or deceptive appearance – as officials were concerned about what Sturgeon would say on TV afterwards. He claimed the FM would be “babbling” on TV after the meetings, and therefore no-one would dig into the “reality or detail” of the crisis.

“ABSOLUTELY F****D”

CUMMINGS slipped into obsecenties as he told how a panicked civil servant in the Cabinet Office told him that the UK was “absolutely f****d” and that thousands of people may die because there was no real pandemic plan. He claims that on Friday March 13 – a week before the official lockdown – he was with scientist Ben Warner and the Prime Minister’s private secretary in the PM’s study, when Helen Macnamara, Deputy Cabinet Secretary, arrived and said the country was headed for a “disaster”.

SPIDERMAN

WHILE giving an example of what the situation in government was like when the pandemic began to unfold, Cummings referenced internet culture and use the Spiderman meme as a metaphor. He said: “You know that Spiderman meme with both the Spidermans pointing at each other, it’s like that but with everybody. So you have Hancock pointing at the Permanent Secretary and you have the Permanent Secretary pointing at Hancock and then both pointing at the cabinet office, the cabinet office is pointing back at them and all the different Spidermans are all pointing at each other saying ‘You’re responsible’.”

HANCOCK’S BEHAVIOUR

CUMMINGS didn’t make much effort to hide his disdain for the Health Secretary and said that while the PM was in hospital with Covid, Hancock let slip the government’s 100,000 testing target for the end of April. Cummings claims Hancock then interfered with the test and trace system so that he could reach his “stupid target” before going on to accuse the Health Secretary of “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” and insisted he should have been fired.

BARNARD CASTLE

JUST over a year to the day from his infamous Rose Garden press conference, you would assume that Cummings would show remorse for the Barnard Castle scandal. But, you would be wrong, as the former aide doubled down but said he understood why people thought it was strange. Cummings said: “If you’re going to drive 300 miles to go back to work the next day then pottering down the road for 30 miles and back to see how you feel after you have come off what you thought might be your death bed didn’t seem crazy to me.”

PM JAB ON TV

THERE was plenty of behind the scenes tales but the strangest one has to be the PM wanting to go on live TV to be injected with coronavirus to “reassure the public”.

Downing Street declined to deny the allegations.