LONDON — Dominic Cummings, the former top aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, on Wednesday painted a picture of chaos, incompetence and confusion at the heart of the government in a ferociously critical account of its early handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Testifying before lawmakers, Mr. Cummings said that Mr. Johnson had initially regarded Covid-19 as a “scare story” and at one point had suggested that a doctor inject him with the coronavirus on live television to play down the dangers to a worried public.
The prime minister was being advised by a health secretary, Matt Hancock, whom Mr. Cummings accused in his testimony of lying repeatedly, being unworthy of the health care workers he directed and presiding over the deadly transfer of elderly patients from hospitals to nursing homes, many of them carrying the virus.
And as the pandemic closed in on Britain, Mr. Johnson was distracted, his former aide said, by an unflattering story about his fiancée and her dog.
“When the public needed us most, the government failed,” said Mr. Cummings, the political strategist who masterminded Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union and engineered Mr. Johnson’s rise to power before falling out bitterly with his boss and emerging as a self-styled whistle-blower.
Mr. Cummings testified for more than seven hours, in a scene with few precedents in British politics: an unelected aide who had been arguably the nation’s second-most powerful man, offering an unfiltered look at the inner workings of the British government as it confronted the greatest national emergency since World War II.
“The problem in this crisis was very much lions led by donkeys, over and over again,” Mr. Cummings said.
Mr. Johnson, who was hospitalized with a severe case of Covid-19 in April 2020, flatly rejected several of the assertions of his former aide in his own appearance on Wednesday in Parliament, where lawmakers are trying to determine how the early days of the pandemic were botched so badly.
Mr. Cummings, 49, did not absolve himself of all blame. He admitted he had not been open about the reasons for a much-criticized road trip he made with his family that breached lockdown rules. And he acknowledged his mistake in not pushing the prime minister to lock down the country earlier than he did, in March of last year.
“Yes, it was a huge failing of mine,” Mr. Cummings told a joint meeting of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committees. “I bitterly regret that I did not hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did.”