Boris Johnson's former chief advisor set to blame him for thousands of COVID-19 deaths, says report

• Dominic Cummings is to blame Boris Johnson for thousands of COVID-19 deaths directly, a Sunday Times report says
• The powerful former advisor is to appear in front of a parliamentary committee next month.
• "Dominic has copies of everything and knows where all the bodies are buried," an unnamed source said.

Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is reportedly preparing a dossier of evidence that will attempt to directly blame Johnson for thousands of deaths during the UK's second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cummings, a key force behind the successful Brexit campaign, led by Johnson, was a close and powerful advisor to the Prime Minister until he was unceremoniously ousted last November. A report in the Sunday Times says that Cummings will use an upcoming appearance in front of a parliamentary committee to implicate Johnson in the UK's death toll.

"Dominic has copies of everything and knows where all the bodies are buried," an unnamed source told the Sunday Times.

The source continued: "He [Cummings] was pushing the prime minister hard to lock down sooner in the autumn and he has lots of evidence that shows that his decision to delay led to devastating consequences."

Despite high levels of infections at the start of the pandemic, the UK did not implement travel restrictions until January 2021, over nine months after the virus was first discovered in the UK.

Government figures released earlier this year revealed that the number of deaths during the UK's second wave of COVID-19 had surpassed the first. The combined death toll is now more than 127,000, one of the highest in Europe.

Last night in a tweet, Cummings appeared to criticize the government's failure to introduce travel bans earlier in the pandemic. In response to a tweet thread on how Vietnam limited its death toll to just 35 by closing its borders, Cummings tweeted: "very important issue re learning from the disaster."

-Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) April 24, 2021

Earlier this week, in a blog post, Cummings launched an unprecedented attack on Boris Johnson alleging that the Prime Minister and his team behaved in a way that he described as "mad and totally unethical" and tried to hatch a "possibly illegal" plan for private donors to fund renovations to Johnson's Downing Street flat.

In the blog post, Cummings said: "It is sad to see the PM and his office fall so far below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserves."

Cummings also alleged that Johnson attempted to quash an internal inquiry about the origins of a series of confidential leaks about the government's COVID-19 strategy at the start of the pandemic when he learned that the investigation could implicate senior government aid Henry Newman, a close friend of Johnson's fiancée, Carrie Symonds.

The blog post was published in response to reports where an unnamed government official appeared to blame Cummings for publishing private text messages between Johnson and the billionaire James Dyson regarding a tax waiver.

In response, a government spokesperson said: "The investigation is still live and it would be wrong to think we have landed on any one individual or, for that matter, completely exonerated anyone."