Devastating new claims have emerged that Dominic Cummings further breached the lockdown rules, as Downing Street came under sustained pressure to fire the prime minister’s most senior adviser.
The new testimony suggests Cummings left the home where he was staying in Durham to visit a town 30 miles away on 12 April.
He was allegedly spotted back in Durham on 19 April, days after he was photographed in London having recovered from the virus, suggesting that following his first trip across the country at the end of March he had made a second journey from the capital to north-east England. At the time, with the UK at the peak of the pandemic, the government was insisting that people should be staying at home.
As Cummings faced calls to resign from across the political spectrum, the government was forced to defend his actions.
Ministers insisted he had stayed put once arriving at a property in Durham, where he had travelled after contracting the symptoms of coronavirus to seek the support from his extended family.
But the new claims would appear to demolish this defence and intensify questions over his claim that going there was permitted because he needed childcare while he was sick.
The new accounts raise fresh questions about his insistence that the initial 264-mile trip to Durham was justified, and led to a new round of calls for the spin doctor to quit.
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