Dominic Cummings has sensationally claimed Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been fired for his handling for the coronavirus pandemic.

The Prime Minister’s former aide claimed both he and the Cabinet Secretary told Boris Johnson that Mr Hancock should be sacked.

Mr Cummings says Matt Hancock "should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 different things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions in meeting after meeting in the cabinet room and publicly".

Mr Cummings claims other senior officials in government agreed with his assessment.

The Prime Minister’s former chief advisor said that in retrospect it was a “huge failure” on his part not to “press the panic button” sooner.

Mr Cummings was giving evidence to the Commons health and science committees with No 10 braced for explosive claims about the Prime Minister’s handling of the pandemic.

Dominic Cummings said he warned the PM on March 12 that there were “big problems coming” if self-isolation measures were not announced immediately.

He said he told Boris Johnson: “We’ve got big problems coming. The Cabinet Office is terrifyingly s***. No plans, totally behind the pace, we must announce today, not next week. We must force the pace. We’re looking at 100,000 to 500,000 deaths between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.”

But he said on that day rather than focusing on Covid the Government was consumed with a potential bombing campaign in the Middle East at the request of Dominic Trump and a “trivial” story in the Times newspaper about Boris Johnson, his fiancee Carrie Symonds and their dog.

He said: “And then to add to … it sounds so surreal couldn’t possibly be true … that day, the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog.

“The Prime Minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story and demanding that the press office deal with that.

“So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq? Part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial.”