A senior Whitehall official who believed that Covid should be treated like chickenpox at the start of the pandemic has been appointed the UK’s top civil servant.
Sir Chris Wormald will take over as cabinet secretary from Simon Case later this month after being chosen for the role by Keir Starmer.
He has been permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care since 2016, and before that held the same post at the Department for Education for four years.
The prime minister said Wormald “brings a wealth of experience” to the role of cabinet secretary.
“Delivering this scale of change will require exceptional civil service leadership,” he said.
“There could be no-one better placed to drive forward our plan for change than Chris, and I look forward to working with him as we fulfil the mandate of this new government, improving the lives of working people and strengthening our country with a decade of national renewal.”
However, Wormald has been criticised in the past for the part he played in preparing the UK for the pandemic as the Department of Health’s most senior civil servant.
Giving evidence at the Covid Inquiry last year, he admitted that the government had based its planning on a flu outbreak rather than a coronavirus like Covid.
As a result there was no plan for lockdowns or widespread contact tracing of those infected.
The inquiry also saw correspondence from March 2020 between Sir Mark Sedwill, who was cabinet secretary at the time, and Wormald, in which they compared Covid to chickenpox.
Sedwill said: “Presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it and develop herd immunity before the next wave.
“We just want them not to get it all at once and preferably when it’s warn (sic) and dry etc.”
Wormald responded: “Exactly right. We make the point every meeting, they don’t quite get it.”
He told the inquiry that he had been “reflecting the state of the scientific advice at that point”, but admitted he had been “very, very loose in my reply”.
Dominic Cummings, who was then PM Boris Johnson’s senior adviser at the time, condemned the decision to make Wormald cabinet secretary.
He posted on X: “The new Cabinet Secretary texted to the old Cabinet Secretary that we in the PM’s office “don’t quite get” the need for chickenpox parties. He was spot on. We thought this was one of the most retarded ideas to emerge from senior civil service in a moment of crisis for many decades.
“It was so retarded that many officials came to me in panic when they realised the Cabinet Secretary and Permanent Secretary of the HEALTH department in charge of pandemic planning truly believed that the faster everyone got covid, the better. He is now in charge of the entire system.”
On the fateful morning of 12/3/20, as Carrie was trying to get the No10 press office to switch from covid to threatening the media on behalf of her dog [not a misprint], the new Cabinet Secretary texted to the old Cabinet Secretary that we in the PM's office "don't quite get" the… pic.twitter.com/VLiQU3ca1o
— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) December 2, 2024
Commenting on his appointment, Wormald said: “The government has set a clear mandate – an ambitious agenda with working people at its heart. That will require each and every one of us to embrace the change agenda in how the British state operates.
“So I look forward to working with leaders across government, to ensure that the civil service has the skills they need to deliver across the breadth of the country.”
