The inquiry’s lawyer has just been discussing an encounter Helen MacNamara had with Dominic Cummings and others in the prime minister’s study from 13 March 2020.

Although PM Boris Johnson was not present, MacNamara says in her witness statement she had gone to tell them the UK was “heading for a disaster”.

Her alarmed exchange – 10 days before the first lockdown – followed a conversation with Department for Health official Mark Sweeney, who according to her statement, “had been told for years that there is a whole plan for this”. But there was no plan, he told her.

“We are absolutely [expletive],” she said.

“I think the country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people,” she told the group, according to her witness statement.

“It was horrible,” she tells the inquiry. There was “increasing concern that we were really radically in the wrong place”.

“It was a sense of foreboding… I hope nobody sitting in that office never has that again.”