Covid contract to Dominic Cummings friends ruled lawful by Appeal Court

A government contract given to a firm whose founders were friends of Dominic Cummings has been ruled lawful, overturning an earlier court judgement.

Last year, the High Court ruled that the £550,000 contract awarded to PR firm Public First was unlawful as it gave rise to "apparent bias".

That ruling has now been reversed in a legal victory for the government.

Campaign group the Good Law Project, which challenged the legality of the contract, said it planned to appeal.

Public First was awarded the contract by the Cabinet Office to carry out focus groups, to test the effectiveness of slogans such as "Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives", in June 2020.

The firm is run by Rachel Wolf, a former adviser to then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, and James Frayne, a longstanding friend of Dominic Cummings, who was Prime Minister Boris Johnson's top adviser at the time.

In the original ruling, Mrs Justice O'Farrell found that the "apparent bias" in awarding the contract was not due to the existing relationships between Mr Cummings and Public First, but because of a failure to consider any other research agency and record the objective criteria used in the selection.

But on Tuesday morning, the Court of Appeal overturned that decision.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett said: "The fair-minded and reasonably informed observer would not have concluded that a failure to carry out a comparative exercise of the type identified by the judge created a real possibility that the decision-maker was biased."

In a tweet, Dominic Cummings said the Court of Appeal ruling was "total vindication for my decisions on moving super speedy on procurement to save lives".

He added: "Remember all the ignorant nonsense from pundits/minor social scientists/Remainiacs?"

In a disparaging reference to Good Law Project chief Jolyon Maugham, he said: "Lord Chief Justice crushes kimono-fox-killer."

Mr Maugham said his group intended to take the case to the Supreme Court.

"This is the first substantive judgment against us since 2019. We think, with respect, it's wrong and we are asking for permission to go to the Supreme Court," the campaigning lawyer tweeted.