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Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, starts giving evidence to MPs on the government’s handling of the Covid crisis at 9.30am, in what promises to be an extraordinary evidence session.

Cummings is regarded as a “bitter” former employer by some cabinet ministers, but he was in the room when important decisions on life and death were taken in Downing St in 2020.

All the action will be live on Parliament TV: Johnson’s team will be glued to it, as will most Westminster journalists and Keir Starmer, Labour leader.

Cummings has offered to give evidence for as long as MPs on the joint health and science committee inquiry want to hear from him. He may well still be talking when Johnson starts answering prime minister’s questions at midday.

Over the past few days, Cummings has set out in more than 60 Twitter posts some of his main charges. But will he have documents and even audio tape to give a dramatic boost to his claims?

He argues that if “competent people” had been in charge, the government could have saved many lives — although MPs will ask why Cummings, the most senior adviser in Number 10 at the time, did not do more himself to avert disaster.

Cummings will argue that the government wasted precious time in early 2020 preparing a “herd immunity” strategy that would have left “hundreds of thousands of people choking to death”.

He will also claim that Johnson was too slow to lock down the country in the autumn of 2020, in spite of rising cases. The lack of testing and what Cummings calls the “almost total absence of a serious plan” to protect people in care homes will also come under the spotlight.

Downing St will hope that for many people Cummings is a compromised witness, the arch lockdown exponent who famously broke the rules himself, motivated by a desire for revenge on his former boss. MPs will ask Cummings about his infamous trip to Barnard Castle.

Cummings is now posing as an advocate of open government, but he is also the person who told special advisers last year that “we are going to have to start shooting people” if leaks continued. He had one young Treasury adviser marched out of Downing St by armed police over alleged leaks.

There will also be a hope in Number 10 that many voters are more focused on how Britain is coming out of the pandemic and the successful vaccine programme than the events of 2020.

But over three or more hours Cummings will hold the watching Westminster world, which he professes to despise, in his thrall as he talks MPs through the decisions taken in Downing St at a moment of national crisis.