'Move on': Johnson tries to bury fracas over adviser's lockdown breach

London | British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has urged the country to "move on" from the furore over his top adviser Dominic Cummings' breach of the lockdown rules, which has sapped his popularity and fuelled Tory unrest.

"Now is the time to leave it aside and move on," Mr Johnson told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday (Thursday AEST), as he doubled down on his defence of his iconoclastic svengali, and sought to reframe the fracas as a narrow, partisan political struggle.

"What we need to do is to move on, and get on to how we're going to sort out coronavirus, which is really the overwhelming priority of the people of this country."

Putting his move-on message into practice, Mr Johnson announced a new contact tracing system, to take effect on Thursday, as Britain struggles to get fully on top of its COVID-19 outbreak. But the Cummings saga dominated the opening rounds of his marathon 100-minute parliamentary committee appearance.

The affair blew up at the weekend when it was revealed that a symptomatic Mr Cummings had driven his family more than 400 kilometres from London to his family farm at the height of lockdown in late March, a breach of the clearcut official advice to "stay at home".

Other senior government medical advisers have had to resign for similar infractions, but Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings have dug in, saying he was entitled to interpret the lockdown guidelines for his particular circumstances.

This prompted accusations that Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings had muddied the authority and clarity of the government's lockdown messaging, with one rule for the elite and another for the masses.

The Prime Minister's personal opinion poll rating has plummeted 20 points in a week, and a range of polls have highlighted widespread public indignation.

Continuing to stand by his beleaguered adviser, he said the onslaught against Mr Cummings had been "a frustrating episode" and urged MPs to put aside "party political points".

"When people hear nothing but politicians squabbling and bickering, it's no wonder they feel confused," he said.

Mr Cummings issued an extensive explanation of his actions at an unprecedented and defiant press conference on Monday (Tuesday AEST), and Mr Johnson said the country had now "heard quite a lot of autobiography".

"This has been going on for several days now in the media at least," Mr Johnson said, trying to draw a line under the episode.

Mr Johnson seems determined to weather the storm, despite the damage to his popularity and standing.

Mr Cummings is seen as central to the Prime Minister's political realignment project, and to his string of successes in the past year: his taking of the Conservative Party leadership, the delivery of Brexit, and his December election victory.

Like his aide, Mr Johnson didn't express regret or apology for Mr Cummings' actions.

"I of course am deeply sorry for all the pain and anxiety that people have been going through throughout this lockdown period," he said instead, as he again called for a shift in focus to "what needs to be done to get though the next stage of this episode".

Britain's exit from lockdown is perhaps the most incremental in Europe. Although workers can return to the office, social gatherings are still largely banned, schools remain effectively shut and non-essential shops are not yet open.

The contract-tracing operation is only just getting started, an app is still in pilot phase, and Britain was remarkably slow to ramp up testing capacity. A 14-day quarantine for incoming travellers will start for the first time on June 8.

The official death toll on Wednesday jumped by 412 to 37,460 - the second-highest in the world and by far the largest in Europe.