• Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, has been described as having “no grip on reality at all” after startling Tory and Labour members of the Commons Treasury committee with a series of provocative claims. After questioning him Helen Goodman, a Labour member of the committee, posted a message on Twitter saying: “Genuinely alarmed at the behaviour of Dominic Cummings who runs Vote Leave, He seems to have no grip on reality at all.” Andrew Tyrie,the Conservative chair of the committee, accused him near the start of the hearing of playing “fast and loose” with the facts. During the hearing Cummings accused the Bank of England and the Treasury of “scaremongering”, described Treasury civil servants as “charlatans” and accused the Cabinet Office of threatening people who did not support it on the EU. Tyrie said these were “truly extraordinary claims” and challenged him to provide evidence to back them up.

• Cummings claimed officials in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office were issuing threats to people and organisations that did not support their policy on the EU. He said this happened in 1999, when the government wanted business to support joining the euro, and it was happening now, he said.

That happened repeatedly in the euro campaign. It has happened repeatedly in this campaign as well. Calls go out from Jeremy Heywood’s office in the Cabinet Office saying, ‘You don’t want to be on that side or bad things might happen to you.’

When he was asked if he was accusing Heywood, the cabinet secretary, of issuing threats, Cummings replied:

All sorts of people in the Cabinet Office call people all the time and make threats, some more overt and some more covert. I don’t want to say Jeremy Heywood himself has particularly and specifically done anything. But everyone close to how government operates knows the power of the Cabinet Office and the power of the cabinet secretary and the power of, subtly-worded in a very English way, threats.

He also said he thought officials and special advisers were involved. “It is part of what their job description is,” he said.

• Cummings claimed that the government was considering announcing new concessions from the EU before the referendum to shore up support for a Remain vote. The Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said the government announced “devo-max” shortly before the Scottish independence referendum when it was afraid of losing and he asked Cummings if he thought the same would happen again. Would the government offer “Euro-min”, Rees-Mogg asked. Cummings replied:

I think there’s a pretty good chance of that. I have spoken to people in government, in Whitehall, in the Cabinet Office who have actively been thinking about some of these schemes. One of the most obvious schemes, if Cameron and Osborne are desperate, is for them to announce some kind of ‘We will amend the 1972 European Communities Act to ensure it will not do blah, blah, blah in the future.’ They were thinking about some kind of scam like that in the hope that it would persuade Boris to support them. Of course, that did not work. Boris stuck to his principles … But they are clearly thinking about something like that.

It would not surprise me at all to see Cameron and Osborne on stage offering something like that, possibly with representatives from the European Union saying, ‘Oh yes, we’ll do this new deal, don’t worry.’

• Cummings said having a European single market in services would be “deeply destructive” for the UK. The government argues that it needs to remain in the EU because the country’s large services sector would lose out if it were excluded from the single market, which is currently being extended to cover services. But Cummings said he did not accept this.

A single market in services would actually be deeply destructive for Great Britain. We attract the biggest proportion of investment into the European Union precisely because we have a different legal system to Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain etc. We have a common law system, courts, contract, insurance, etc etc, which is the reason why we suck in all this money from around the world. The idea of harmonising all our rules on all of this with Greece would be disastrous for these investment flows. So I reject your premise. The idea that we want a single market in services is false. Harmonisation of all of these rules is damaging, often.

• Cummings refused to rule out the prospect of there being a second referendum if Britain votes to leave the EU. One theory is that the EU may offer new concessions, making a second referendum attractive. Boris Johnson once floated with this idea, but dropped it after it was powerfully mocked by Cameron in the Commons.

• Cummings accused the CBI of lying about business support for the EU. He said:

I witnessed exactly the same process on the euro campaign in 1999 when they lied repeatedly about their membership. They lied about how many members they had, they lied about how they were surveying them. They persistently lied about business opinion, and they have been doing the same thing on the EU.

The CBI is so dishonest. It won’t even tell you how many members it has got. That’s the scale of its dishonesty.

• He said Cameron was “crazy” to say that he would trigger article 50, starting the two-year withdrawal process from the EU, immediately if Britain voted for Brexit. Cummings said there was no need to act that soon. In fact, there might be no need to trigger article 50 at all, he argued, because an alternative withdrawal process might be possible.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

The Labour MP Helen Goodman has also been tweeting about the impression he made on her when she questioned him earlier.