Dominic cummings

I was relieved to discover, earlier this week, that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, was a symbol of inequality in modern Britain. Relieved because I have been scouring the country for such a symbol for ages and had hitherto not succeeded in finding one. Cummings is just that symbol, according to Robert Peston, because his father has a garden with some trees in it. Cummings was thus able to walk through these trees, whereas people who do not have fathers with a garden with some trees in it are not able to do so. Privileged bastard. There is, however, one small problem.

What is really going on here? The via dolorosa Boris Johnson is trudging along is about more than Dominic Cummings’s actions and the Prime Minister’s refusal to acknowledge they were wrong, let alone ask the bloke for his ticket. The government’s Covid-19 messaging has been eviscerated, health guidance undermined, public goodwill forfeited and political capital amassed across ten months expended in a few days. The Prime Minister believes all this is worth it. The 40 Conservative MPs who have called for Cummings to go do not understand why, nor does Scotland Office minister Douglas Ross, who resigned over the matter yesterday. Other Tory politicians privately despair at the high decadence of prolonging a political scandal in the middle of a national emergency.

Dominic Cummings knows all about how perception damages public confidence in political parties. Here he is in June 2017: 'People think, and by the way I think most people are right: ‘The Tory party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me’. That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct. Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.' And this is what he said yesterday about why it was OK to walk in the Durham woods, when he should have been strictly quarantining because of his Covid-19 symptoms.

Happy now? Thought not. Dominic Cummings has delivered his statement and answered questions but still the critics aren’t appeased. Not at all. In fact, the tenor of the questions that were put to him suggested that quite a few of the journalists lucky enough to be socially distancing in the Downing Street rose garden, plus those listening at a distance, hadn’t been listening to a word he said. Didn’t he realise that there were people out there who hadn’t seen their elderly parents or grandparents for months and how would they feel knowing that he’d been gadding up to Durham to see his?

The rule of modern politics, let's call it Trump's first law, is that if you are being attacked for apparently breaking the rules, the best defence is to double down and insist that it is in fact you and your colleagues who have acted with the utmost integrity - and anyone who suggests otherwise is a knave or a fool. Such was how the prime minister defended his chief aide Dominic Cummings - who as I said just now in the daily Downing Street press conference breached not just one but at least three lockdown rules (don't leave the house if someone in it has Covid-19 symptoms, don't spend hours in very close proximity in a confined space like a car with a sufferer and don't go to a second home).

One of the key committees advising the government is SAGE — the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies. At the weekend, there was a rumpus after the Guardian reported that Dominic Cummings had been present for some of its meetings; though given the enormity of what was being discussed there would have been problems if no one from Downing Street was at these meetings. Last night, Bloomberg reported on the SAGE meeting of 18 March. Alex Morales and Suzi Ring wrote that Dominic Cummings had at that meeting raised questions, including asking ‘why a lockdown was not being imposed sooner’.

These are discombobulating times. A deadly pandemic; the United States at sea, China belligerent and the EU at war with itself. British politics was in flux before the virus hit. Now it is vertiginous. The Tory party, long seen as the guardian of the status quo, has been forced to change tack as it deals with the fallout. Keir Starmer, recently elected as Labour leader, will play a vital role in this realignment – but not one we would once have envisaged. Starmer’s election as Labour leader in the midst of coronavirus is a good thing. He is the anti-Corbyn for a Labour party looking for calm and stability after almost five turbulent years. He is the definition of the establishment technocrat in an age of populists.

There are a handful of big things to watch out for following Sir Philip Rutnam’s resignation as Home Office Permanent Secretary: Whether in laying out his case for constructive dismissal, evidence emerges that makes it impossible for Priti Patel to remain as home secretary.Whether other permanent secretaries and senior civil servants show solidarity with Rutnam, thus making it harder for Dominic Cummings to reform how they and civil servants support the Government, and harder for him to streamline the centre of government and the Cabinet Office.

How do you move on from a week of torrid headlines over a power struggle between senior No. 10 aides and a recently departed Chancellor? The old Tory playbook – mastered by Boris Johnson's former election guru Lynton Crosby – would suggest throwing a dead cat. The dead cat strategy used when a party wishes to change the conversation by any means necessary. The idea is that by the time it's done people will stop talking about the thing you want to move away from and instead become distracted and effectively go: 'Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!' It's worth remembering this device when considering that we are in day three of No. 10's latest BBC row.

If you thought Boris Johnson’s and Dominic Cummings’s culture war against the so-called London elite had ended with his decisive election victory, that it was simply a useful campaigning trope, you may have to rethink. Because Johnson’s chief aide Cummings reinforced the government’s excoriation of media and lawyers when addressing Downing Street officials this morning, in the words of one official present. Cummings described last night’s Court of Appeal suspension of the deportation of criminals to the Caribbean as 'a perfect symbol of the British state’s dysfunction'. He said there must be 'urgent action on the farce that judicial review has become'.