Robert Peston

The penny seems to have belatedly dropped for Boris Johnson. He can have a no-trade-deal relationship with the European Union – what he calls an Australian-style relationship – or he can have Northern Ireland as a seamless member of the UK’s internal market. But under the EU Withdrawal Agreement that he signed, he cannot have both.  If we trade with the EU under WTO terms there will be highly significant tariffs levied on UK-EU trade alongside highly significant fiscal and regulatory differences between the UK and EU. And the default position in the Northern Ireland Protocol is that – without agreement to the contrary between the UK and EU – all goods flowing from GB to NI are 'at risk' of flowing across the NI border into the EU.

You may wonder why on earth a Tory government led by Boris Johnson, the heirs to Thatcher for goodness sake, are sacrificing the prospect of a trade deal with the EU because they want the right to subsidise British industry. If the Tories and Thatcher stood for anything, it was rolling back the role of the state in the private sector. Well, all that is stuff for the GCSE history syllabus, and turns out to be irrelevant to today's politics. Because if the government of Boris Johnson has an ideology, it is that of Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave crew. And Cummings's passionate conviction is that Johnson's government MUST have the discretion to invest without fetter in hi-tech, digital, artificial intelligence and the full gamut of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. How so?

Some in Westminster have been missing Dominic Cummings. It turns out he had an operation in late July, which he delayed a year ago when Boris Johnson persuaded him to become his chief aide, and has been convalescing in the north of England since. He returns to normal duties at No. 10 on Monday. Whitehall source tells me he has not been working and was not looking at emails or messages. I imagine it has been an unmitigated joy for him to switch it all back on again — especially to read the reported remarks of his father-in-law about the PM’s alleged (and denied) early retirement plans.

The cost of Covid-19 in the UK, in 45,000 lives lost and considerably more if 'excess' deaths are included, in long term illness for tens of thousands, and in damage to our prosperity, is changing everything. But did the shock have to be so great? Could the government have done more to protect us?

It is a big deal that the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is being totally excluded from the UK's new fast 5G mobile network, and is redolent of a de facto cold war between the West and China. But Johnson has taken a more gradualist approach to the exclusion of Huawei than his Tory critics wanted and UK telecoms companies feared. BT and Vodafone got more time than they expected to move away from Huawei as a 5G and broadband supplier. The Tory MPs who want no involvement of the Chinese company in important communications infrastructure will feel only partially vindicated; many of them will be disappointed and angry. The UK telecoms giants had hoped they would have till 2027 to remove all kit from 5G.

The £15 billion spent on PPE, personal protective equipment, since March is one of those numbers that once it's in your head, it's impossible to unthink it, like a ghoul from a nightmare. It gauges both the scale of the health and economic crisis we're enduring, but also quite how astonishingly unprepared the government really was. Remember at the beginning the Health Secretary Matt Hancock said we had more than adequate stocks of PPE because of no-deal planning. Just for the record, the £15bn dispensed on face masks, gowns and visors – which have a user life of anything from a day to a few weeks – would, on the government's sums, be enough to pay for at least 18 new hospitals.

There is only one test for what the Treasury is billing – with all its magnificent talent for hyperbole – an 'update', which is the impact it will have on taming the looming ghoul of mass unemployment. Will Rishi Sunak's stimulus package deter or even reverse decisions to sack people by those businesses that are most squeezed by the social distancing imperative? That are suffering both a reduction in capacity (tables removed from restaurants, for example) and demand? There are millions employed in such industries, from shops, to bars, to theatres.

These may well be the defining few days of the Johnson government. Having failed to make a towering success of the initial response to the Covid-19 crisis – by his own admission on Times Radio this morning – the Prime Minister is now embarked on the kind of structural reform of the machinery of government that will determine whether he will be seen by future generations as a Homeric hero or Homer Simpson. So far we can see the building blocks of the reconstruction, rather than the detail.

One of Boris Johnson’s closest allies, David Frost – who has been negotiating the terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU – is to become National Security Adviser, succeeding Sir Mark Sedwill, who is standing down both as cabinet secretary and NSA. This is an unusual and controversial appointment because Frost is a political appointment, a special adviser, in his current role – and will continue as a political adviser rather than becoming a member of the civil service. There will be a formal process to find a new cabinet secretary. His appointment is bound to cause a big gulp among the spooks and military top brass Frost is close to Dominic Cummings, and is routinely referred to as ‘Frosty’ in Johnson’s circle.

The first local lockdown – and therefore a test of whether local lockdowns will be effective in suppressing coronavirus outbreaks – could take place within days, according to senior members of the government. One pointed out that there has been a surge in cases in Leicester: there were 658 coronavirus cases in the Leicester area in the fortnight to 16 June. New data on the prevalence of the virus in the area has been delivered to Leicester's mayor Sir Peter Soulsby, according to the LeicesterLive website, and he said his officials were analysing the data over the weekend. I am told that the data does not yet show that a full lockdown is required. A senior official said: ‘It would need to be driven by the data and we’re not at that stage right now.

Here are the outstanding questions to be taken by the Prime Minister and the coronavirus strategy committee he chairs (CS) today about how far lockdown will be eased on 4 July and thereafter. First, on socialising inside where we live; will we be allowed to meet with anyone we like indoors in groups of up to half a dozen, or will we be restricted to socialising with a single family or household of our choice with whom we would form a long-term 'bubble'? This is a choice between a rule more likely to be actually followed, namely the permission to mix with whomever we like so long as there are no more than six of us, versus a rule that the scientists believe is more likely to reduce the risk that the rate of viral transmission will increase dangerously again.

Danny Kruger, the Tory MP who is an old friend of Dominic Cummings and his spouse, got it right last night. The 'affaire Cummings' – as the French would put it – is no longer about the most powerful aide to the prime minister and the minutiae of how he interpreted coronavirus quarantine rules differently from most of the country. Kruger argued that attacks on Cummings are attacks on Boris Johnson, because the PM has so conspicuously become Cummings’s human shield. So as another Tory MP told me – a grandee no less – this is now all about the PM himself and how he governs. It is about why Boris Johnson rates Cummings so highly, and why he needs him at the centre of his government.

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.

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).