No. 152 - Adding Insult to Injury

Dear James,

So, at long last, the man became flesh. Yesterday Dominic Cummings came out of the long grass and faced the nation to explain his recent exploits in Durham and Castle Barnard. Here was Svengali, Rasputin, Mephistopheles or even the devil himself throwing himself before his accusers. And the result? Bit of a let down really. He was so ordinary, so like you and me. None of the vengeful spite that he regularly displays on the road outside his house, none of the verbal aggression or crazed ramblings of his blog. Not even the silence of his sullen sulks around the Palace of Westminster. Here was an almost normal bloke who’d been caught transgressing some minor by-law on the parish green. He was even nice towards his erstwhile most vocal critics, the press. It was Laura, Beth, Robert and Gary rather than ‘the expletives deleted’ Kuenssburg, Rigby, Peston and Gibbon of his more private moments. That must have hurt! 

So in the dappled late afternoon sunlight of the Number Ten Rose Garden, Dominic made his confession. He had been confronted by a series of medical situations that would have stretched any ordinary bloke. Radiating the normalcy of a minor sinner and displaying a sort of behavioural contrition, he told us that, post his Covid-19 brush with death, and on his wife’s birthday, he had taken a hour’s drive with his family to a beauty spot at Castle Barnard to check that his eyesight was ok to drive to London the next day. Really? But true or false, the big take-away was that this was not the raving ideologue of right wing fundamentalism but just an ordinary bloke in the street. What was there not to love about Dominic? 

Well, first of all he refused to apologise. He had been confronted with exceptional circumstances and, like any man, he made the right decision for his family. Except that he is not an ordinary man. Dominic Cummings is the Prime Minister’s Chief Adviser. He holds a position near to the top of government and he had just set up a series of rules for the country to adhere to.  Why did a man next to the centre of power, surrounded by top scientists and medical experts, make a decision to ignore those rules and cut and run for Durham when he could have just got on the phone and asked the experts what he should do? 

Today, you James, subservient as usual to the Tory whip rather than to the feelings of millions of people who followed the rules and feel betrayed, have added insult to injury. Your cloned messages from Tory high command ask us to put it all behind us and move on. Move onto where? To more mixed messages, more confused strategies, more obfuscations, more lies?  Do we really want more of ‘Booster Boris’? Remember his boasts about Britain being ‘very well prepared’ for the virus, about our ‘fantastic testing systems’ and our ‘world beating track and trace’ system? Today the ONS (Office of National Statistics) confirmed total deaths in the UK to May 15th had reached 42,173. This is what happens when ‘boosterism’ meets reality!

Through Cummings’s crass incompetence and Johnson’s desperate efforts to hang on to the only man who can give him any sort of credibility, they have made a mockery of all efforts to guide our country through the crisis. Both men are monomaniacs who are willing to twist truth to gain their ends. It was Prof Stephen Reicher, of the Sage Behavioural Insights Committee, who three days ago said,“Boris Johnson has trashed all the advice we have given on how to build trust and secure adherence to the measures necessary to control Covid-19.” Amen to that. 

In the end James, this is all about trust. Whatever trust Boris and your government had before Covid-19 has been draining away slowly and yesterday, the last few drops of that precious commodity disappeared into the soft earth of the Rose Garden at Number 10. In a strange way, I feel sorry for Cummings. Nemesis is the painful end of hubris. It was what the gods did to vainglorious pretenders in order to restore equilibrium between god and man. Or to put it another way, between truth and mendacity. 

James, Mr Cummings has been found out. It’s time for him to go. 

Kind regards, 

BH – Your Concerned Constituent