No.205 - 'Would I lie to You?' or 'Would He Lie to Us?'
Dear James,
What is the truth? A big question for any one – or at least for anyone genuinely interested in the subject. ‘’The truth’ (definite article) smacks of ultimates (restricted in human beings by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) but truth ( a non-articled abstraction), suggests more process than outcome. Many of us seek truth, but seeking truth is not the same as finding it- except of course for the religiously inclined. The reason I am asking this is to find out what you, James, think about Dominic Cummings’s testimony last week. Was he telling the truth or was it just a pack of lies?
Last Wednesday I watched almost seven hours of Cummings’s testimony before the House of Commons Committee. His white, grub like demeanour suggested some bug that has lived in the dark for far too long. A year ago, if anyone had asked me, I would have said this man was a lying narcissus and the Opinium poll this week suggests that most people still view him the same way. Only 20% said they would trust him. Strangely though that same poll indicated that 63% of respondents thought that Cummings was telling the truth. In other words while people would not trust him as a person, this inside observer to events at the heart of government made sense of everything that we on the outside had suspected. How can that be? Well, Dominic had been relieved of a job that required him to tell untruths. It is such a pity that so many of us have to live two lives simultaneously. The life for which we are paid and the life which is the real us. We all know this situation but none more so than the average politician. So few of you stand up for your own internal truths - if indeed, you have them. So did the real you James, the one that can sense the honest man from the charlatan, hear the truth last week from Cummings or did your party ‘filters’ allow you only to hear your Party’s version of that truth i.e that it was the ravings of a vengeful, bitter and aggrieved employee against his previous masters?
Some of it must have been hard to bear for you James. Cummings, for example claimed that, ‘When the public needed us most, the government failed’. Or ‘’I regard him (Johnson) as unfit for the job’, or Hancock ‘lied to everyone on multiple occasions’, or that Johnson said, ‘I would prefer to see bodies piled high rather than to go into a third lockdown’. Cummings’s gist was that Johnson did not learn from his mistakes. He fretted about any kind of lockdown. He advised that Covid was ‘only killing 80 year olds’. He repeatedly said that, ‘I should have been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ ‘Boris was ‘about a thousand times too obsessed with the media”, and ‘changes his mind ten times a day’. Cummings told the PM, ‘The whole system is in chaos.” Boris replied, “ Chaos isn‘t that bad. Chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who is in charge.” Like Hitler, Johnson cultivates lower level anarchy and confusion, believing that it enhances his authority.
And it is not as if Cummings was talking just about the past. On April 1st this year the government first learned about the Indian variant of Covid 19. On April 2nd Boris banned all travel into the UK from Pakistan and Afghanistan, countries that had lower Covid rates than India. Yet travel from India was only stopped on April 15th. Why? Because Boris is trying to win a trade deal with India. In that thirteen day gap up to 60,000 people entered the UK from India. Boris never learns. He has tried to treat Covid with politics and as a result many thousands of our citizens have died unnecessarily.
“It’s completely crackets that someone like me should have been in there, just like it is crackers that someone like Boris Johnson is in there”, said Cummings last week. He continued, “The country deserved better than a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at the last election’.
Dominic Cumming’s testimony last week was more than an attack on individuals; it was an assault on the system itself. Our politics needs a thorough overhaul, from top to bottom. Surely we as a nation can do better than this? We cannot let this tragedy happen again!
So finally, James, I ask you. Was Mr Cummings telling the truth last week? Or was it a lie? Go on, I dare you. Tell us what the real James Cartlidge thinks!
Kind regards,
BH – Your Concerned Constituent