Dominic Cummings, what is he like eh?
Remember what seems like years ago when everyone was baying for SG medical advisor Cath Calderwood’s blood because she traveled 30 miles to Fife to ‘check on a holiday home’ taking hubby, kids and dogs with her, on two separate occasions? Roll on to this week when we discover that PM advisor Cummings suspected he had the virus and then drove 260 miles to his parents on the basis of needing childcare while he and his wife isolated.
Suddenly many of the people who though Calderwood was right out of order are falling over themselves to excuse, defend and justify Cummings’ goings. Yes it's a different set of circumstance but a fair chunk of the population still sees the two as equivocal, and wether we like it or not it's perception that counts in politics.
The Dominic Cummings story has turned into a media circus (#cumgate as one of the Twitter hashtags would have it!), this is regrettable, unseemly and given the likely level of punishment that would have been meted out if the police had decided to issue a fine, somewhat out of proportion. And yet….
He hasn’t broken the rules they say….No? As far as I can remember the government advice until recently has been:
Self-isolate at home
Don’t undertake any unnecessary journeys, (particularly long distance ones
Here’s a screenshot from NHS.uk on 23 May even after movement restrictions were eased in England:
That’s pretty clear, about staying at home.
Of course within a few days of the Cummings news breaking the advice had changed, decide for yourself if that is coincidence....
What did he do?
Cummings and his wife apparently both had Covid symptoms, so Cummings popped his kid in the car and they all drove from London to Durham (lets be honest, that’s a long distance by anyones measure) so that he could isolate on his parents property and his family could look after the kid if required, although I believe it then transpired that he and his wife actually looked after the kid (although that bit of the story is murky).
Its frankly pretty unbelievable that he couldn’t have arranged for the kid to be collected and taken to the relatives if and when he and Mrs Cummings were too seriously unwell to do it or that a family of their means and connections couldn’t have found an alternative solution; or was it just too inconvenient,compared to a few hours drive to a cozy family cottage?
So what's the problem?
But from a political point of view his actual actions pale into insignificance compared to their impact once they came to light. This was all so bloody predictable, the PM should have realised where trying to shrug the episode off would lead (perhaps if he spent less time listening to Cummings advice he might of!). The problem is not particularly with what Cummings did, which was to a degree understandable, but rather in the way he and his boss have reacted to it becoming public. I personally don’t really care much about Cummings choosing to relocate his family to an empty cottage on his parents ‘estate’ so that they could isolate together somewhere where family were nearby to assist if an emergency required. What I do give a stuff about is how this and the Government response will be exploited by opponents such as the SNP, and the fact that the PM has handed them a weapon to use against him, his party, and for the SNP at least, by association the UK.
Many thousands in a similar position to Cummings didn’t have the luxury option of an cosy free estate cottage, or even if they did have an alternative place to go they still tried to follow the spirit of the government guidance i.e. “STAY AT HOME” and made other arrangements that were perhaps much less convenient to them personally, and they did it because they thought they were doing the right thing as per government guidance.
I have read arguments that Cummings son was autistic with special needs who 'might' have been traumatised if he was not cared for by specific relatives. I haven’t heard Cummings use that as a specific reason though. Is his son autistic? and if he is then how traumatised by unusual arrangements under lockdown would he be? To be cold about it, frankly it’s tough, loads of people are upset and distressed by this pandemic, he’d be joining a club of hundreds of thousands of other children and adults similarly traumatised living under 'lockdown' rules. People that couldn’t be with dying relatives or attend their funerals, lonely pensioners who have forgone social contact for months, vulnerable people who have struggled to get provisions and services or who simply don’t understand why their routines have been so badly disrupted and their friends and family don’t visit, cancer sufferers who have had their treatments disrupted, people awaiting medical procedures, forced to wait for extra months in pain and discomfort because they can’t go where they would otherwise have gone, lots of people have been inconvenienced and worse, we used to be "all in this together".
It seems to me that Cummings decided to break lockdown and drive while infected not because it was his only option, but because he could, and because it was much more convenient for him to do so. In point of fact he did it for selfish reasons because he wasn’t prepared to endure the inconvenience of additional difficulties and worries of staying at home (as the government he works for was telling people to do. I’m unconvinced by his supposed fears of being doorstepped by protesters, I’m sure he had threats and abuse long before Covid and ironically (and unfortunately) if anything it’ll be worse now if the angry baying mob outside his door this week is any guide. Besides, when we were in full lockdown any protester would be easy to spot in an empty street and the lack of traffic would have ensured a rapid police response, particularly if his friends in high places had already told the police of any security concerns. Frankly in my opinion it’s a convenient smoke screen.
One of the additional embellishments to his story that attempts to explain another sighting of him on his grand tour of County Durham, (I.e. his appearance in Barnard Castle at a later date) is frankly bizarre. He claims that once recovering from the virus they contemplated the return drive to London but poor Dominic felt his eyesight was a bit dodgy and he might not be up to the drive. So what does he do? He takes the family for a 30 mile drive to ‘test’ his eyesight and see if he’s safe to drive. Now let’s not forget that a primary premise of the defence offered is that this is a man who cares so deeply about the wellbeing of his child that he prioritises that over the lockdown rules, and yet we find him admitting he’s happy to chuck the kid in a car and go for a country drive to see if his eyes work. Either he’s an idiot or he thinks we’re idiots (which to be fair he probably does have some supporting evidence for!), and that's before we consider the potential motoring offences he might have just admitted to committing, if were true.
The most galling thing for me about this debacle is that his movements are at worst a relatively minor offence (recently confirmed when Durham police said that the Barnard Castle trip probably broke lockdown rules but that he'd have got a ticking off and so long as he returned to the house no fine would have been issued), no worse than what tens of thousands of others have done during lockdown, some of whom have been fined, and some not. But it’s not what he did that is the problem, it is his attitude to it, and worse it is the Prime Ministers attitude to it (and by extension many of his party colleagues). Health minister Hancock was caught slightly off guard at ta recent Coronavirus briefing when asked if they would now review all the cases of fines for people breaching lockdown in similar situations, he said he’d look into it! What on earth? It’d be a lot simpler, cheaper and expedient to just review one case rather than all of them, don’t police and other public employees have more important stuff to be doing in the middle of the biggest crisis since World War II than rearranging mountains because someone important is in the shade?
What DC and his boss have now created is a situation and a story that will be used continually to beat the government with, and will be cast up whenever convenient further down the line as clear evidence that this is a government run by people who think rules are for the plebs and that the elite can and do as they damned well please, and worse will just shrug it off brazenly when found out. It's ironic given Cummings' alleged 'anti-elite' approach (a fabrication seemingly as hollow as Trump's 'drain the swamp' slogan, but that some voters eagerly lapped up) I honestly hardly give a toss if Cummings traveled to Durham to safely isolate, I do give a toss about the utter PR disaster its mismanagement has created, Labour, SNP and just about everyone else must be rubbing hands in glee at this mismanagement sh*tshow. Certainly opinion polls appear to support that assertion!
It didn’t have to be like this, The PM could have come out and said something along the lines of "Dominic is very sorry and has apologised to me personally, he panicked for his son and made a rash decision that he thought best at the time and in retrospect he regrets that decision. I still highly value Dominic’s advice but both he and I realise that it would be inappropriate for him to continue providing official advice on the pandemic crisis so I will be moving him to focus on (blah blah Brexit and anything else)".
Yeah he’d still get flack but he’d of acted, Cummings would have apologised and be seen to at least suffered some minor punishment, then government could get back to business as usual having neutralised the worst of the story. Then in a few months time Cummings can be wheeled back into whatever position the PM see’s fit in true Mandelson back from the dead fashion. Besides the way things are going in a few months time Boris may be dealing with much bigger PR problems as the results of his Covid management strategy become clearer.....
What they have done instead is dig a great big hole, stood in it, and handed hoses of sh*t to let their opponents fill it up.
We’re in Scotland where the anti-tory machine is permanently in overdrive, they just provided it with lots more fuel. It's not as if the way things are currently panning out that Boris has bags of goodwill to spare in this Covid-19 crisis. either here in Scotland or in the wider UK, and the Cummings affair is already having an impact on his popularity (see below), maybe temporary....maybe not:
But rest assured, unless action is taken this will be brought up again and again....
