A couple of summers ago I had to visit the optician. It was a particularly hot summer, large parts of which I had spent in a baking, stuffy office staring at a screen. This, it turned out, was drying out my eyes to such an extent that they had turned red. I looked like a cartoon baddie.
So I had an eye test. An eye test which did not involve climbing into my car and driving 30 miles to a beauty spot. This method - the one we are expected to believe was used by Dominic Cummings to determine whether or not it was safe to drive back to London from Durham - is unsurprisingly not one currently recommended by any of the major optical retail chains. To paraphrase Blackadder there is only one thing wrong with this explanation. It is bollocks.
The initial denials of any lockdown breach from Cummings, from bumbling Donald Trump tribute act Boris Johnson and a whole host of desperate, should-have-known-better careerist ministers were not enough to bury the story. Even Tory brochure of hate the Daily Mail turned on the government and its lying, entitled, narcissist chief advisor. The nation’s press could and should have employed some more sensible social distancing measures in the current climate, but they were fully justified in continuing to follow this story up. It was and still is essential to the continued efforts to control the pandemic that the little snot-weasel be made accountable.
All of which led to the announcement yesterday that Cummings would be making a statement and taking questions himself. Some had a problem with an unelected fraudster getting this type of national TV platform which was understandable. The man already has far too much power and to make him the centre of national attention was arguably pandering to his massive ego. But it also offered the viewing public an opportunity to see him try to explain for himself why it was fine for him to drive his family 250 miles to Durham while his wife was experiencing symptoms of the virus. Why was it ok for him and not for you? Why had you not seen your grandchildren, why had you lost loved ones without being there for them or missed funerals if this sort of thing was within the rules of the March 23 lockdown?
So he got his platform. Half an hour late he finally arrived, seated at a small table in the Downing Street garden. He looked like he was selling raffle tickets or some sort of cheap shit at the St Helens Show. Someone in government (possibly Cummings himself as it appears he is the one in possession of the administration’s one brain cell) had obviously judged the mood and decided he wasn’t worth one of the brightly coloured plinths reserved for ministers at the daily briefings. Bad Eyes? Get In Your Car, Drive 30 Miles would not have worked as an effective slogan.
What followed was an explanation that was inconsistent and implausible. We are back to Blackadder again when he had to explain to his puritanical auntie why she had just heard someone shout ‘great booze-up, Edmund’ from the drunken party he was secretly hosting in the next room. He thinks about it for an age before coming up with the tale of Great Boo who had just awoken after suffering from sleeping sickness. As Auntie Whiteadder had heard ‘Great Boo’s Up’.
Cummings told us that having himself fallen ill with the symptoms of coronavirus and isolating for the requisite 14 days he had been suffering from poor vision. The problem remained when he started to recover from the other symptoms so to find out whether he would be fit enough to drive, he drove. Of course, why wouldn’t he? Who hasn’t done that?
Well, everyone as it turns out. Cummings’ increasingly desperate supporters must have been dismayed at this explanation. They had spent the previous 48 hours explaining why driving 250 miles to a different part of the country, in a confined metal box with an infected wife and a four-year-old was not a breach of the lockdown rules. They thought they had nailed that, now here they were learning that the next task on their to do list would be to explain why it was not in any way dangerous to drive around for 45 minutes without the ability to see properly. You have to feel for these useful idiots. For me that’s like pushing my chair up the steepest ramp in Britain to get to the pub only to find a flight of stairs at the top of the ramp which lead to the pub. The hard work has only just started and maybe it is a hopeless cause. Couldn’t he have given them something to work with? Anything?
Not that it has deterred them. Cummings still has his loyal following. They tell us that in taking the child to a place where he could receive the care that he may or may not have needed Cummings was only doing what any caring parent would do for their child. These people queued up to tell us that they would have done the same in his position. We’ll ignore the fact that Cummings has to drive the length of the country to find someone who likes him enough to help him with child care. That tells its own story. The point is that had any of those people done what Cummings chose to do they would have been arrested and fined. What his explanation depends on is the public’s belief in his exceptionalism. That we will tug our forelocks and accept that he is better than we are and so not subject to the same rules. The sadness of it is that to a large extent it works. Or at least it has so far. Unless something changes dramatically Cummings is going to be allowed to ride this out on the back of cap-doffers who ‘aren’t interested’ in politics, absolutely do not vote Tory but have no doubts that Dianne Abbott would have redirected all of their taxes to the local mosque.
There are others who go a stage further. There have been some fairly vile takes which state that anyone objecting to Cummings’ actions has no idea what he has to go through because, being furloughed, all they have to do is sit in their gardens and enjoy a beer. It hardly needs saying how insulting this is to the millions who have had no choice but to be furloughed. The thousands who have made horrifying sacrifices to comply with the measures as their family members perished. To my personal dismay a couple of rugby league club owners and self proclaimed man of the people Tony Bellew are among those sitting in judgement of the furloughed. The same rugby league owners who are currently using the furlough scheme to pay their players at Rochdale and at Wakefield Trinity. As for Bellew, the next time he visits Goodison Park I would hope he is met with the same reception that greeted Rod Stewart when he went to Celtic Park just after the election. After hearing that the wannabe-Scot crooner had sided with the Tories during the campaign the Celtic fans unfurled a banner which read ‘fuck off, Rod’.
There are just the beginnings of a Tory revolt. Douglas Ross was a minister in the Scotland office until today when he became the first to make a stand. He decided he could not tell the public that they had been wrong to follow the rules and one government advisor had been right to break them. Yet this is merely a ripple. It will take similar action from several more weightier names in the government for our non-stick Prime Minister to abandon his plan to baton down the hatches until it all blows over. The prospects of that appear bleak at the moment. Only this morning Michael Gove, that symbol of self entitlement and psychopathic British exceptionalism, was on TV trying to keep a straight face while telling people that he has ‘on occasion’ driven to check his eyesight but that he is ‘not an authority on driving’. Indeed not, but the question of whether it is advisable or even legal to drive with impaired vision feels like something the DVLA left out of the handbook because it was just too bloody obvious.
So what have we learned other than that the far right cult which comprises our government don’t much care whether the public believe their lies or not? Fundamentally that it is less about left or right wing politics and more about the more basic question of right and wrong and about not having a psychotic belief that you are untouchable. But most of all, we have learned what not to do if your working environment gets too hot and your eyes turn red.
Tuesday 26 May 2020
Saturday 23 May 2020
Cummings And Goings
Like most people I have barely left the house for the last two months. I have been working from home since the government announced on March 17 that anyone with any of a whole raft of underlying conditions should do so.
Though I am at an advanced stage of chronic kidney disease and am awaiting transplant I am fortunate that having not had my surgery yet I am not immunosuppressed. So I have been able to take the odd push down to the shops for essentials. I have even driven to the supermarket once. This constitutes a day out in the new normal of 2020.
Others have it worse than I do. I know people who are shielding. People who are immunosuppressed who according to government advice from March 23 could no longer leave the house at all if they wanted to avoid contracting the potentially deadly coronavirus Covid-19. The rest of us were told only to go out for food or medicines, exercise for up to one hour, work (if you are a key worker like an NHS worker, delivery driver or supermarket staff) or to take supplies of food or medicines to friends and family who were shielding.
Those rules have been relaxed slightly. On May 10 our jibbering halfwit Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the previous limit of one hour of exercise no longer applied. Activities like picnics, sunbathing, golf and ‘unlimited rambling’ were back on the agenda. There’s a certain irony in gaining permission for unlimited rambling from Johnson, a world class unlimited rambler. Yet visiting family was still a no-no. You could meet family members for outdoor activities as long as you adhered to the social distancing guideline of staying two metres apart but you could not visit them at their home nor let them into yours. The only exception to this was that children could spend time at the homes of each of their parents if they were not living at the same address. If you were a grandparent hoping to see the little ones you were still shit out of luck. You had to suck it up and stay away from them for the greater good. Many grandparents were more likely to be in the more vulnerable groups it was said. It was accepted that the measures were for their own protection.
Imagine all our surprise then when it was revealed last night that Dominic Cummings, the government’s special advisor, flagrantly and dangerously broke these rules. Rules that he had helped devise, let’s not forget. And not just by popping down the road or across town but by driving over 250 miles from his London home to Durham. Fucking Durham. He apparently did so to help his sick wife look after their son. In imposing the restrictions the government went out of their way to express sympathy on the matter but nevertheless explicitly stated that individuals should not travel even in such circumstances. The message was drummed into us day after day at the government’s pantomime plinth daily briefings. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt. No circumstances in which it was deemed ok to just pop here or just go there. Not even if you were Dominic Cummings.
Though social media has been full of people delighting in eagerly grassing each other up for breaches of these rules they were mostly followed. There were photographs doing the rounds of people gathering on beaches and of one hard of thinking community dancing the conga on VE Day. Still, the vast majority of the population reluctantly complied and stayed at home. If there were sick relatives to care for in other parts of the country the people made other arrangements. Thousands have had to leave family members to die alone as a consequence of this directive. The cruelty of this needs no further explanation. I haven’t got the words for people who have been through this horror only to learn now that the rules didn’t apply to Cummings.
He stayed in a building close to his parents’ farm. That itself is a breach of the government’s own rules but it also places his parents at significant risk given that they are in the most vulnerable age group. He did all of this while himself experiencing symptoms of coronavirus! Either Cummings is sufficiently sociopathic to deliberately place his own parents in mortal danger or the risks aren’t quite as high as we have been told to this point. Either way millions of us have been taken for fools by the elected officials responsible for protecting us. I always knew that electing a government somewhere to the right of Paolo Di Canio would be damaging but I must admit to being slightly taken aback by the extent to which they have fulfilled that potential.
Such is their arrogance they are not even sorry. As I write the entire Tory cabinet is rushing to send out social media statements in defence of Cummings. He is receiving a more strict level of shielding from any wrongdoing than anyone vulnerable shielding from the virus itself. It’s actually an embarrassment and quite shameful to see the leaders of a developed democracy behaving this way. It is even more mortifying to consider that it is happening in our democracy. This is the sort of skullduggery normally reserved for despots and dictators who rule by fear. Consider the following responses;
‘Two parents with coronavirus were anxiously taking care of their young child. Those seeking to politicise it should take a long, hard look in the mirror’ - Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.
‘It was entirely right for Dom Cummings to find child care for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill’ - Health Secretary and ought-to-know-better recently recovered coronavirus patient Matt Hancock.
‘Taking care of your wife and young child is justifiable and reasonable, trying to score political points over it isn’t’ - Chancellor Of The Exchequer Rishi Sunak.
‘Caring for your wife and child is not a crime’ - Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for Fuck All Michael Gove.
You’ll notice the common thread. Trying to spin these irresponsible breaches as some moral good. Looking after the family. Taking care of the kids. The problem with this approach is that it implies that the rest of us, including those who could not be with their dying relatives or who could not attend their funerals, just didn’t care enough about their loved ones to break the rules. If not, if the ministers are standing by the idea that Joe Public was right to stick to the rules however emotionally difficult that may have been, then what they are therefore trying to sell us is the idea that Cummings is entitled to be viewed as an exception. That his family matters more than yours or mine. Don’t you be driving up to a different part of the country to look after your family. You stay at home, save lives, stay alert, don’t be selfish. But Dom? He’s sweet. He gets a pass.
To be fair it wasn’t always part of the plan to let him off like this. No, phase one (this government loves a phase) was to cover it up for eight weeks. When an unusually inquisitive national newspaper got bored of complying with the bullshit and asked on April 5 whether it was true that Cummings was in or had recently been in Durham Downing Street said ‘that’ll be a no comment’. It wasn’t until Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield failed to specify his location in her account of his illness for The Spectator that the jig was up.
Defending the indefensible is merely an encore to what has been a scandalous cover-up from which there should be a succession of rolling heads, not just that of Cummings. Someone in Number 10 sanctioned Cummings’ Covid road trip. I’d send them on another one. A European football tour with Harry Redknapp and Razor Ruddock and the boys at the earliest opportunity. If the electorate can’t hold them to account and make them change their shameful ways then perhaps a few nights listening to Paul Merson trying to save them from their vices might do the trick.
Cummings’ lockdown flout is not the first of its kind. Yet the response from the cabinet ministers is markedly different to the one we saw previously. Neil Ferguson was a government advisor on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) before he broke lockdown rules by receiving a visit from his married girlfriend. Before that Scotland’s chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood lost her position after visiting her second home.
On Ferguson future fall-guy Hancock declared himself ‘speechless’ and said that Ferguson had ‘made the right decision to resign’. Hancock also said he would ‘back the police’ if they saw fit to take action. In the end they decided not to, but it was not the backing of those in positions of political power that got Ferguson off the hook. Hancock just didn’t want to be seen to be trying to do the job of the police for them. Just as well since he can’t even do his own job, as over 35,000 deaths and counting will attest.
The most worrying aspect of all of this shameless rank-closing within the cabinet is what it says about Cummings’ influence within government. What is it about him that has Hancock, Raab, Sunak and Gove so desperate to avoid cutting him loose? My best guess is that he is the only one among them with an IQ over 12 and that without him they just won’t know what to do to get us through the rest of the current crisis. Or is it something more sinister? Has he got the negatives? Has he kidnapped Gove’s mum? Nah, that can’t be it. Like Gove would care. Whatever the reason for it the government’s collective refusal to force the resignation of an unelected advisor in clear breach of the law at a time of national crisis is deeply troubling. We are back to the question of government without accountability. Of dictators and despots.
We may all yet pay a price for the government’s abhorrent double standard. How can any government minister stand behind his or her brightly coloured, confusingly sloganed plinth each day from now and tell us to adhere to rules that its own insiders can break without consequence? There will be those who will no longer listen which can only increase the chances of more gatherings, more crowded streets, more congas, less compliance with social distancing and - if what we have been told is true - more of a likelihood of a second huge wave of infections and deaths.
If that happens and Cummings is still in his job then good luck telling people that they can’t visit family or attend funerals. Some of you will have already hit the road.
Though I am at an advanced stage of chronic kidney disease and am awaiting transplant I am fortunate that having not had my surgery yet I am not immunosuppressed. So I have been able to take the odd push down to the shops for essentials. I have even driven to the supermarket once. This constitutes a day out in the new normal of 2020.
Others have it worse than I do. I know people who are shielding. People who are immunosuppressed who according to government advice from March 23 could no longer leave the house at all if they wanted to avoid contracting the potentially deadly coronavirus Covid-19. The rest of us were told only to go out for food or medicines, exercise for up to one hour, work (if you are a key worker like an NHS worker, delivery driver or supermarket staff) or to take supplies of food or medicines to friends and family who were shielding.
Those rules have been relaxed slightly. On May 10 our jibbering halfwit Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the previous limit of one hour of exercise no longer applied. Activities like picnics, sunbathing, golf and ‘unlimited rambling’ were back on the agenda. There’s a certain irony in gaining permission for unlimited rambling from Johnson, a world class unlimited rambler. Yet visiting family was still a no-no. You could meet family members for outdoor activities as long as you adhered to the social distancing guideline of staying two metres apart but you could not visit them at their home nor let them into yours. The only exception to this was that children could spend time at the homes of each of their parents if they were not living at the same address. If you were a grandparent hoping to see the little ones you were still shit out of luck. You had to suck it up and stay away from them for the greater good. Many grandparents were more likely to be in the more vulnerable groups it was said. It was accepted that the measures were for their own protection.
Imagine all our surprise then when it was revealed last night that Dominic Cummings, the government’s special advisor, flagrantly and dangerously broke these rules. Rules that he had helped devise, let’s not forget. And not just by popping down the road or across town but by driving over 250 miles from his London home to Durham. Fucking Durham. He apparently did so to help his sick wife look after their son. In imposing the restrictions the government went out of their way to express sympathy on the matter but nevertheless explicitly stated that individuals should not travel even in such circumstances. The message was drummed into us day after day at the government’s pantomime plinth daily briefings. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt. No circumstances in which it was deemed ok to just pop here or just go there. Not even if you were Dominic Cummings.
Though social media has been full of people delighting in eagerly grassing each other up for breaches of these rules they were mostly followed. There were photographs doing the rounds of people gathering on beaches and of one hard of thinking community dancing the conga on VE Day. Still, the vast majority of the population reluctantly complied and stayed at home. If there were sick relatives to care for in other parts of the country the people made other arrangements. Thousands have had to leave family members to die alone as a consequence of this directive. The cruelty of this needs no further explanation. I haven’t got the words for people who have been through this horror only to learn now that the rules didn’t apply to Cummings.
He stayed in a building close to his parents’ farm. That itself is a breach of the government’s own rules but it also places his parents at significant risk given that they are in the most vulnerable age group. He did all of this while himself experiencing symptoms of coronavirus! Either Cummings is sufficiently sociopathic to deliberately place his own parents in mortal danger or the risks aren’t quite as high as we have been told to this point. Either way millions of us have been taken for fools by the elected officials responsible for protecting us. I always knew that electing a government somewhere to the right of Paolo Di Canio would be damaging but I must admit to being slightly taken aback by the extent to which they have fulfilled that potential.
Such is their arrogance they are not even sorry. As I write the entire Tory cabinet is rushing to send out social media statements in defence of Cummings. He is receiving a more strict level of shielding from any wrongdoing than anyone vulnerable shielding from the virus itself. It’s actually an embarrassment and quite shameful to see the leaders of a developed democracy behaving this way. It is even more mortifying to consider that it is happening in our democracy. This is the sort of skullduggery normally reserved for despots and dictators who rule by fear. Consider the following responses;
‘Two parents with coronavirus were anxiously taking care of their young child. Those seeking to politicise it should take a long, hard look in the mirror’ - Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.
‘It was entirely right for Dom Cummings to find child care for his toddler when both he and his wife were getting ill’ - Health Secretary and ought-to-know-better recently recovered coronavirus patient Matt Hancock.
‘Taking care of your wife and young child is justifiable and reasonable, trying to score political points over it isn’t’ - Chancellor Of The Exchequer Rishi Sunak.
‘Caring for your wife and child is not a crime’ - Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for Fuck All Michael Gove.
You’ll notice the common thread. Trying to spin these irresponsible breaches as some moral good. Looking after the family. Taking care of the kids. The problem with this approach is that it implies that the rest of us, including those who could not be with their dying relatives or who could not attend their funerals, just didn’t care enough about their loved ones to break the rules. If not, if the ministers are standing by the idea that Joe Public was right to stick to the rules however emotionally difficult that may have been, then what they are therefore trying to sell us is the idea that Cummings is entitled to be viewed as an exception. That his family matters more than yours or mine. Don’t you be driving up to a different part of the country to look after your family. You stay at home, save lives, stay alert, don’t be selfish. But Dom? He’s sweet. He gets a pass.
To be fair it wasn’t always part of the plan to let him off like this. No, phase one (this government loves a phase) was to cover it up for eight weeks. When an unusually inquisitive national newspaper got bored of complying with the bullshit and asked on April 5 whether it was true that Cummings was in or had recently been in Durham Downing Street said ‘that’ll be a no comment’. It wasn’t until Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield failed to specify his location in her account of his illness for The Spectator that the jig was up.
Defending the indefensible is merely an encore to what has been a scandalous cover-up from which there should be a succession of rolling heads, not just that of Cummings. Someone in Number 10 sanctioned Cummings’ Covid road trip. I’d send them on another one. A European football tour with Harry Redknapp and Razor Ruddock and the boys at the earliest opportunity. If the electorate can’t hold them to account and make them change their shameful ways then perhaps a few nights listening to Paul Merson trying to save them from their vices might do the trick.
Cummings’ lockdown flout is not the first of its kind. Yet the response from the cabinet ministers is markedly different to the one we saw previously. Neil Ferguson was a government advisor on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) before he broke lockdown rules by receiving a visit from his married girlfriend. Before that Scotland’s chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood lost her position after visiting her second home.
On Ferguson future fall-guy Hancock declared himself ‘speechless’ and said that Ferguson had ‘made the right decision to resign’. Hancock also said he would ‘back the police’ if they saw fit to take action. In the end they decided not to, but it was not the backing of those in positions of political power that got Ferguson off the hook. Hancock just didn’t want to be seen to be trying to do the job of the police for them. Just as well since he can’t even do his own job, as over 35,000 deaths and counting will attest.
The most worrying aspect of all of this shameless rank-closing within the cabinet is what it says about Cummings’ influence within government. What is it about him that has Hancock, Raab, Sunak and Gove so desperate to avoid cutting him loose? My best guess is that he is the only one among them with an IQ over 12 and that without him they just won’t know what to do to get us through the rest of the current crisis. Or is it something more sinister? Has he got the negatives? Has he kidnapped Gove’s mum? Nah, that can’t be it. Like Gove would care. Whatever the reason for it the government’s collective refusal to force the resignation of an unelected advisor in clear breach of the law at a time of national crisis is deeply troubling. We are back to the question of government without accountability. Of dictators and despots.
We may all yet pay a price for the government’s abhorrent double standard. How can any government minister stand behind his or her brightly coloured, confusingly sloganed plinth each day from now and tell us to adhere to rules that its own insiders can break without consequence? There will be those who will no longer listen which can only increase the chances of more gatherings, more crowded streets, more congas, less compliance with social distancing and - if what we have been told is true - more of a likelihood of a second huge wave of infections and deaths.
If that happens and Cummings is still in his job then good luck telling people that they can’t visit family or attend funerals. Some of you will have already hit the road.
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