Blind Faith

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.