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.