The truth about why Cummings hasn't gone: Johnson
is too terrified to sack him
Marina Hyde
The prime minister’s decision is not born of loyalty
to his adviser – he just can’t get rid of his ideas man
@MarinaHyde
Tue 26 May
2020 14.19 BSTLast modified on Tue 26 May 2020 16.14 BST
Perhaps on
Sunday you watched the entire nation being lectured on what constitutes
fatherly responsibility by Boris Johnson, a man who won’t even say how many
children he has, and leaves women to bring up an unspecified number of them.
Perhaps on Monday you watched the Guardian’s Rowena Mason being lectured in journalism
by Johnson, a man sacked from a newspaper for fabricating quotes from his own
godfather, and who blithely discussed helping a friend to have another
journalist beaten up. Perhaps today, you heard Michael Gove tell LBC he has “on
occasion” driven a car to check his eyesight.
If you did
see these things, I can only direct you to the slogan flyposted all over Paris
during the 1968 civil unrest. “DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND – THERE IS A FAULT WITH
REALITY.” The term “gaslighting” is much overused, but let’s break the glass on
it for the events of the past few days. As for “indefensible”… well, I don’t
think that word means what you thought it meant.
Anyway. I
see the latest science Dominic Cummings knows more about than you is optometry.
Half an hour late on Monday afternoon – like he’s Mariah Carey and not some
spad in inside-out pants – the Islington-dwelling humanities graduate took to
Downing Street’s rose garden. There, he delivered the most preposterous address
to a nation since Tiger Woods stood in front of an audience, including his
mother, and apologised to his wife and sponsors. The difference is that Woods
had a problem with cocktail waitresses, while Cummings fucks entire public
health messages in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Also, he’s not remotely
sorry.
By now, you
may be dimly aware that his wife showing coronavirus symptoms saw Cummings
first return to Downing Street, then embark on what we might call an Odyssean
project: a heroic 260-mile quest all the way to County Durham, breaking the
spirit and letter of lockdown rules he helped to write. I guess he just wanted
to be a rule-maker, not a rule-taker. Then, he explained, he embarked on a
60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle, with his child in the car, to see if his
eyes were so banjaxed that it was unsafe for him to drive. Which is … but no.
I’m sorry, I just can’t with that one. Maybe later. Hopefully he’s at least
nuked his car insurance premium.
Apologies
for having to get tough with a guy who has always cultivated an image of
himself as the Roy Keane of Westminster, even if that is like being the Clint
Eastwood of the DVLA. But if Cummings and his wife didn’t know what they’d done
was wrong, why would they choose to write a lengthy article last month about
their virus experience – full of personal family information – which omitted
all of these dramas, all of these material facts. Or as Cummings addressed
these questions of what is unredeemable in the rose garden: “I stress to people
that they should not believe everything in the newspapers.” And I stress to
people that by far the most inaccurate account of the period in question was in
the Spectator, bylined Mary Wakefield and Dominic Cummings. As for his
querulous domestic exceptionalism, you’d think they were the first parents ever
to get properly ill in possession of children. Or child, in this case. God
knows, it’s not much fun. But, dare millions of us say, it is kind of what you
sign up for – a reality not lost on the ICU nurse couple I heard on the radio,
explaining about both of them being hard hit by Covid-19, and having to isolate
with their own three children without help.
Cummings’
university history tutor once described him as “something like a Robespierre”,
“determined to bring down things that don’t work”. Five years after his
revolution, Robespierre himself was deemed to be something that didn’t really
work, and was “brought down”, to euphemise the business of being relieved of
your head in front of an ecstatic mob. I must say I found the footage of
Cummings being screamed at in his street on Sunday distinctly disturbing when
set alongside his account of his family’s house having become a target for
threats of violence. This is never right.
Part of
what’s disturbing was the vignette of a Britain Cummings himself did much to
foment: grimly polarised, reflexively aggressive and running with an
undercurrent of menace. His crowning triumph – the successful campaign to leave
the EU – was a masterclass of stoking and exploiting divisions, unpleasantly
emotive half-truths or untruths, and evidently considered itself above the law.
I wrote last year about the dangerous folly of whipping up people versus
parliament narratives, and how quickly those who imagine themselves on the side
of the people can suddenly be reclassified as an enemy politician. But even I
would have thought it too neat, too written, for Cummings to find himself on
the wrong end of his sorcery as quickly as he has been. The thing about playing
to angry mobs is that eventually they get angry with you. They came for
Robespierre in the end, too.
For all the
draw of the Cummings character, though, the last few days are ultimately a
terrible story about Johnson. “Wash your hands, wash your hands” the prime
minister kept gibbering last night. He’s certainly washing his hands of it all.
All populists secretly hate their people, and Johnson is no different. But that
“secretly” is key. His decision to keep Cummings brings his contempt for those
he is meant to serve into the open. He would rather endanger their lives by
compromising a vital public health strategy.
But why?
The thing about Johnson is that he desperately wanted to become prime minister,
and he desperately wanted to have been prime minister. It’s just the bit in
between he struggles with. With Othello, it was jealousy. Macbeth: ambition.
Lear: pride. Johnson: career liar, hollowed out by narcissism, who not even his
friends would joke was motivated by public service. I guess it’s the little
things that trip you up, isn’t it?
Anyone who
imagines his defence of Cummings is born of loyalty is unfamiliar with the
concept “Boris Johnson”. This is actually a simple story: man with no ideas is
too terrified to sack his ideas man. Or to put it in the complex intellectual
terms it deserves, some street heckler once shouted at David Hasselhoff: “Oi!
Hasselhoff! You’re nothing without your talking car!” Cummings is the talking
car to Johnson’s Hasselhoff.
So here we
are. Cummings stays, and only irresistible external events will make Johnson do
the right thing. He is not himself capable. We have the highest death toll in
Europe, we left the care homes to their fate, our test-and-trace blunders are
an international embarrassment, and we didn’t even save our economy. Johnson
takes daily runs, but appears only once or twice a week in a crisis to fail at
leadership.
This is the
utter smallness of the man, and the tragedy for everyone stuck being governed
by him. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the acceptance. It would be nice to
think we’re not so beaten that we don’t expect better than what he’s given us.
After all, lives literally depend on it.
• Marina
Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário