Dominic
Cummings
Dominic Cummings took the public for fools. Now
they want his head
Andrew
Rawnsley
Now everyone knows who are the hypocritical elite.
Boris Johnson will pay a very high price for clinging to his unelected adviser
Sun 31 May
2020 09.15 BSTLast modified on Sun 31 May 2020 11.17 BST
With
increasing desperation, Boris Johnson has urged everyone to “move on” from
talking about Dominic Cummings. The public know what they want. They want the
prime minister’s chief adviser moved out.
This time
last week, Mr Cummings was telling journalists that the revelations about his
lockdown-busting excursions to and around Durham were “fake news”, while
reassuring the prime minister that this story could not harm them, because it
was of interest only to the Westminster bubble. All of which turned out to be
as ludicrously wrong as making a 60-mile car trip with your four-year-old
strapped in the back as an “eyesight test”.
I have had
a ringside seat for many political dramas. Some – such as Black Wednesday, the
poll tax revolt and the MPs’ expenses scandal – have mattered a lot. Others
have not mattered a jot. To be a consequential episode with lasting effects, a
scandal has to have key attributes. It must cut through to the public in a big
way. It must change how the country sees its government. And it must redefine
opinions in a way that is enduringly bad.
The
Cummings affair ticks all of those boxes. The cut-through to the public has
been immediate, massive and extremely negative. The Opinium poll that we
publish today finds that four out of five voters think the prime minister’s
chief adviser broke the rules, two out of three do not believe his
explanations, and a similar proportion think he should go. Support for the
government has dropped by eight points, the largest weekly plunge ever recorded
by Opinium. Boris Johnson has said “people will make up their own minds”. The
people have. They think his chief adviser is a rule-breaking liar who should be
sacked if he won’t resign.
The reasons
why they think this could elude only someone who is supposed to be a genius at
reading public opinion. Everyone who has had to make sacrifices during this
crisis – and that is many millions of people – has felt stung by the discovery
that it was one rule for them and another for Boris Johnson’s court favourite.
Those voters who were still inclined to give the government the benefit of the
doubt when it claimed “we’re all in it together” have been made to feel like
credulous dupes.
This sense
of being taken for mugs was compounded by Mr Cummings’ news conference in the
Downing Street rose garden, a venue usually reserved for hosting foreign
leaders, not contrition-free sophistry by an unelected apparatchik trying to
save his job. He was sounding almost plausible until he made the claim that the
60-mile round trip to a beauty spot on Easter Sunday, which just happened to be
his wife’s birthday, was to test whether he was fit to drive. Was that the best
that the grand wizards of spin at Number 10 could come up with? What
alternative alibis did they discard as too risible before they alighted on that
one? Or did he fail to come up with a more credible explanation for the side
tour to Barnard Castle because he was too busy rewriting old blogs so he could
claim he had warned about a pandemic when he hadn’t? People will put up with a
lot from their governments, but being taken for idiots who will fall for
anything is not one of them.
One of the
reveals of this affair – actually, more of a confirmation than a reveal – is
that the people running Number 10 do take their fellow Britons to be fools. Mr
Johnson and Mr Cummings secured their seats of power by manufacturing a “people
versus the elite” narrative with themselves self-cast as the tribunes of the
plebs. This was always counterfeit. Mr Johnson is a Latin-quoting Old Etonian.
Mr Cummings’s father-in-law lives in a castle. The chasm between what they
claim to be and what they truly are has now been definitively exposed. One Tory
MP comments: “People are furious. I keep hearing ‘one rule for us’. It’s doing
serious damage.” The prime minister and his chief adviser are now the faces of
an out-of-touch, hypocritical, unaccountable, unapologetic, unshamable elite.
The effect
on public opinion has fomented a ferocious mood in the Conservative
parliamentary party. One Tory MP, who has not taken a public position, reports:
“I’ve had hundreds of emails – I’m not exaggerating: hundreds – about this.
Ninety eight per cent of them are hostile.” Quite a lot of Tories think that
the events of the past week, indisputably a gift to Labour, have made the next
election harder to win.
Boris has just used up one of his lives
Former
cabinet minister
Around half
of Tory backbenchers have been publicly critical of Mr Cummings, with many
calling for his resignation. A minister has quit. Many more feel the same way,
but have not spoken out for reasons of loyalty or careerism or for fear of
retribution by Mr Cummings and his small but powerful gang at Number 10. “Look
down the list of those [Tories] who went public with a call for his
resignation,” says one senior Conservative. “It’s not all Remoaners or people he’s
picked fights with. It’s all sorts of people. It’s long-standing MPs and it’s
new MPs.”
So another
consequence of this episode is a recasting of the relationship between Number
10 and Conservative MPs. When Boris Johnson won them a parliamentary majority
last December, it was said by many, including me, that this would grant him an
extraordinary amount of goodwill and forbearance with his backbenchers. A great
deal of that capital has just been burnt up in this bonfire of Cummings’
vanities.
“It has
hurt Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Boris has just used up one of
his lives.”
Another
price has been paid in the degradation of the cabinet. About half of them
didn’t come out in public support of Mr Cummings and about half of them did,
and I award no prizes for guessing which half has the more self-respect this
morning. It was a humiliation for senior ministers to be ordered to tie
themselves in knots trying to defend an adviser who is known to hold most of
them in contempt. It was demeaning for cabinet members to issue near-identical
tweets in his support as if they were no more than fake accounts operated from
a bot farm. Given the lack of evidence that all of them are sentient human
beings, perhaps some of these ministers are indeed badly written algos run out
of Mr Cummings’ laptop. Generously assuming that at least some of them have a
latent regard for their own reputations, the ridicule they have endured will
leave a bitter taste. Next time Mr Cummings gets himself into trouble – and
there will be a next time – they may be a little more reluctant to come to his
defence.
The government
has yet to face what could be the most deadly consequence of this episode: what
it means for control of the epidemic. How easy will ministers find it to
persuade the public to “do the right thing” when these same ministers have
spent the past week defending Mr Cummings for doing the wrong thing? The
government is moving deeper into the perilous phase of releasing lockdown
measures when it cannot be entirely sure that it truly has the disease
suppressed and before a test-and-trace regime has been adequately established.
Voicing the
anxieties of the scientific advisers, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief among
them, has warned that “we still have a significant burden of infection” and the
UK remains in a “fragile state”. Despite that serious caution, Mr Johnson is
rapidly moving towards a substantial dismantling of restrictions. He now does
so under a dark cloud of suspicion that his decision-making is no long being
driven by the best scientific advice but by a desire to get his rule-breaking
adviser out of the headlines. Should there be a reignition of the epidemic,
should we face the much-dreaded second wave, the government will find it much
harder to convince the country that it acted in good faith and did all in its
power to ensure maximum public compliance. This will be even more the case if
people break the rules with the excuse that “I’m just following my instincts”
or “I’m only doing a Cummings”.
Boris
Johnson was persuaded that it would look weak to give up his senior aide. The
main source of that advice was, no doubt, Mr Cummings himself. Or, it occurs to
me, the prime minister may be paralysed by the terror that a sacked Cummings
would vengefully spill many rancid secrets. Whichever is the case, it looks
both pathetic and dangerous to cling to one unelected adviser at such a severe
cost to the government’s authority, the cabinet’s credibility, control of the
epidemic, the national interest and even people’s lives. That will not be
readily forgotten.
•Andrew
Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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