Illustration
by Bill Bragg
The Dominic Cummings circus is an indictment of
the entire governing class
Aditya
Chakrabortty
Today’s punch-up obscured how many of the failures
that left the UK so fatally exposed to the pandemic still remain
Wed 26 May
2021 16.36 BST
Who better
to judge the true significance of Dominic Cummings’ Big Day Out at parliament
than Dominic Cummings himself? Not the grave-faced, shaven-headed man we’ve
been watching, ladling out his revenge cold, but an earlier incarnation. Before
he became chief adviser to Boris Johnson, before he compromised his own
government’s lockdown rules by driving the family to Barnard Castle; before all
of that, when he was just a guy holed up in a bunker with his blog, composing
screeds about Bismarck, he anticipated the absurdity of today’s carnival: “The
political-media system,” he wrote in a 2017 post, “actively suppresses thinking
about, and focus on, what’s important.”
Westminster
demands a diversion and, over the months leading up to this hearing, Cummings
has made himself its distractor-in-chief. Ever happy to fatten the beast he
only pretends to despise, he has drip-fed journalists poison about his former
confidants. And a grateful press hyped up the coming “Domageddon”, describing
him as the “terrifying” kamikaze genius prepared to slay the prime minister or,
at the very least, detonate Matt Hancock for “lying”.
“It’s a
full-on knife fight,” frothed one insider at the Evening Standard. Another
source whispered hoarsely to the Sunday Times: “Dominic has copies of
everything and knows where all the bodies are buried.”
And, my,
aren’t there a lot of bodies. More than 150,000 Britons have been killed by Covid:
the equivalent in deaths of a twin towers terrorist attack happening on these
shores every week for a year. Well over a million people report suffering long
Covid, with one in six so ill they cannot carry out daily tasks. These are
bodies, all right: sick and dead ones. No cache of top-secret documents is
necessary to find out about them; they are our relatives, friends, neighbours.
And the cause of their deaths is rather bigger than a punch-up between two
middle-aged private school boys. It lies in a grotesque failure of the state.
In a
country that as late as 2019 considered itself to be among the best prepared on
Earth to handle a pandemic, hundreds of thousands of families are today
struggling with premature death or the nursing of a chronically ill loved one,
and the loss of vital income. Forget the blame game being played on Downing
Street, this is an indictment of an entire governing class: lethal in its
complacency, cocksure despite its manifest inadequacy, and forever blocking its
eyes and ears to the lessons from history, or even the TV pictures from
hospitals across northern Italy.
“When the
public needed us most, the government failed,” Cummings acknowledged on
Wednesday. And tens of thousands died as a result. That’s what counts, not who
said what about herd immunity. The machinery of state buckled, the government
all but collapsed – not just once, but again and again: from PPE to lockdowns
to test and trace to care homes. The result is that Johnson’s UK stands
alongside Donald Trump’s US as a cautionary tale of what happens when a ragtag
bunch of cash-in merchants, state-haters and incompetent braggarts are allowed
to run a country in grave danger. Plenty of examples of that were given to the
parliamentary committee: Johnson pretending to be the mayor from Jaws, Cummings
dreaming of replacing dull old civil servants with supercomputers, and Hancock
blagging his way through.
The thread
that pulls all this together is denialism. The denial you saw etched on the
face of Hancock last spring is now writ large across what Cummings calls the
“political-media system”. Many of the pundits and politicians refuse to take on
board how singularly badly the UK has handled the pandemic, even while
relatively poor states such as Vietnam have done much better.
Even before
the former chief adviser took his seat this morning in the Wilson Room at
Portcullis House, he was being written off as yesterday’s man, spilling the
beans on an episode that, however bad, will count more in history books than it
ever does at the ballot box. For now, what counts for the front pages is jabs
and freedom day just around the corner, the binning of social distancing
rules, the return of big, fat weddings and heaving nightclubs. With all that
waiting for us, the pandemic has been consigned to the rear view, its lasting
effects chiefly a matter for careers in SW1.
Except, to
misquote an old Athenian, just because you do not take an interest in Covid
doesn’t mean Covid won’t take an interest in you. As MPs questioned Cummings,
the so-called Indian variant of the coronavirus continued its advance across
the country. It is no longer confined to Bolton and Burnley and a few other
pockets, but is increasingly widespread across west London. And what the
Cummings circus has obscured is how many of the failures that left the UK so
fatally exposed remain with us.
Consider:
Whitehall freely allowed in planes from India long after it was in Covid
meltdown. The £37bn test-and-trace programme keeps breaking down – in April and
May, some English councils could not see full data on positive tests within
their area. A full 15 months into this pandemic, the UK’s sick pay system –
the meanest anywhere in the developed world – has still not been fixed. Even
today, the care worker looking after your mum is effectively incentivised not
to get tested for Covid for fear of going broke.
Most
serious of all, Johnson and his ministers still refuse to level with voters for
fear that they won’t love them any more. The result is utter confusion. We’d
rather you didn’t fly to Greece this summer, but we won’t stop you – so enjoy
that week sunbathing on the island of Petridish! Your area is in lockdown,
except we wouldn’t dream of telling you. You can hug, but only if absolutely
necessary.
The prime
minister, who claims to be led by “data, not dates”, also promises we are on a
“one-way road to freedom”. Both things cannot be true, as proved by the minutes
of the last Sage meeting held two weeks ago. Discussing the new variant,
scientists agreed that it was a “realistic possibility” that it is “as much as
50% more transmissible” than the previous Kent strain. In that case, the
minutes record, for Johnson to press on with his road map “would lead to a
substantial resurgence of hospitalisations”. The potential is lethal, as
observed by Deepti Gurdasani, clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University
of London: “Thousands may well die just because huge numbers will get infected,
even if the risk of death for each person is low.”
Against
that risk, the sensible thing to do would be to park “freedom day” and to make
sure the UK is as well-protected as possible against this variant and all the
others we are likely to face over the coming months. Money for smaller class
sizes with better ventilation in schools; accommodation for low-income and
badly housed families that need isolation; ditching the hyperbole about ancient
British liberties such as downing a pint of Stella.
Doing those
things would really be learning the lessons from Covid. But then who dies of
this disease? Frontline workers, black and brown people, those with
disabilities and people squashed into tiny housing. Rarely the sort who gets to
address a select committee or text a friendly journalist.
Aditya
Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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