Not Moving On

I gather there is a rule in political circles that if a story is still on the front pages after eight days, someone's head has to roll. I think it might have been a 'rule of thumb' from Alastair Campbell's days at No10 under Tony Blair, but whatever, tomorrow, Sunday, appears to be the likely day of reckoning. So, lets reprise the situation and see what the state of play is.  

In order for us all to do as we are told and 'move on' as the increasingly-beleaguered prime minister earnestly wishes, the public must obligingly have become bored with the story and be distracted with purchases of BBQ-stuff in eager anticipation of lockdown being eased. Of course it's only being eased early at this point and when 'track, trace and isolate' is not properly ready in order to provide a Cummings smokescreen. Two senior scientific SAGE members have confirmed it's simply too soon.

We all know that the Cummings' fanciful 'back-engineered' story, concocted in order to satisfy certain known facts, is complete bollocks, something admirably highlighted at length during last night's HIGNFY and they didn't even mention the now confirmed position that Cummings jointly owns the property he was staying in and is therefore a second home.  

The list of Tory MP's demanding that Cummings is sacked is still growing, as is the list who are simply unhappy and the petition demanding his removal has passed one million. The Guardian is reporting that MP's have received over 180,000 emails:-

Constituents bombard MPs with tens of thousands of emails over Dominic Cummings

The furore over Dominic Cummings’ breach of lockdown rules has prompted tens of thousands of people to flood their MPs’ inboxes in what some described as the biggest outpouring since Brexit, a Guardian analysis has found. As Boris Johnson tried to draw a line under the crisis involving his chief adviser, constituents across the country sent missives to their MPs, with many sharing stories of their own lockdown hardships.

A Guardian analysis covering 117 MPs found they have received a total of 31,738 emails since a joint Guardian and Daily Mirror investigation a week ago divulged that Cummings had travelled to County Durham and taken a trip to a beauty spot with his family after suffering coronavirus symptoms.

If that level of correspondence was reflected across all 650 MPs, it would suggest the revelations may have sparked as many as 180,000 items of correspondence. The numbers were either provided in response to the Guardian’s request for figures, or in statements MPs had released to constituents.

Johnson has repeatedly suggested it was time to “move on” from the Cummings row, despite about half of Tory backbenchers – more than 100 MPs – calling for his most senior aide to resign or be sacked, or criticising Cummings. Many said they were motivated by their constituents’ anger.

On Friday evening Theresa May added her voice to the Tories criticising Cummings. In a statement to constituents of her Maidenhead seat, the former prime minister said she could “well understand the [public’s] anger” towards Johnson’s senior adviser. “I do not feel that Mr Cummings followed the spirit of the guidance,” she said.

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What's particularly interesting is how the Cummings affair has burst the bubble of Brexit euphoria surrounding Boris, his personal ratings plummeting and how normally loyal Tory supporters are 'getting it'. This from the Guardian on Thursday:-

The Tories are losing the shires – this is a gift for Keir Starmer

What Britain wants is a “strong leader prepared to break the rules”. Or at least that’s what it wanted a year ago, when a Hansard Society survey showed that 54% of voters were actively looking for a prime minister willing to play dirty if necessary. In retrospect, these findings predicted much about the rise of Boris Johnson last summer. His supporters were never so much blind to his flaws – who didn’t know the score by then? – as curiously attracted to them, or at least willing to see their usefulness in the circumstances.

Brexit supporters in particular, exasperated with what they saw as months of Brussels running rings around Britain, argued that you can’t make an omelette without someone cracking eggs. Only now, waist-deep in eggshell, do some of them seem to be realising that the end of rules-based order isn’t as fun as it sounded. And that means something fundamental is shifting.

Johnson’s personal ratings have plummeted through the Dominic Cummings debacle in a way they didn’t before, even as people’s loved ones were dying, in a sense because this is so personal to him now. Politics is becoming a contest of character, not merely ideology – a choice between government by not-so-lovable rogues who don’t seem to accept that the rules apply to them, and something that for the last few years has been made to look bland, dull and out of touch by comparison. Yet when the alternative seems to be living in a state of rage at what this government is becoming, then playing by the boring old rules suddenly starts to look appealing. Enter, then, Keir Starmer.

The most heartbreaking aspect of this past week has been hearing from people who now feel guilty for doing the right thing, tortured by the thought that in not rushing to see their dying relatives they may have inadvertently let down those they loved. By refusing to admit that Cummings was wrong to exempt himself from lockdown rules, the government is now pouring salt into these wounds.

In an excruciating piece of breakfast radio today, Matt Hancock was repeatedly asked if Cummings had done “the right thing” by driving a carful of coronavirus to Durham. The health secretary could only say, wretchedly, that it was all within the guidelines, which is not only nonsense but the answer to a very different question. The truth is that Cummings may have flouted not just the regulations with his day trip to Barnard Castle – as Durham police have reportedly concluded, or the sense of social solidarity emerging over the last few months, but also a very specific, small-c conservative sense of decency and duty.

That’s why shire Tories are furiously buttonholing their MPs, vicars are revolting, police officers are privately fuming, and the Daily Mail is on the warpath on behalf of middle England. When told to do their moral duty for the good of the country (not least by the Queen, live from Windsor Castle), Mail readers generally do it – and vociferously judge those who don’t. Defending Cummings for failing to do the same is an open gesture of contempt for the values on which the provincial and suburban, golfing and gardening, churchgoing heart of what used to be the Conservative party is founded. And simultaneously it enrages many of the new northern working-class Tory voters on which this government’s majority depends.

The people Labour’s new leader must win back don’t just live behind the so-called red wall, but in southern and Midland marginal towns which used to return Labour MPs in the party’s winning days. Most know nothing much about Starmer yet, except that he has nice hair and once bought his mum a field for her rescued donkeys; but right now that beats defending the indefensible.

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So, the man with no ideas simply has to hang on to the ideas man at any cost. This piece by Mandrake in the European was rather telling I think:-

Why Boris Johnson missed out on role of editor at the Telegraph

No newspaper campaigned more stridently for Boris Johnson, to lead the nation than the Daily Telegraph. Tellingly, however, its former proprietor Lord Black – and then his successors, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay – did not, however, want to see a man quite so chaotic, tardy and unpredictable installed as its editor.

“Boris made no secret of the fact he wanted to be editor of the Telegraph, but all they were prepared to give him was the Spectator,” a former hireling of the newspaper group tells Mandrake. “One of the things that put them off the idea was how he responded when, one quiet Sunday during the late 1990s, Charles Moore, as editor, had left him in charge.

“As usual, David Lucas, at the time the Telegraph’s very able night editor, outlined what was going into the paper at the afternoon conference and Johnson sat there and silently nodded. He then withdrew to his office for a bit – talking to no one – and left early. David was bemused as the editor of the day tended to say something at some point. The feeling was Boris knew he was out of his depth.”

Johnson’s editorship of the Spectator – a period punctuated by so many sexual shenanigans that it became known as the Sextator – did little to persuade the pious Barclays they had been wrong in their judgment.

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I'll round this off with another piece from the Guardian following that terrible performance by Boris at the Scrutiny Committee earlier in the week:-

Floundering Boris leaves no doubt: our PM is a showman out of his depth

We’ve reached the point where the only way to understand the state the country is in is to realise that it has become a banana republic. A failed state run by a bad joke of a prime minister, who prioritises the job security of his elite advisers over the health of millions. A man who sees no need to be across the most basic points of government policy and is so inarticulate that he can’t even start a sentence let alone finish one.

It’s normal for a prime minister to appear before the liaison committee – the supergroup of select committee chairs – at least three times a year. This was the first time Boris Johnson had bothered to turn up in more than 10 months. And you could see why. Even with Dominic Cummings sitting just off screen – Boris’s eyes kept darting to the right, desperate for help – holding up placards with something approximating an answer, Johnson was lost for words. The great populist who doesn’t even realise he has long since lost the support of the people. A mini-dictator surrounded by yes men locked inside the No 10 bunker.

What made this even more pathetic and desperate a spectacle was that Boris clearly believed he had prepared thoroughly. If he had, then his short-term memory is completely shot. More likely though, Boris’s idea of preparation is just a quick 10-minute skim of a briefing note.

Boris is the supreme narcissist – the apogee of entitled arrogance in which other people are there only to serve his needs. A fragile ego, disguising an absence of any self worth.What’s more, you sense he knows it. That in the wee, wee hours he looks through a glass darkly and sees the blurred outlines of his limitations and failure.

The session started with questions from committee chair, Bernard Jenkin, and Boris was clearly expecting friendly fire. Only to many people’s surprise – possibly even his own – Bernie turned out to be no patsy. Instead he went straight to the point. Why was there to be no cabinet secretary inquiry into Dominic Cummings’s clear breach of the government coronavirus guidelines.

“Um... er... well,” Boris blustered looking frantically to Classic Dom for help. Up went the placard ‘It’s time to move on.’ “Um... er... well ... I think what the country wants is to move on,” he said.

What the opinion polls have clearly shown is that at least 70% of the country think that Laughing Boy is basically taking the piss – one rule for the elites, another for the little people. Only Boris somehow ignored that, believing that he knew better what the people really thought than they did. Who would have guessed that Boris would have ascribed to the Marxist idea of false consciousness?

Six times Boris insisted that the country wanted to move on. Something I’m sure the families of those who have died – not to mention the many thousands who could yet die as the prime minister trashed his own public health message to protect a chum – must have been delighted to hear.

Pete Wishart, Meg Hillier and Yvette Cooper all went in for the kill. Had Boris actually seen the evidence that Cummings had provided for his special and different Covid-19 fortnight away on his father’s estate? Boris nodded fiercely. He had. And the evidence was that it was Dom who was running the country and he didn’t have the power to sack him.

Nor could he explain the difference between deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries’s clear instructions to stay at home and the supine advice of several cabinet ministers who had insisted that maybe having to look after your own child constituted exceptional circumstances. Boris’s best guess was that maybe Harries hadn’t been as clear as he would have liked her to be and he hoped that she would come on message in the near future.

He ended the section on Cummings by insisting that all the stories that Dom had corroborated in his rose garden press conference were essentially false.

Things didn’t improve when Jenkin moved on to other areas of the government’s handling of the coronavirus. Boris had only the sketchiest idea of how the new track and trace system that was meant to come in to operation the following day would work. A nation panicked. He even said he was forbidden from making any promises on dates for reaching government targets. Let that sink in. The prime minister is forbidden from making his own policy. If we had been in any doubt who was running the country we weren’t any more.

Boris didn’t even know the basics of how his own benefits system operated. This was Government 101 and the prime minister was still out of his depth. During the worst health crisis for a century we are lions led by dead donkeys.