Dominic Cummings’ devastating evidence has done the country a great service

In the run-up to Dominic Cummings making his appearance at Westminster there was plenty of performative cynicism about it on Twitter. As though it was all a great lark, a chance to see the old Svengali laid low, stripped of power with nothing left but bitter ramblings. Cummings can be arrogant and this drives some of his critics mad. Anyone who has ever disagreed with him, or tangled with him in argument, will know how infuriating he can be. And here was a chance for revenge. Order the popcorn. The prospect of him giving evidence for hour after hour, like the verbal equivalent of one of his endless, rolling blog posts, obviously made the thing easy to mock in advance.

Others in the “social media community” declared that it was all irrelevant media bubble rubbish anyway because no-one cares. The public has forgiven the government for its early failings and it was all a long time ago, it is said. Some of those saying most loudly that no-one cares – and the public has priced it all in anyway – seemed to care enough to watch many hours of the evidence session and then comment on Twitter.

This – the no-one cares critique – is a pernicious trend in modern media and politics, as though what matters at any given moment is whether or not the public is bored by a particular story. It’s a function of excessive reliance on opinion polling and the way government constantly measures the national mood to establish what’s scaring us punters and what, in effect, ministers can get away with. It’s a corrosive function of the anti-media mood of the moment, and it completely misses the point. Knowing what happened, knowing what the powerful people we pay to run things with our money are up to, matters.

Public opinion is important but it is not, or should not be, the sole arbiter in a healthy democracy. It also matters how we’re governed, how institutions function, how leaders respond to pressure and whether lessons are learned on the path to improvement.

Incidentally, quite often very few people care about a story or scandal that subsequently turns out to matter a lot – and then suddenly they do care. In 1972 when Richard Nixon won 49 states in a US election landslide almost no-one cared about Watergate. Look what happened next.

This is not to compare Covid to Watergate or Boris to Nixon. But there was enough said by Cummings in his devastating session of evidence to suggest the breezy confidence among the government’s supporters is misplaced or overdone.

The allegations about patients being discharged from hospitals into care homes – when assurances were given that they would be tested – surely points the way towards legal action and compensation claims from families of the bereaved. The legal reckoning on Covid is likely to last for many years to come.

Cummings’ evidence was powerful, considered and rich in detail. Perhaps it was too vicious and at points, but this was raw transparency. He explained where officialdom failed, but also gave credit when certain figures scrambled to improvise emergency measures. He took his share of the blame and looked weighed down by the burden of history. The Health Secretary Matt Hancock was eviscerated. The picture painted of the British state and how slowly it adapted in a global emergency was deeply worrying.

In the end, there was no need for jokes. This was a deadly serious and chastening occasion. In helping to explain what happened, in illuminating the battlefield, he has done his country a great service.