In defence of Dominic Cummings, victim of an ideological witch-hunt

Let me ask you a very frank, direct – possibly even impertinent, in any context other than the current emergency – question. Have you ever, according to the terms of The Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 (UK Statutory Instruments 2020, No. 129, Regulation 15 – (1) (a), failed, without reasonable excuse, to comply with a restriction or requirement imposed under regulation 4 (1), 5 (1), 7 (1) or 9 (4) or (5)? Hesitation in answering may be construed as an admission of guilt or, worse, ignorance of the regulations cited.

Not many readers on this site, patronized as it is by well-informed and intelligent people, will have fallen for that very obvious trick question. It is, of course, completely irrelevant since those regulations, dating back to 10 February, were revoked and supplanted by the provisions contained in the Coronavirus Act 2020 (c. 7, s. 87 (1), Schedule 21 paragraph 24, on 26 March, as any fule kno.

And just to make sure everyone was paying attention, the revised rules were again revised on 23 April. The government has also published Explanatory Notes for the further confusion of lieges who did not find the legislation itself sufficiently opaque: do not, as they say, go there – for the sake of your mental health.

The reality is that the entire nation is convulsed in a frenzy of coronababble, in reaction to l’affaire Cummings, despite the fact that virtually nobody has actually read the regulations, since it would take the duration of lockdown to do so, with the further challenge of keeping pace with their repeated revision. Under normal conditions the individual we would probably have asked to expound the regulations is – er – Dominic Cummings.

In the present circumstances, however, there is an understandable reluctance on the part of the Royal Corps of Media Hacks to adopt his interpretation. He volunteered it this week in the Downing Street rose garden. The scene there was an extraordinary inversion of the received caricature, of Cummings as a feral psychopath and the media as firm but courteous interrogators. What we witnessed instead was Dominic Cummings making himself available for questioning for a full hour, setting out the details of his case clearly, forensically and with a degree of credibility his interrogators, as well as the viewing public, had not expected. The agenda of those media interrogators was transparent.

Yet the case against Cummings demonstrably failed. His explanation conceded the use of personal discretion to the furthest extent compatible with the rules, but no clear breach could be proved. The lockdown regulations, from the first, included the catch-all qualification “without reasonable excuse”. Cummings provided such reasonable excuses. Whether a family of three travels six miles or 260 enclosed in a car, they are not going to infect anybody en route to their destination. In Cummings’s case that destination was an isolated cottage on his family’s farm ideal for self-isolation, with his family leaving food outside.

Criticism of his sick child being cared for at a Durham hospital is perverse, considering the pressure at that time on London hospitals. His full and circumstantial account made it clear he behaved responsibly, in fact to an uncharacteristic degree, considering his conduct in some other contexts.

“People are angry.” Of course they are: they have been undergoing an experience comparable to the Great Plague and they will vent that anger against anyone towards whom it is channelled by media commentators. “What about people who are not in a position to do what Cummings did, who do not have access to a remote country cottage?” That represents a large majority of the population; but why should the restricted resources of most parents inhibit those who do have self-isolation facilities from doing the best for their child?

You do not need to be an admirer of Dominic Cummings – in any case a fairly exclusive coterie – to recognize that what he is currently facing is an ideologically motivated witch hunt. He has made himself unnecessarily obnoxious to many people, he has exercised power with a tactlessness that has sometimes verged on the brutal and he has disrespected the institutions of representative government by very publicly frequenting Number 10 in an attire that, to put it mildly, ensures he could never be mistaken for Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Those are the presentational flaws. What is more important is his socio-political agenda. Cummings has set himself the Herculean task of displacing the self-perpetuating elites from civil service and government, as well as from all the commanding heights they have occupied in public life. The blocking, which nearly became the reversal, of Brexit proved beyond a doubt the reality of illegitimate power entrenched throughout all the institutions of governance and opinion forming.

A Telegraph reader recently described the outcry against Cummings as a “campaign to remove the architect of Brexit”. That is true, although the original architect of Brexit was Nigel Farage; but Dominic Cummings, as campaign director of Vote Leave and as the éminence grise of the Johnson administration, when he helped the Prime Minister provoke the Remainer parliamentary majority into conceding a general election, may have made the difference between Brexit happening or being annulled.

The lynch mob currently assailing Cummings has two components: the leaders and manipulators are the vengeful Remainer rump, the useful idiots are people of varied Brexit persuasions who have been radicalised, so to speak, by the bruising experiences of the pandemic. Something significant is occurring here: having been marginalised in the era of Brexit and Trump, the elites are exploiting the pandemic to recover their influence. The current issue of The Economist, house magazine of the progressive establishment, triumphantly mocks the predicament of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings: “A row over the alleged breach of lockdown rules stokes anti-elite anger of the sort they once harnessed.”

That anger is similarly of two kinds: synthetic and politically motivated, and genuine but misguided rage being vented by frustrated, locked-down members of the public seeking an object for their pent-up resentment. The politically motivated element is indulging in so-called “leverage tactics”, pioneered by trades unionists in 2013, by demonstrating in an intimidating manner outside Cummings’s family home – an intolerable and totalitarian activity.

If the pandemic had not materialized, his enemies would have found some other pretext for trying to bring down Cummings. Without him, they hope Boris might be weak enough to extend the post-Brexit trade talks and transition period beyond December. If any proof were needed of the elites’ reckless ambition to destroy Cummings, one need look no further than the tweet sent out recently by a civil servant, on the official Civil Service account, attacking the Prime Minister and saying “imagine having to work with these truth twisters”.

The Civil Service had no problem working with Tony Blair, of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fame, and other economists of the truth. For decades “our highly professional, completely neutral” Civil Service has indefatigably obstructed any identifiably Tory policy promoted by Conservative governments, while promoting “progressive” ideas and political correctness at every opportunity. Dominic Cummings is the only person determined to end this subversion of representative government and that is why he must stay by Boris’s side, even though he will add little to the social congeniality of Downing Street.

Cummings has no reason to resign. Significantly, since the rose garden interview, the BBC has subtly shifted its ground to claiming that even if Cummings did not break “the letter of the law” (what other law is there?) he should resign because of the outrage his conduct (as reported by the BBC among others) has provoked. Of course he did not apologise: how credible is the stance “I did the right thing and I am sorry about that”? The resignation of a Scottish junior minister, defending a majority of 513 on the perennially disgruntled side of Hadrian’s Wall, will rightly be taken as a sign of weakness.

The Tory Party needs to rediscover its once formidable discipline and end the pandering to political opponents that has become second nature since the departure of Margaret Thatcher. Dominic Cummings’s abrasive approach has earned him innumerable enemies, including many in the Conservative party. They must now choose whether to help the Johnson government, post-pandemic, radically and confidently reconstruct the country, or sign on as useful idiots and help their enemies to de-fang that government and leave it, toothless and disoriented, to blunder purposelessly through the years until defeat at the next general election.