Dominic Cummings took the public for fools. Now they want his head

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.

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