Trust in the government is truly in jeopardy, and Dominic Cummings did little to help
For Dominic Cummings, sorry is the hardest word. His lengthy defence against the charge he broke the lockdown rules by taking his family from London to Durham might ease some of the pressure from Tory MPs on Boris Johnson to sack his closest adviser. But I doubt it will calm the genuine public anger about his behaviour, or limit the damage to Johnson’s reputation.
In a highly unusual press conference for a backroom adviser, Cummings adopted a slightly more conciliatory tone than his camp’s initial dismissal of the story as “fake news”. He admitted he should have given his side of the story more quickly. Indeed, this was not New Labour’s rapid rebuttal; it was painfully slow, after three days of damaging headlines.
Crucially, he repeatedly refused to apologise. The only time he said sorry was for keeping journalists in the Downing Street Rose Garden waiting. He could not even bring himself to issue the politician’s usual weasly half-apology: “I am sorry if anyone is upset by what I have done.” Cummings does not do contrition. He should have referred himself to the cabinet secretary to investigate whether he had breached the lockdown rules or the special adviser’s code of conduct. No chance of that, though.
Cummings did not even consider resigning, but conceded that “arguably” he might have told Johnson before heading to Durham. He didn’t tell him until a few days later when they were both in bed suffering from coronavirus. “I am not saying I know I am right,” he said, and conceding that others might have acted differently. But if some of the public were mad and angry about his actions, he insisted, that was partly the media’s fault for getting some things wrong. His trip from Durham to Barnard Castle was “a test run” to see whether he could drive back to London to return to work at Downing Street, since his eyesight had been affected by the virus.
Intriguingly, Cummings conceded he had made mistakes going back to January in his handling of the coronavirus crisis, though he would not elaborate for now. The public inquiry into the government’s response will want to quiz him about that. But he refused to accept he had made mistakes by leaving London for 15 days for an isolated cottage on his father’s Durham farm, or even that he had broken the spirit if not the letter of the lockdown rules. Many people will think he did just that, even allowing for the discretion he claimed under the rules to protect his four-year-old son when he and his wife were both likely to be ill.
The government’s handling of this sorry saga has been woeful. It is not about the judgment of one adviser but that of the prime minister. Johnson’s Trumpian press conference on Sunday, dodging questions with his usual bluster, failed to draw the proverbial line under the affair. It made it much worse in the eyes of the public and, in turn, Tory MPs, whose inboxes filled up with angry complaints from people, many of whom had made heartbreaking personal sacrifices to obey the lockdown rules. About 20 Tory MPs went public in calling for Cummings to resign or be sacked.
Several ministers were privately appalled. Some did not want to defend the apparently indefensible in public without knowing the full facts, which Cummings has now belatedly explained to Johnson and the public.
Mistakes were bound to be made in a national emergency triggered by an unknown virus. But this was a self-made crisis which embroiled the PM, forcing him to front Sunday’s press conference in an attempt to save his adviser’s job.
Would Johnson have gone the extra mile to save the skin of a cabinet minister accused of breaking the “stay at home” rule? I doubt it. So do some ministers. Would he have tried to save Cummings if an election was in the offing rather than more than four years away? I doubt that too.
Johnson will hope this controversy will be long forgotten by the next election. Yet it could leave lasting damage. Once lost, trust is a genie out of the bottle. Ask Tony Blair. Six months ago, voters put their trust in Johnson to “get Brexit done,” including many who had never voted Tory before or recently. That trust is now in jeopardy. Is one adviser, however brilliant and indispensable in Johnson’s eyes, really worth risking the PM’s own reputation?
It is more serious than that. The most important thing at stake here is the credibility of the government’s message in a public health emergency – and perhaps even its ability to keep R, the average number of people infected by a person with the virus, below one, if Cummings’s actions encourage people to ignore the restrictions.
The irony is that Cummings’s reputation is built on the perception that he can connect with ordinary people over the heads of what he views as an out of touch Westminster elite. Now, it appears, he has alienated the people he purported to champion. Although Johnson might think Cummings’s defence means the “case is closed”, many voters will still believe the self-styled “people’s government” is treating the people with contempt.
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