Cummings Going

So, it’s not been all bad this year. *Puts on Loyd Grossman voice* Let’s look at the evidence:

• Peter Sutcliffe has died of COVID-19
• Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump
• Dominic Cummings has left No 10
• Nigel Farage lost £10,000 betting that Trump would be re-elected

I’m not sure which of these was the most welcome. For the time being, I’ll say the departure of Cummings.

Dominic Cummings is the man who broke Britain. It was his extensive, and highly dubious, date-mining, along with all the filthy lies from Vote Leave, that saw the UK vote to leave the European Union, despite there being not a single benefit to the British people. Cummings was more than just an advisor to the equally odious Michael Gove as he attempted to rip apart state education, again with not a single benefit to the people. Cummings was the man who did more than anyone else, with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbyn, to help Boris Johnson achieve a landslide election win last December with his ‘Get Brexit done’ lie. Everything since December, every government shit show, from sacking long-standing public servants to the shambles that is Serco track and trace is down to him. His fingerprints are over every aspect of this awful government. His departure is a blessing.

His modus operandi is a culture war and he believes in the chaos theory. (Please Google this yourself. It saves me cutting and pasting huge chunks off the internet.) He sets people against each other, like leavers and remainers, like the rich and the poor. Cummings hates us all. And he hates the Conservative party almost as much as I do, but not quite. There is little doubt that the government’s catastrophic handling of COVID-19 was at least in part down to him. And then there’s Barnard Castle.

Remember at the height of the first lockdown when Cummings took his wife and young child for a holiday in his second home in Durham? He even took his wife out for a 60 mile round trip to Barnard Castle to help celebrate her birthday. What a lovely thing to do! But it wasn’t, was it? The government had issued rules, almost certainly crafted by Cummings, that we should all stay at home. But here he was, driving 264 miles, to take a week’s holiday. He even had the brass neck to say he had driven all the way to Durham because he thought he might have COVID-19 and couldn’t get any child care in a small town like, er, London. And although he ‘recovered’, he had problems with his vision and did what any of us would do in the circumstances: he drove 60 miles with his wife and infant child in the car to ‘test my eyesight’. If you believe that or any of the story he gave for travelling up north, you probably think Boris Johnson will provide an additional £350 million a week to the NHS now we have left the EU.

Britain will not recover from the Cummings effect in my lifetime. Already, Britain is losing its power and prestige in the wider world and life will get much harder for everyone, especially the next generation.

Evil, that’s what he is. Evil like Thatcher, like Murdoch, like Farage. I’ll raise a glass tonight to Cummings’ departure from Downing Street. It can’t undo the damage he has done to this country and in any event we still have four more years of this dreadful government. At least, now he’s gone, tomorrow will be better than today. Or perhaps not as bad.