First let us celebrate what was best about Dominic Cummings’s rantathon before a House of Commons committee today: he slagged off the useless Boris Johnson; he dissed the insidiously terrifying and nauseatingly influential Carrie ‘Princess Nut Nut’ Symonds; and maybe best of all, he made it clear that Health Secretary Matt Hancock is a compulsive liar who should have been sacked long ago.
Here is one of his killer lines on Princess Nut Nut:
The PM’s girlfriend was trying to change a bunch of different appointments in No10 & appoint her friends. In particular she was trying to overturn an official process about hiring a particular job in a way that was not only unethical but clearly illegal.
A good point well made. The inner-circle at 10 Downing Street is quite notoriously swollen with friends of Carrie. Any Conservative ought to be properly concerned by this, not least because of her connections with both the animal rights movement and with the eco-fascist campaign organisations. Princess Nut Nut’s instincts are not remotely conservative yet she seems to have been given extraordinary sway over Boris Johnson’s decision-making.
Cummings’s attack on Hancock is similarly on point.
Hancock, he told the hearing, should have been fired for “at least 15 to 20 different things” and that there are “numerous examples” of Hancock lying.
But none of this will have come as news to anyone. Nor — at least not to anyone who read my article yesterday — will Cummings’s confirmation that he is a rabid lockdown fanatic and that he was one of those who pushed Boris Johnson away from his original plans for herd immunity.
Indeed, Cummings emerges as a sort of Pol Pot figure, so ideologically committed to the utter destruction of the economy and the ruining of lives for the greater good that he is quite unable to appreciate what a dangerous loon his testimony must make him look to the sentient observer.
By comparison — at least in Cummings’s account — Boris Johnson comes across as an almost likeable and admirable figure.
Cummings confirmed Boris was against wrecking the economy and locking the nation up. Well, I’m sorry but to me, that doesn’t sound like a black mark against the Prime Minister. Rather, it suggests to me a Prime Minister with a sense of perspective: one who recognises that Covid deaths cannot be the only metric by which a country’s pandemic record can be assessed and that there other factors of at least equal importance such as the health of the economy and the public’s mental and physical health.
Even more pleasing was Cummings’s revelation that at one point Boris Johnson offered to have himself injected with Covid live on TV in order to demonstrate that the virus wasn’t the menace everyone feared.
But more seriously, the problem with Westminster politics is that it is so corrupt and mendacious that it’s hard to take what anyone says or does at face value.
Yes, perhaps Cummings was using the hearing just to vaunt his massive ego and take revenge on people who’d irritated him. But his testimony will also, I think, serve a much more dangerous purpose.
What Cummings has done is help further the narrative, much promoted in the MSM and especially the BBC, that there’s only one question to be asked of Britain’s lockdown policy: not “was it justified?” but “was it introduced early enough?”
Anyone watching Cummings’s testimony in the hope that there are bold, contrary voices in politics who are fighting against Britain’s biosecurity state tyranny will therefore have been grievously disappointed.
It’s possible, indeed, that the whole thing was just a psy-op. Cummings isn’t arguing against lockdowns. He is arguing for more of them — and more strictly next time. This is exactly the kind of biosecurity state that organisations like the World Economic Forum are hoping to impose.
The terrifying thing is that he’ll probably get his way this Autumn. Thanks for nothing, Dom.
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