Why the anger provoked by the Dominic Cummings scandal won't go away

Extraordinary behaviour by PM and aide

IT’S difficult to know which is more arrogant - a Number Ten aide who ignores the rules he helped to write, denies he has done anything wrong and does not even consider offering to resign, or a prime minister who brushes aside the flouting of the lockdown and the widespread outrage it provokes and stubbornly refuses to wield the axe.

Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are both treating the public with contempt.

And their behaviour is extraordinary. The accepted code is that when an adviser becomes the story, they have to go.

Anyone else in Mr Cummings’ position would have realised they had to step down, even if they might hope to return at a later date.

And any other prime minister would have told them their time was up. Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants have been forced to quit for far less.

It’s ten days now since the story broke about the Downing Street senior adviser decamping from London to Durham at the height of the pandemic so he could self-isolate near his family in case he needed childcare for his four-year-old son since he feared both he and his wife could come down with the virus.

The prime minister and Mr Cummings have brazened it out so far and probably feel confident they have got away with it.

But at what price? This is not just an issue which has been whipped up by opponents to cause the government some embarrassment at an inconvenient moment. It’s not a piece of political point scoring.

MPs of all parties have had thousands of angry emails from constituents. Almost 100 Tory backbenchers have criticised Mr Cummings or called for him to go.

There is genuine public outrage. And it centres on a basic sense of injustice at the idea there is one rule for the powerful and another for the rest of us.

That’s bad enough at the best of times, but in the middle of an unprecedented lockdown when many people have suffered the strain of separation from close family, the misery of loneliness and the unimaginable distress of being unable to comfort loved ones as they die, that unfairness becomes unforgivable.

Catherine Calderwood had to resign as Scotland’s chief medical officer early in the crisis because she visited her second home despite telling everyone else it was not allowed. She offered a humiliating public apology and Nicola Sturgeon was initially reluctant to let her go because she valued her advice.

But in the end they recognised the public anger was such that saying sorry was not enough and Ms Calderwood paid the price.

And last month, Professor Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who helped shape the lockdown strategy, quit as a government adviser after he too broke the rules by receiving visits from his lover at his home.

Defending Mr Cummings, the prime minister said he “of course” regretted “the confusion and the anger and the pain that people feel”.

He was right about the anger and the pain, but not the confusion. The situation for many people is all too clear. Those in power are imposing severe restrictions on everyday life, designed for the benefit of all, but deciding they can live by a different code themselves.

The public’s feelings of outrage have been compared to the reaction to the MPs’ expenses scandal - only this is probably more serious.

Mr Johnson may think the row is over, but this scandal has stirred the kind of anger which politicians ignore at their peril.