The World According to Dom
James Butler
The main point of Dominic Cummings’s seven-hour testimony in Westminster this week was just one line: ‘Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.’ Anyone who has paid attention to the government’s pandemic management may find this late admission, and the dropped jaws with which it has been received in some sections of the press, frustrating. Didn’t we know this already? Didn’t we know that delays in locking down were compounded by ministerial incompetence, prime ministerial laziness and a deep-seated instinct to do nothing to interrupt the flow of capital? That Number 10, in the grip of British exceptionalism, refused to learn from abroad? That track and trace failed, and that Covid patients were regularly discharged from hospital into nursing homes without tests, with fatal results?
We knew. But only for a given value of ‘knowing’. In Britain, a fact can be known quite widely but not enter the category of publicly known facts unless sanctioned and repeated by sections of the press or the political class. The transition can be difficult, and may be obstructed by a government’s simple refusal to acknowledge the fact. The road from publicly known fact to political consequence is even less travelled. Cummings trailed his appearance before the select committees in an interminable Twitter thread, ‘revealing’ that the government’s initial policy had been ‘herd immunity’. Laying aside the ambiguity of the phrase, the government’s chief scientist said as much to both the BBC and Sky early in the pandemic; only through carefully cultivated amnesia could the press treat it as a revelation.
Those sceptical of Cummings’s reinvention as a disgusted truth-teller may wonder about his emphasis, and ask who is missing from the story. His testimony focused strongly on early decision making, especially the chaos inside Downing Street before the first lockdown was imposed. It is true, and worth repeating as it slips out of the domain of public fact, that the first lockdown was delayed by many days after it was obviously necessary; Johnson did not act decisively, but prevaricated and temporised. People died as a result. Conventional wisdom suggests this is ‘priced in’ to public opinion as a government trying seriously and desperately to respond to an unexpected situation: Cummings’s emphasis on Johnson’s distraction and disorientation is surely meant to leave a question mark over ‘seriously’. He put less stress on the repetition of the same mistakes, the same prevarication, in the second wave.
In the world according to Dom, this is because what matters is character. The errors revealed in the first days of the pandemic were bound to be repeated because they were caused by the dispositions of the people making the decisions. This lent some of Cummings’s answers a pantomime, point-missing quality: in response to a series of adroit questions from Dean Russell about the structural and institutional lessons that might be derived from his experience, he could only return to Johnson’s personal flaws, ‘like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle into the other’.
It’s true that ‘don’t elect Boris Johnson’ is a useful first step for dealing with any problem, but it is a little galling to hear it coming from the man who masterminded Johnson’s rise. There is a general vein of self-exculpation here: he issued a general-purpose statement of contrition for having fallen ‘disastrously short’ of what the country needed, but no reflection on the well-documented state of chaos, intrigue and professional anxiety that Cummings himself inculcated in Downing Street was forthcoming. Those who have lost relatives and friends may find his apologising for not being more widely listened to something of an insult.
Cummings is an unusual political actor because he feels minimal party loyalty: there is very little the Conservative Party can give him that he wants, although the absence from his account of his former employer Michael Gove – a notorious lockdown sceptic – may give a clue to his future plans. Detachment makes his testimony both more candid and more strategic than that of a special adviser who has absorbed the Westminster habit of omertà: dotted among the character assassinations were a number of claims that a determined opposition, a crusading press or a public inquiry might pursue. These include allegations of corruption on the part of Johnson’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, trying to secure jobs for her friends, and that Johnson misled Parliament by denying he’d said ‘let the bodies pile high.’
The most extraordinary vitriol and most damaging accusations were levelled at Matt Hancock: that he had lied repeatedly to colleagues over the testing of patients leaving hospital for care homes, which in fact happened ‘very partially and sporadically’, and that he was kept in post only to be a useful fall guy when an inquiry came along. At the end of the first phase of the pandemic in June last year, 16,000 people had died in UK care homes; in Germany, with twice as many people in care, the number was 3500. In May, Hancock claimed to have ‘thrown a protective ring’ around care homes from the very first days of the pandemic. It was a claim repeated by the prime minister in the Commons on 13 May. Who will be held responsible for these deaths?
The road to consequences remains long. Cummings’s credibility with the public is low – YouGov finds that only 14 per cent of the public trust him to tell the truth, compared to Johnson’s 38 per cent – and he has produced no real smoking gun, though he has promised to hand over messages and documents to the committee. He doesn’t have an obvious champion in parliament: Hancock’s statement yesterday turned into an unlovely competition between Tory MPs gushing over his achievements in office. But he didn’t deny the allegations. The defence being briefed in Westminster is that the same thing happened in Scotland, where Hancock wasn’t responsible – but the Scottish government has admitted its failure, and never made the same grand claims in the first place. Such a weak defence suggests Hancock’s reprieve may be only temporary.
Cummings’s testimony would cause real problems for the government only if the press were willing to forego writing about court drama and press the unanswered questions home, and the opposition were capable of capitalising on it. Neither seems at hand. Journalists have already begun to pronounce that the story won’t ‘cut through’, as if the way they covered it made no difference to its salience. (Why then bother to write at all?) Labour has managed to translate seven hours of lurid testimony into the most arid of process demands: that the public inquiry be brought forward. That is hardly a demand you can paint on a placard, though perhaps the party’s strategists thought its slogan of recent months – ‘we agree with the government’ – wouldn’t do the job either.
A political system that cannot enforce consequences on a government is broken. Not broken enough, according to Cummings. ‘In a well-run entity what would have happened here is essentially, in my opinion, you would have had a kind of dictator in charge of this,’ he told the committee. ‘He has as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do stuff, and pushing the barriers of legality.’ The constraints against which Cummings is pushing here are multiple: distribution of power across the cabinet, competing Whitehall fiefdoms, political scrutiny. His defence might be that he is merely seeking efficiency in response to emergency, and only within the law, even if pushing at it. But the fantasy of the philosopher-king – or in this case, the scientist-king – is the oldest expression of oligarchical resentment at democracy there is; Parliament has already accorded to the government extensive powers to regulate all social life during the pandemic with minimal scrutiny, powers which are even then often exceeded and unequally applied by the police.
The dream of soft decisionism, of a great scientific mind untrammelled by democratic mediocrities, is a frequent theme of many of the ‘rationalist’ blogs that Cummings frequents, and has its disciples in recesses of the Conservative Party and among his Vote Leave fellow travellers. It remains a marginal element in British politics, but the most disturbing possibility raised by Cummings’s testimony is that in a broken system, where Westminster retains its vanity and pomp, but none of its ability to govern effectively or restrain an increasingly decadent executive, the idea of ‘a kind of dictator’ has some serious allure.
Comments
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28 May 2021
at
7:56pm
Joe Morison
says:
I was a very little boy when Harold Wilson noted that a week is a long time in politics, and since then things have only speeded up. It’s all too easy to despairingly buy into the Tory narrative that stories of their pandemic ineptitude ‘will not cut through’; not at the moment, perhaps, but these things can change as quickly as the weather. At the moment we are all on a being-vaccinated and ending-of-lockdown high, but like all highs it will pass and when it does there will be the unavoidable fact of our place at or near the top of the death leagues.
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29 May 2021
at
3:05pm
RegPresley
says:
I am struck by James Butler's opening sentence, since I noticed myself - and I only managed to watch about four hours of it - what a high ratio there was between the Cummings word-count and the points of substance. Seven hours!
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29 May 2021
at
6:00pm
Anaximander
says:
British voters rarely make international comparisons, so Germany's success is irrelevant for them.
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30 May 2021
at
10:36am
Abigail Watson
says:
I hesitate to put in writing my actual opinion of Dom Cum, for fear of legal action to follow. Suffice it to say, this man has upset everyone I know with his Barnard Castle antics, and is furthermore only an ex-actor on the stage on which he would like to parade inside knowledge and unverified excoriations. Who would take him very seriously, and more to the point, why on earth is this failed agent of government, (I think he would have liked to have been the dictator to which he wistfully alludes), given seven hours of parliamentary time?
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30 May 2021
at
11:18am
Neil Foxlee
says:
Re "a kind of dictator", a more charitable explanation would be that Cummings (a history graduate) was using the word in its Ancient Roman sense, as Marx did when he referred to the "dictatorship of the proletariat":
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30 May 2021
at
11:43am
Robin Durie
says:
But the fantasy of the philosopher-king – or in this case, the scientist-king – is the oldest expression of oligarchical resentment at democracy there is...The dream of soft decisionism, of a great scientific mind untrammelled by democratic mediocrities, is a frequent theme of many of the ‘rationalist’ blogs that Cummings frequents, and has its disciples in recesses of the Conservative Party and among his Vote Leave fellow travellers. It remains a marginal element in British politics..."
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30 May 2021
at
12:07pm
Neil Foxlee
says:
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen any reminder of this in the current Cummings coverage: 'Cummings outlined the government’s strategy at the time in a way that was summarised by some present as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”'
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30 May 2021
at
1:24pm
Graucho
says:
This much we know ...
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1 June 2021
at
2:55pm
Simon Wood
says:
The more Johnson does what he wants - gets married in the solemn Catholic Cathedral - the more he'll be admired in a time of uncertainty. Nothing else matters, no amount of outraged verbiage will dent this strength, however wobbly he actually is.
Read moreJohnson is no Trump; his supporters are not fanatics, they are not devoted. When the novelty of normality has worn off and the damning evidence continues to mount, it will not be dismissed as fake news. Johnson may be dreaming of ten more years, but in ten months he could be fighting for his political life. Whether that fight will be against Labour or against Sunak and Gove (both quite unjustifiably absent from Cummings’s excoriation) remains to be seen.
The same ratio is apparent in Cummings's blog output. There, as here, it blunts the impact. In fact, there are several other factors that blunt his impact: his habit of exaggeration ('the Cabinet Office is terrifyingly shit'); his encomiums for minor protégés (Ben Warner); his past record of mendacity (£350m; the Barnard Castle nonsense); his obvious personal animus ('Hancock'); his internal contradictions (focus on data but argue purely rhetorically); his humourless personality (seven hours and not a single smile?)
It is pretty obvious to everyone that there are many aspects of the government's handling of the pandemic that have fallen woefully short and one day, perhaps, these will all be weighed in the balance against the undoubted success of the vaccine programme. For the time being, however, the mighty ship of state rolls on and the dinghy of an unemployed north London (or Co. Durham) blogger is not going to alter its course.
Labour would look anti-patriotic slagging off a government faced with such an unprecedented challenge, no matter how badly it has handled it.
Cummings is an irrelevance to most voters; they'll never follow him as a scientist-dictator anyway.
So Starmer has little immediate ammo, and knows he'll just have to sit it out and wait; and even then he might get no payday.
"The word ‘dictatorship’ in all languages (dictature, Diktatur, etc.) began as a reference to the dictatura of the ancient Roman Republic, an important constitutional institution that lasted for over three centuries and left its enduring mark on all political thought. This institution provided for an emergency exercise of power by a trusted citizen for temporary and limited purposes, for six months at the most." (https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/hal-draper/article2.htm )
How charitable one would want to be towards Mr Cummings is another matter.
I'm not so sure that it is marginal, or indeed confined to fringes on the right - in fact, all of this is redolent of what Blair aspired to, with his focus on "what works" & his attempts to move "beyond politics". Indeed, in his latest New Statesman article, he seeks to outline (yet again) this "vision", in ways which are differentiated from Cummings solely by his even greater ignorance of the capacities of AI/"big data". We find continuing echoes of Blair's disdain for democracy in the whole Mandelsonian disregard for democratic accountability, & his "they've got nowhere else to go" presumptions about voters on the left. Ultimately, what you describe appears not so much to be fringey, as to be the common principle of soi disant "centrists".
Cummings has previously been caught out lying.
Johnson has previously been caught out lying.
According to those who have worked with him, Johnson pays no attention to details and has the attention span of a goldfish.
Up to the point where vaccines came to the rescue, the U.K. had the worst per capita fatality rate from covid of any substantial European country bar Belgium.
The final item is the bottom line on which the government should be judged. Ignore the sound and fury, it signifies nothing.
Even when there's not much to do during the pandemic, most people don't bother with politics, not because they're stupid but because the politics isn't very interesting, even the wallpaper isn't interesting.
They will know and sit up when someone with interesting ideas pops up.