The war on truth plays out in a weird little rose garden

Dominic Cummings huffed and puffed — but it was the BBC who folded, says Declan Lynch

THE viewing figures were enormous, for the BBC and Sky News and anyone else showing the live pictures from the rose garden at the back of 10 Downing Street. Millions were watching, as a weird-looking little man took his position at a small table in the summer sunshine, making him look a bit like the chap taking the money and selling raffle tickets at the local gymkhana.

But he’s been selling bigger stuff than that for a long time now, has Dominic Cummings. And enough of the unfortunate people of Britain had been buying it, to make him the kind of character who can command his own table in the rose garden, with the multitudes watching.

Maybe those numbers were augmented by a lot of viewers who had nothing else to be doing, except to look at the UK prime minister’s chief “advisor” doing his dance.

Yet they were also drawn to this show in large numbers — because they were personally involved in the story in a way that is most unusual. And because they knew that the like of this had not been seen before, that an “advisor” had never become so powerful.

And this was not the only thing that had never been seen before, under the reign of Dominic Cummings.

Never, certainly in living memory, has a British administration been so constantly and pathologically dishonest on all issues, great and small. But it is the great issues for which they will be especially reviled, the incessant lying about every aspect of Brexit, all day, every day — the wildly misleading slogans, the underlying falseness whereby they knew this would be horribly painful for many people... but, of course, not for themselves.

And they had created the conditions in which their mendacity could thrive, by engaging in the lowest form of politics known to mankind, the deliberate drumming up of nationalist hysteria.

Like US president Donald Trump, they were engaging in a cultural civil war, so that no matter what manner of far-right garbage they were peddling, they could always rely on the slobbering devotion of their own tribe.

So Cummings might pretend to be explaining himself, but these guys don’t do accountability. Indeed, a Boris Johnson stands out even among the legendary deceivers of politics, in that he is rarely even trying to provide the media or the public with reliable information.

As with Trump, the incessant bullshitting is a policy, designed to demoralise people until they just give up. After his show in the garden, it later emerged that Johnson’s chief manipulator Cummings had updated his blog to give the false impression that he had been aware of the dangers of a pandemic — in their war against truth, these guys make up stuff needlessly, almost as a matter of professional pride.

So when Cummings took his position in the rose garden — late, of course, like Trump — he was bringing all this to the table.

He would be giving a version of events that was obviously ridiculous, but then that is how they Got Brexit Done. That is how they’ve been getting everything done.

Indeed, one of the more ridiculous falsehoods of their whole operation, was that the Johnson regime was supposedly a people’s crusade, that its opposition to “Europe” was part of some tremendous plan to… eh, “take back control” from the elites.

Yet it was the Tory elites who would benefit greatly from the delinquencies of their crusade, while the “people” were led to their doom.

And now at last in the rose garden, here was a case study of an elitist of the far right, separating himself from the hordes — deciding that the little people could take all the deprivation of the lockdown, while he got on with his important life, and got away with it.

Because again, getting away with it is not just something that is greatly to be desired by these creatures, it is to some extent the purpose of the exercise. Cummings would know too, that the TV reporters in general have mostly been useless against him and his kind, these political hacks with their ancient playbooks, their “both-sidesism”.

So it would not have pleased him, a few hours later, when Emily Maitlis did some proper journalism on Newsnight, opening with a searing statement which drew on the facts of the case to elucidate a few truths about Cummings and Johnson.

Nor was it surprising, at the end of the day, that there was indeed an apology — from the BBC, for Emily Maitlis.

Apparently it was felt by her superiors that she had not been “impartial”, though there was a time when Newsnight presenters weren’t constrained by such balderdash.

It’s just getting harder and harder to remember that time.