MP hits at British PM’s failure to act in aide row

Boris Johnson’s hopes of an end to the coronavirus controversy that involved his top adviser were frustrated on Thursday when a senior Conservative MP said the British prime minister had failed to make a “course correction”.

Tobias Ellwood, a former defence minister, reflected the intense anger against the top of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party after Dominic Cummings’s breach of the UK’s lockdown rules.

The incident, which damaged Mr Johnson’s leadership, was “eroding the government’s authority during the biggest crisis in 75 years”, Mr Ellwood said in an interview with The National.

“This is a massive national distraction which has diluted the authority of government.”

Mr Johnson hoped the issue would fade after he addressed a committee of MPs and said that it was time to “move on”.

But Mr Ellwood said: “It’s the duty of the prime minister to make a course correction to get us back on point. Yesterday, he did not do that.

“If people are calling for Cummings’s resignation, whatever the mechanics are to correct the course, that’s what you want the prime minister to do.”

There was a backlash from across the political spectrum after Mr Cummings flouted the lockdown rules and drove about 420 kilometres north from London to his parents’ property in Durham, north-east England in March.

His wife had fallen ill and he was concerned that she had contracted coronavirus and that he might, too. On Monday Mr Cummings said that “exceptional circumstances” surrounding the welfare of his four-yearold son excused his actions.

Asked if Mr Cummings should be sacked, Mr Ellwood said: “There is certainly an inherent unfairness that there is one rule for one and one rule for another.

“The optics of it look appalling and that’s what needs to be addressed,” he said.

There were suggestions that Mr Cummings’s actions would lead to others breaking the lockdown rules that have succeeded in bringing the country’s coronavirus death rate down.