My shame as Britons bow to petty tyrants

THE TORRENT of rage unleashed on Dominic Cummings was as predictable as the sun rising tomorrow. Short of running a concentration camp, there are few human activities more likely to invite loathing than sitting at the heart of government criticising blithering incompetence and that is what he is constantly doing. Many of us may agree with his sentiments but when you are elevated to the heart of the citadel you are expected to maintain the fiction that the panjandrums know exactly what they are doing and are doing it well.

So the idea that this confected rage should pour out of the establishment is no surprise. What ought to raise our eyebrows is the spluttering of a huge swathe of the media whose once treasured refusal to be conned seems to have transmuted into grovelling obsequiousness. Half the print media and all radio and TV studios have gone overboard to condemn him and his wife.

Mr and Mrs Cummings feared they might be confined to hospital. But they have a toddler of delicate health – he is autistic and terrified of strangers. Better, they judged, that he be looked after by his family than sent to an institution where he could cry himself to sleep each night without understanding why he had been abandoned to strangers.

The rules were, of course, vague. Regulation Six said road journeys were to be avoided if the purpose was not “reasonable” or even “necessary”. But in our rich language neither adjective is scientifically precise. A car doing 90mph in a 30mph zone – that’s technically provable. But what Mr A thinks is reasonable his tetchy neighbour next door may think is not so.

There is nothing so merciless as hypocrisy and at the moment our dear old country is drowning in it.

Final point, and it worries the hell out of me. We are slowly sliding into a bureaucratic dictatorship and it is underpinned, as all dictatorships by pandemic, brainwashing propaganda.

It was state propaganda that in the Thirties converted the whole German nation from civilisation to barbarism. Today it causes North Koreans to weep with devoted pleasure to be in the presence of the weird little pudding who is their tyrant. I saw it in East Germany – relentless, mind-sapping, repetitive to the point of a cosh on the head. Now it is happening here for the first time in my life and I fear, not the propaganda, but the totally unexpected British docility in the face of it.We used to fight robustly, even truculently to protect our rights and freedoms.

Now we buckle and bow, just because the phrase “Save lives” is added to everything. Even that phrase is meaningless. Lives are being thrown away by lack of protective kit, nothing like enough testing and the medical profession being virtually closed down, on orders, for anything that isn’t Covid. One day this cowardly insanity will end and then, I hope, there will be one helluva reckoning. As for the Tory MPs waving their virtue about, they are seeking the career destruction of a man who tried to protect his grievously sensitive child.

They should ask their constituents. Cummings endangered absolutely no one speeding through the night in a sealed car. Any devoted father would have done the same.

I certainly would. End it. OK?