Daily Mail COMMENT

IN the clearest way, Dominic Cummings has violated the spirit and letter of the lockdown. In doing so, he has given every selfish person a licence to play fast and loose with public health.

Boris Johnson says he ‘totally gets’ how the public feel about this. Clearly, he totally doesn’t. Neither man has displayed a scintilla of contrition for this breach of trust. Do they think we are fools? For the good of the Government, and the nation, Mr Cummings must resign. Or the Prime Minister must sack him. No ifs, no buts.

LIKE him or loathe him, Dominic Cummings has proven himself to be the master of the ‘cut-through’, the crisp, simple message that lasers in on the heart of the issue.

He has risen to power in Downing Street through his ability to slash away the political undergrowth and connect with the desires of ordinary people, and by helping to consign Jeremy Corbyn to the dustbin of history, saved us from the rule of an unreconstructed Marxist whose dissembling incompetence would surely have led us to disaster.

For that alone, Mr Cummings deserves our thanks.

But now the Prime Minister’s combative chief of staff has been skewered by his weapon of choice.

‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.’ This mantra — one Mr Cummings helped devise — has embedded itself in the public’s consciousness over the past two months.

This order has been hammered home at every No10 briefing on the crisis. It has been plastered across the lecterns used by ministers to deliver a daily diet of distressing statistics — figures that barely scratch the surface of the human misery lying beneath. And it is backed by the full force of the law.

The exact details of Mr Cummings’s journey — or journeys — from London to his family’s home in County Durham may be a subject of dispute.

But what is clear is that he and his wife, who was showing symptoms of Covid-19, and their son travelled 260 miles from their spacious house in London to stay elsewhere for two weeks or so before returning home.

Mr Cummings is further alleged to have travelled some 30 miles from his Durham bolt-hole to a wood where he and his family strolled through bluebells.

What the Prime Minister knew about this expedition is still unclear. What we do know is that Mr Johnson relies on Mr Cummings to drive through his radical post-Brexit, levelling-up agenda. One now endangered by the economic havoc caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

For the Prime Minister, the departure of his key ally would be a cruel blow. The Cummings-shaped hole in his administration would be hard to fill.

But Mr Cummings has violated the spirit and letter of the lockdown and, in doing so, he has given every selfish and reckless person in this country a licence to play fast and loose with public health.

Confronted by the Press, Mr Cummings fired back: ‘It’s not about what you guys think.’ He is right. It’s about what the British people think. And most of them are rightly appalled by his conduct.

The Prime Minister says he ‘totally gets’ how the public feel about this.

Clearly, he totally doesn’t. Neither he nor his principal adviser have displayed a scintilla of contrition for this outrageous breach of trust. Do they think we are fools? Boris Johnson has already expended too much political capital in the Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis to waste more on his devil-may-care sidekick. This offensive ‘one law for you, one law for me’ style of leadership must end. Mr Johnson may judge Mr Cummings to be indispensable. But there are no indispensable men. As the former French premier Georges Clemenceau once ruefully remarked, the graveyards are full of them.

When asked if he would resign over the issue at the weekend, Mr Cummings replied: ‘Obviously not.’

He and his master will try to brazen this out. It will not work.

For the good of the Government, and by extension the nation, Dominic Cummings must resign now. Or the Prime Minister must sack him. No ifs, no buts.