PM’s hope of row dying out left in tatters
As almost 40 Conservative MPs call for aide to resign:
THE scale of the Tory revolt over Dominic Cummings became clear last night as almost 40 MPs called for him to resign, a minister quit and some warned of a ‘Black Wednesday’ crisis.
Amid growing anger from all wings of the party, Scotland Office minister Douglas Ross announced he was quitting over the issue.
He said he could not defend Mr Cummings’s actions to constituents who had followed the ‘stay at home’ advice and denied themselves the chance to visit sick relatives.
By last night at least 39 other Tory MPs had called for the Prime Minister’s most senior aide to leave Downing Street.
They included four members of the executive of the party’s backbench 1922 committee and no fewer than 15 former ministers.
Some had received as many as a thousand messages each from constituents over the aide’s failure to abide by the lockdown, with warnings that party members were amongst the angriest.
One senior backbencher said: ‘This is not the usual suspects, it is our grassroots, our own members.
‘If we don’t stop this now, it will be our Black Wednesday.’
Downing Street had hoped that Mr Cummings’s press conference on Monday afternoon would take the heat out of the row, but calls for him to go continued yesterday as the public remained unconvinced by his explanation of his actions and his refusal to apologise.
William Wragg, who sits on the 1922 executive, warned that it was ‘humiliating and degrading’ to watch Cabinet ministers seek to defend Mr Cummings.
Mr Wragg, who chairs the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in the Commons, said: ‘We cannot throw away valuable public and political goodwill any longer.’
Fellow 1922 executive members Steve Baker, Mark Pawsey and Jason McCartney have also called for Mr Cummings to resign or be sacked.
Bob Blackman, the secretary of the 1922 committee, last night said: ‘It would have been far more sensible if he had gone to the Prime Minister and said “This is what I did, I’m becoming a distraction to the work of this government. Under the circumstances, I don’t think I can continue to advise you”. And then it would be a judgment for the Prime Minister.
‘There could have been an investigation to determine if he broke the law and if he broke the spirit of the law.
‘Just saying “I didn’t do anything wrong, I’m not resigning or even contemplating resigning” is not good enough. It communicates a degree of arrogance.’
Mr Blackman said the public was now ‘in meltdown’. ‘You can feel the anger,’ he added.
Veteran Tory Sir Roger Gale said the 1922 executive needed to ‘make it clear to Boris Johnson that Dominic Cummings should go’.
‘They are elected to tell the PM what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear,’ he added.
The Prime Minister’s hopes that he had drawn a line under the crisis were shattered when Mr Ross became the first Cabinet minister to quit over the row shortly after 9am yesterday.
Former chief whip Mark Harper insisted Mr Cummings ‘should have offered to resign, and the Prime Minister should have accepted his resignation’.
Members of the 2019 Tory intake calling for Mr Cummings to go included Simon Jupp and Elliot Colburn. East Devon MP Mr Jupp said he felt ‘anger, disappointment and frustration’ and suggested that Mr Cummings should consider his position.
Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick told BBC Radio 2 that his own postbag showed ‘many people still disagree’ with Mr Cummings’s actions.
And backbench Conservative MP Mark Garnier said the special adviser should ‘do the decent thing and resign’.
The Wyre Forest MP, who said he has received more than 300 emails critical of Mr Cummings from constituents, said felt ‘hugely sympathetic about his plight’.
But he added: ‘The whole of coronavirus has now been taken over by him and his actions. I think at the end of the day people feel so strongly about this.
‘This story isn’t going to go away until he’s gone and now I think it’s time for him to do the decent thing and resign.’
Elliot Colburn, Conservative MP for Carshalton and Wallington, said he had written to the Prime
Minister calling for Mr Cummings to resign.
He said: ‘I have received more emails on this than on any other issue since being elected – many hundreds of messages from concerned constituents – and I join them in that view.’
Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt last night said Mr Cummings had breached the lockdown rules on three occasions, but as someone who had made mistakes himself in the past, he did not believe he should quit.
In a letter to a constituent, the Commons health committee chairman wrote: ‘Having watched the broadcast [on Monday afternoon], my own view is that what he did was a clear breach of the lockdown rules – coming back into work when he had been with his wife who was ill, driving to Durham instead of staying at home and visiting Barnard Castle.
‘These were clearly mistakes – both in terms of the guidance, which was crystal clear, and in terms of the signal it would potentially give out to others as someone who was at the centre of government.’
‘A degree of arrogance’