Another fine mess

TRUMP’S GUTTER INSTINCT Dom and Bojo act now a chink in Tory armour

LOTS of late night phone calls in this game. Not those ones, either. Politics ones.

My phone normally starts going at 11.15pm. People ringing to talk about what just happened on Newsnight, did I see such-and-such car crash interview, and isn’t X good/bad on the TV?

That was one of the good things about Andrew Neil’s show getting the chop. It was on far too late.

That show meant little else but 16 years of various people ringing at 12:30am asking me what I thought about Michael Portillo’s trousers.

Late night phone traffic has died off, maybe to do with pubs being shut. But there was a good one this week.

Damaged

Some Labour type chose the early hours to advance a theory about how Dominic Cummings is like an impacted molar. We’d been arguing about it in the day. I thought the man should resign or be sacked.

Not so much over the ridiculous eyesight stuff but for the fact that he broke the very rules he helped to set.

My friend reckoned it was better for him to stick around.

Then inspiration – more likely Bell’s – must have struck and he phoned me in the night.

“Think of Cummings,” he said, “like an impacted molar. If you yank it out with pliers, it hurts for a bit but you’ve cured it. Better to leave him there, throbbing away, a constant source of pain. Then we can hammer away at it.”

It makes sense to a degree. Even in the early hours. Personally, I would have much preferred to see Cummings resign. But that’s me. Labour’s

“WHEN the looting starts, the shooting starts,” said white police chief Walter Headley in charge of the cops in Miami in 1967.

He boasted his men would go after what he called “young hoodlums” – people who were part of the civil rights movement. Now Donald Trump has placed himself calculation being that keeping Cummings around will be a reminder of what a mess this all was.

It helps to frame what is kind of emerging anyway – that this is a government of people who work to a different set of rules than you or I.

It will be handy in an election, I guess. What it fails to take into account of is that an election is a long way off. We have all sorts of things to get through first.

Brexit is back on the horizon and we are about to go through a very deep and dangerous recession.

By the time we are through, those firmly in the tradition of Chief Headley, regurgitating the phrase after violence broke out in Minneapolis following the death of a 46-year-old black man, George Floyd, in police custody.

The President’s response is unforgivable. Maybe he was right to condemn the looting that had things will look very different and I’m not sure anyone will remember the ins and outs of The Cummings Affair.

But the man himself could still be there. Damaged and with the strut gone out of him.

A far cry from the Terror of Whitehall, bound to Boris for ever.

And that’s another problem for the Conservatives. Mr Johnson’s spirited defence of his colleague has left the door open for Labour.

The PM will be framed as not being up to the job, as being hapless and unable to manage without his righthand man. Orville without Keith. Keir broken out but to use such inflammatory language is not only dangerous it’s an insult and harks back to a bleak and shameful time in American history.

But with the deranged rhetoric coming out of the White House lately it feels like the US has not made much progress at all.

Starmer has already said: “I don’t think he’s going to do anything about Cummings because he can’t, it seems, continue without his adviser.”

And that’s how it’s going to go for a bit. Meantime we try to work out what kind of double act they will be.

Are they going to become national treasures? Morecambe and Wise or Ant and Dec? Or one of those lower league ones like the Chuckle Brothers?

My money would be on one of those acts that are hugely popular for a while but that the public go off swiftly.

Hale and Pace for example. Or maybe Dick and, erm, Dom.