My beef with Mr Cummings? Government policy is a reflection of his paranoia

His panicked reaction to catching the virus is symptomatic of the Government’s timidity

There is a hamlet in the Surrey Hills that I know well called Little London. It is so named because during the periodic plagues in the capital some of its better-heeled citizens would get out as fast as possible and head for somewhere safer. There are other Little Londons dotted around the Home Counties within a radius of about 50 miles, all thought to be bolt-holes for those escaping the Great Plague of 1665. Samuel Pepys, an important official at the Admiralty who had to continue his work at Whitehall, packed his wife off to Woolwich, then in the countryside, when the pestilence came knocking on the City gates.

In a diary entry in July, as the contagion spread, he wrote: “I grieved in my heart to part with my wife, being worse by much without her, though some trouble there is in having the care of a family at home in this plague time … Late home and to bed, very lonely … Plague growing very raging and my apprehension is great.” He was right to be worried since it killed a quarter of London’s population.

King Charles took his court to Salisbury and then Oxford in 1665. For those able to travel and possessing the wherewithal to do so there is a natural urge to get out of cities when diseases strike because it is in the teeming metropolis that they spread fastest. Dominic Cummings, who has made a study of such contagions, will have known this better than most.

But the rules that he was instrumental in promulgating to tackle the virus specifically forbade people to skedaddle because of the risk of spreading it around the country. Indeed, those in the past who took flight from London were not exactly welcome when they pitched up with their families in tow possibly bearing the plague with them, often in lousy bedding or clothing.

When the Covid-19 virus began to take a grip, many thousands of people living in London must have thought that they would rather weather this particular storm in their second homes in Scotland, or Wales or Cornwall. But they were told not to. Those who did make it without being turned back by the police, like Gordon Ramsay, have spent weeks fending off the insults showered upon them.

In the great debate over whether Mr Cummings was right or wrong to head for Durham, few seem to have considered that what he was really doing was getting the hell out. He had watched as the Prime Minister, the Chief Medical Officer, the Health Secretary and others with whom he worked all fell ill within the space of a few days. Then his wife called him to say she was ill.

As he admitted at the bizarre news conference in the Downing Street garden on Monday, “Most of those who I work with most closely … either had had symptoms and had returned to work or were absent with symptoms. I thought there was a distinct probability that I had already caught the disease … I was thinking, what if the same or worse happens to me?”

So he loaded up the car with his sick spouse and child and zoomed up the A1 without stopping, bound for his very own Little London. That sounds like fleeing to me.

Most of us, not least because we were told we could not go to a second home (which, when all the guff is stripped away, is what Mr Cummings did) would have taken to our beds, got some childcare arranged and seen it through. That is, indeed, what millions have done. But as Mr Cummings implied, he was terrified.

Perversely, there are many people who defend this because they say he was just doing what any reasonable and rational person would do. Indeed so. But the rest of us weren’t allowed to. A post facto set of explanations has been contrived such as to make a Jesuit blush in order to justify his flight, centring on the need to find childcare for his four-year-old son as though that was a consideration unique to his family.

Even more bizarrely, his cheerleaders think that Mr Cummings in going North had shown the proper cavalier attitude to a set of illiberal and overly restrictive controls on our lives when he was doing the precise opposite.

He is more gung-ho about the lockdown than anyone. It is he who pushed for the imposition of a 14-day quarantine on all travellers to the UK from next week, a madcap idea that will wreck what’s left of the country’s tourism industry and make the UK the most isolated country in the world this side of Pyongyang.

We know he is in favour because if he wasn’t, it would not be happening.

But we also know from what he said at the Rose Garden press conference. Mr Cummings was less exercised by the accusations that he broke the rules than by suggestions early on in this crisis that he was a softie when it came to stopping people going anywhere.

He even made a particular point of this in his statement. “For years, I have warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning. The truth is that I had argued for lockdown. I did not oppose it.”

All of those defending Mr Cummings as though he is some doughty champion for ending the lockdown have got it completely the wrong way round. In fact, the excessive caution now being exhibited in No 10 can partly be attributed to him and to the fact that the Prime Minister was taken badly ill.

If you read what Mr Cummings wrote last year you can see how worried he was about experimentation on pathogens that “could cause a global pandemic killing many millions”.

Covid-19 is a nasty virus and we were right to be very worried at the outset, but it is now clear that it is not the Great Plague or anything like it. It is on a par with the 1968 flu pandemic, which did not necessitate the complete destruction of our children’s futures in order to get through it. So why the delay in ending the lockdown? Why do we still have preposterous rules that forbid family gatherings? My beef with Mr Cummings is not that he travelled to Durham but that he is a pivotal figure in a Government whose excessively cautious policy is a reflection of his own paranoia.