A great political excuse lives on long after the scandal

After lockdown is lifted, home-grown tourism is going to be bigger than ever. Being quarantined if we dare to leave the country helps, of course. But truthfully, being dutifully stuck at home wishing we had a second one, made of blocks and say, 260 miles away, has piqued our interest in those iconic places we’ve heard about in the news, and whose very name is redolent of escape.

Barnard Castle is one such corner of these sceptred isles. Before the bank holiday it was best known for its dramatic 12th-century fortress set on a high rock above the River Tees and the Bowes Museum, which houses a cracking art collection. Now, thanks to the sort of publicity you couldn’t pay for, this location is very firmly on the map.

So much so that its charms now rank even higher than the royal connections of Woking Pizza Express and Salisbury Cathedral’s 123-metre spire, so beloved of day-tripping Russian assassins. Thanks to Dominic Cummings, County Durham can scrap its rather bland “This is Durham” slogan for something considerably more mystical, such as “Follow your instincts to Durham”.

This was the reason he gave for loading his fouryear-old son and wife into the car and driving through the night, even as he was falling ill, too. Intrepid? Bonkers? Against the spirit of the guidelines he helped draw up? Maybe. But that’s the atavistic call of County Durham.

It’s all quite filmic, especially the bit where the PM’S odd-job man struggled with his sight and yet heroically loaded his family in the car some days later and ferried them 30 miles to Barnard Castle just to check whether it was too dangerous for him to drive.

I believe the town’s visionary (sic) aldermen are running up the slogan “Barnard Castle – A Sight for Sore Eyes”. Rather felicitously, in the 19th century, the expression ‘‘Come, come, that’s Barnard Castle!’’ was used as a response to someone’s flawed excuse for their actions. In so doing, Cummings failed to grasp that risible excuses live on long after any original (oh all right then, vigorously disputed) misdemeanour would have been forgotten.

Better to say nothing than to utter a Bill Clinton corker. On smoking dope in college: “I didn’t inhale.” On his predatory relationship with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, which rather ickily highlighted the one-sided nature of his proclivities.

Here in Britain we can scarcely plead the Fifth, given the wealth of public evidence against our elected members. Who could fail to enjoy senior Lib Dem and married father-of-two Mark Oaten baldly explaining that he was drawn to using rent boys because of his dramatic hair loss? Called to account for criticising foreign aid to “bong bongo land”, Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom excused himself by pointing out that bongo antelopes are white. They aren’t.

Former Tory MP Edwina Currie on her affair with the PM? “John Major was a sexy beast.” Tony Blair on waging war in Iraq: “I could have sworn there were weapons of mass destruction.”

By comparison, following your exceptionalist instincts and driving to Durham or turning a blind eye to a forbidden Barnard Castle jaunt seem uncontroversial – until you remember we are living in a pandemic.

Safe to say that whatever happens to Cummings, his goings will forever remain etched in the pages of the Great British gazetteer.