Genuine panic as ‘Red Wall’ Tory MPS take hit for Cummings
When news broke of Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip to Durham, the first officially sanctioned response from the Government was that the story had been cooked up by “campaigning newspapers”.
The implication of the phrase was deliberate and clear: Mr Cummings was being targeted by Left-wing journalists opposed to Brexit, as a way of settling scores.
Downing Street still appears to be clinging to the hope that it can persuade the public this is nothing more than a culture war between Left and Right, Leave and Remain, faction against faction.
Undoubtedly there are those in the Conservative Party and beyond who have watched the travails of Mr Cummings over the past five days in a state of glee, for entirely personal or political reasons.
It is also true that the first Tory MPS to call for Mr Cummings’s head, including Steve Baker and Peter Bone, are long-standing critics with something of an axe to grind, while some of the bishops who have weighed in are also veteran Europhiles.
But Tory backbenchers have been warning Downing Street for days that tribalism has nothing to do with the mess the Government now finds itself in, and the 30 or more Tory MPS who
have now gone public with calls for Mr Cummings to resign are from every wing of the party.
They have been bombarded with emails and letters from constituents livid at his behaviour, and the vast majority of those who are contacting them have no obvious allegiance to
‘Those who lent us their votes say they won’t do it again’
any particular camp. For them it is purely about right and wrong, or to use Mr Cummings’s own word, a sense of “unfairness”. Tellingly, a Yougov poll carried out yesterday showed that 52 per cent of 2016 Leave voters want Mr Cummings to resign, which appeared to kill off any lingering suggestions of tribal bias against him.
The same poll said 71 per cent of people think Mr Cummings broke lockdown rules, compared with 68 per cent before his press conference, and 59 per cent of all those surveyed said he should resign, up from 52 per cent before his statement.
A separate poll, carried out by Comres, showed approval ratings tanking for both Boris Johnson and the Government. Mr Johnson’s rating has slumped into negative figures for the first time since he became PM, at minus 1 per cent, compared with plus 19 per cent immediately before the Cummings story broke and plus 25 a fortnight ago. Overall Government approval is at minus 2 per cent, dropping 16 points in a day.
Genuine panic is setting in for many MPS in marginal constituencies, particularly those who won Labour “Red Wall” seats at the last election, that trust in the Tory party is draining away so rapidly that it may soon be too late to repair the damage.
One MP who won a long-standing Labour seat at the last election said yesterday: “Normally when there is a big controversy your mailbag is split between people on either side of the divide.
“Not this time. There’s maybe one or two in every 100 who are saying people should lay off Dom and that this is a witch hunt, but all of the others are saying he should resign or be sacked.
“Some of those might be coordinated by Labour, and you can see that when similar phrases come up over and over again, but the vast majority are from average, down-toearth Tory voters, people who read The Telegraph or the Daily Mail, who think he broke lockdown rules and he should go. Dom’s appearance in the Downing Street rose garden hasn’t moved the dial at all. Of course people have sympathy for the situation he was in, but it was no worse than what thousands of other people have had to deal with, and other people just got on with it.
“They didn’t drive half way across the country to stay on their parents’ farm.”
Another Tory in a marginal seat said: “Remember Boris asking Labour supporters to lend us their votes? Well those people who did are now contacting us and saying they won’t do it again, because they don’t trust Boris anymore.”
No10’s strategy over the weekend appeared to be based on the idea that “the public is on our side” and that once Mr Cummings set out his explanation the crisis would die down.
Mark Spencer, the Chief Whip, was among those who tweeted his support for Mr Cummings after Monday’s press conference, saying the special adviser “has had a lot of misinformation put out there about him”.
A senior Tory MP said: “All Cummings did was confirm that he had broken the rules. Trying to portray this as a factional fight just won’t wash with the public.”
Even loyal party servants, however, believe No10 badly misjudged the mood of the nation and many have expressed disbelief that the Prime Minister did not order Mr Cummings to apologise and submit himself to an independent inquiry.
One said: “They thought people would just blame the media, but they have blamed Dom instead. It’s as if they read a couple of tweets saying this was all a Remainer witch hunt and ignored the thousands of others saying he should go.
“The bottom line is that Boris sent people a letter saying they should stay at home, so they did.
“They didn’t look for obscure exemptions, they abided by the spirit of the rules and Dom didn’t.
“They aren’t prepared to forgive him for that.”