Boris and Dom have united the UK in a consensus of disgust
IT was, as one wit put it, a bit like asking Emu to sack Rod Hull. Dominic Cummings’s controlling hand is so far up Boris Johnson’s fundament, the UK prime minister would collapse like an empty suit off a charity shop hanger without his puppet-master’s touch.
So there was no real surprise when Boris emerged on Sunday evening to stand by his man, having dodged public scrutiny, and even hard questions from his own party colleagues, for weeks. He was clearly under orders to deliver a script, almost certainly dictated by his ‘special adviser’ himself: watching from his shadowy backroom lair, Cummings’s lips were hardly seen to move.
The pair clearly reckoned that Boris’s posh-boy charms, the bumbling delivery, the studied dishevelment, the carefully curated collection of tics and quirks, the single-sentence soundbites which had conned the country into buying his Brexit baloney would work to pacify the peasants once more.
A nation that was dumb enough to buy ‘Get Brexit Done’ as a meaningful campaign slogan would surely believe that, in brazenly flouting the lockdown rules he’d designed for the riff-raff, Cummings was actually being responsible and even admirable.
It didn’t quite work out that way, though. Instead, Boris and Dom have managed to achieve something that nobody thought possible in the Divided Kingdom of Brexit – they’ve united the country in a rare consensus. Unfortunately for them, it happens to be a consensus of disgust, anger and, increasingly, of dawning insight and dread: It is finally sinking in with the great British public that they bought a Brexit pig in a poke from a slippery double act of ‘find-the-lady’ fairground shysters.
Glaring
If lying and breaking the rules is Boris’s idea of ‘integrity’, if blatant lawlessness can be paraded as ‘legal’, and putting your own interests ahead of everybody else’s is what counts as being ‘responsible’, then heaven help the poor idiots who trusted him with their fortunes and their futures.
Boris’s attitude to the lockdown rules, they’re just realising, was a belatedly glaring metaphor for Brexit: convince the gullible plebs to take the pain, so the privileged elite can revel in the spoils.
Brexit, a cunning plan to turn the UK into a regulation-free tax haven for Boris’s billionaire backers, a Cayman Islands in the north Atlantic, was never about taking back control – it was about taking control. He and his pals know full well that the ordinary folk will be the ones to suffer post Brexit, while the unconscionably rich grow unconscionably richer at their expense.
But once the hapless dupes could be conned into compliance with the myth that it was all for their own good, the truth would dawn far too late: the Brexit bandits would have long since vanished over the distant hills with the family silver.
And the lockdown, too, was only ever about imposing sacrifice on the peasants so the privileged could behave as they wished. There was absolutely no reason why Cummings needed to go to his parents’ home in Durham, while he and his wife had Covid-19 symptoms and the rest of the country was dutifully staying home to ‘protect the NHS’. He didn’t even avail of ‘the right sort of childcare’ when he got there, since he and his wife stayed in their second home with their son as they could as easily have done in London.
And Boris has become so tineared to his own mendacity that he didn’t even hear the irony of his bogus invoking of ‘a father’s instincts’. This is a man who had to be hauled to the High Court to acknowledge paternity of a child born of an ‘adulterous affair’ in 2013, who won’t admit how many children he’s fathered, is estranged from some and would probably be hard pressed to name them all.
Revolt
Nor did he hear himself effectively accuse all those families who observed the lockdown, staying away from elderly parents and managing childcare as best they could, of being lesser parents than his slimy puppeteer. Cummings’s supporters also hint that he had gone to comfort his mother after the recent death of her brother – again, so much for those 60,000 Covid victims’ families denied the chance to comfort their own loved ones.
This time, it seems, the peasants might just be revolting. The police, the medics and even the country’s bishops have reared up in outrage, with one bishop tweeting that ‘Johnson has gone full Trump’.
The prospects for Cummings’s long-term survival can’t be good, and because Johnson is an utterly empty shell without him, then the prime minister’s days are numbered too.
The question is whether the British public will snap out of their Brexit stupor to realise they’d been led by the nose to economic and societal disaster by a couple of self-serving fraudsters, before it’s too late?