Bojo’s F1 move shows flexibility

IT’S quite the week they’re having in the upper echelons of the British government. The Dominic Cummings affair has done more to sap authority from the Tory party than anything it’s done or not done in its ten years in power.

The dangerous thing about it from their point of view is that it’s easily understandable to anybody and everybody. This has cut through in a way that reports about failures in testing and planning hasn’t, simply because Mr Cumming’s behaviour offended against people’s sense of fair play. Having endured what they endured in the belief that everybody was in it together, they rightly feel they were played for patsies. The denials and post-hoc justifications from Mr Cummings and his colleagues have only fed into the sense that, much like residents of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some are more equal than others.

That’s dangerous ground for any government to be standing on, particularly so at a time when, with the easing of restrictions, certain exemptions will have to be made. Is it a good look for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to be carving out an exception to the fourteen day quarantine rule for Formula 1 team personnel so that Silverstone can host two rounds of the world championship in July? Probably not in the best of times and certainly not in the week that’s in it. That doesn’t, however, mean that Mr Johnson is wrong to do so in this instance. Motorsport is a huge industry in the United Kingdom accounting for something like forty thousand jobs, it’s deserving of flexibility in a way Cummings isn’t and wasn’t.

Far be it from us to praise Mr Johnson and his government, but it’s an oddly hopeful sign for the coming months that he’s made a move in this direction. It has ramifications for sport beyond Formula 1. If there’s an exemption for Formula 1 there can be an exemption for football and rugby and a whole host of other sports.

It means we might yet get to see the concluding stages of the Champions League and the Champions Cup in rugby. Obviously it’ll be far from a free for all, there will have to be rigorous testing and isolation procedures, extreme care and caution, but it ought to be just about possible to proceed behind closed doors.

We just hope that Mr Cummings’ dash to Durham, not to mention his excursion to Barnard Castle (to, eh, test his eyesight), won’t undermine public support for these steps towards normality and force Bojo to take a step back.