One law for the rich, another for the rest

Views from around the world. These opinions are not necessarily shared by Stuff newspapers.

If we had not already seen the earlier resignations of the Scottish chief medical officer and a top British epidemiologist for breaking lockdown rules, Boris Johnson’s Jesuitical defence of Dominic Cummings might have washed. But the British prime minister’s insistence that his aide was only behaving “instinctively”, as any father would do, was too much of a reinterpretation of the guidelines even for many Tory backbenchers.

Cummings’ attempt to make the case at a press conference in Downing Street that he was allowed by the lockdown rules to break them in “exceptional circumstances” was far from persuasive. How many others, equally pressed with childcare responsibilities, will feel that they too, aided by intinct alone, can unilaterally interpret the rules so flexibly? Without asking anyone’s permission.

That he asked himself repeatedly “What’s the safest thing?” to do to minimise the spread of the disease is commendable. But he was asking the wrong person.

Johnson has backed Cummings’ reasoning. And yet this is not a court of law but of public opinion.

The perception of a breach of the rules, certainly of their spirit, is as important as any legal nicety. The inescapable sense is of one law for the twohomed rich and Boris-connected, and another for the rest.