Not convinced by rose garden performance
GEOFF Ford’s flippant piece on Friday, May 29, about the Dominic Cummings saga leaves a bad taste in the mouth. His four paragraphs about the enemies Cummings has made in the past seemed quite irrelevant to me, as most people knew little about Cummings before hearing the news of his trip to Durham from London.
People are angry (70 per cent reportedly want him to resign, as do a growing number of Tory MPs), because of the immorality of his trip during lockdown, the implausible nature of his excuses (driving to a beauty spot for 30 minutes on his wife’s birthday to test his eyesight, for instance) and the outrageous unfairness when most of us stuck to Cumming’s own rules without complaint, often in the direst of circumstances. The rose garden performance did not convince. Having spent six hours in Downing Street the day before, (perfecting his story with the PM, one would have thought) Cummings kept us waiting for half an hour.
What has incensed me most during the whole affair was the PM’s defiant statement in his press conference: “In every respect, he has acted responsibly, legally and with integrity.”
It seems millions of ordinary people agree with me in being concerned about the strange interpretations of right and wrong in this case, making it very difficult for us to “move on” without Cummings being sacked. I feel like my parents would have felt if their neighbours didn’t draw their black-out curtains during the war. Name and address supplied.