Who will defend Dom Cummings now?

JUST over 18 months ago a wellknown bespectacled chap with a semi-shaven head was spotted by a member of the public while on a sightseeing trip in the north of England.

Well, not sightseeing, exactly – more a case of sight-testing. Naturally, this column poured scorn on the now infamous lockdown-defying trip to Barnard Castle – and I thought I was on fairly safe ground because I imagined most people would regard the Covid comings and goings of Cummings as being pretty much out of order.

However, I then received the largest mailbag of nasty missives it’s been my displeasure to read in more than four and a half decades working as a journalist. According to the authors, it was absolutely fine for Dominic to test his eyesight by driving a 60-mile round trip on busy roads. And they said I should be sacked for daring to question Boris’s judgement in hiring such a Machiavellian personage.

Actually, they said a good deal more besides – in fact most letterwriters said they wished my heart operation five years ago had not been successful – which of course proved that the hate-mail campaign had been orchestrated by someone.

I wonder if these letter writers will be so quick to defend their shavenheaded hero now?

I doubt it. Dom does not strike me as being a very popular figure nowadays. If he were ever to put his money where his mouth is and actually stand for political office, it is doubtful he’d get his deposit back.

This week Mr Cummings was captured by TV cameras scuttling, insect-like, down a London street after publishing a series of new and harmful revelations about his former boss. I’m sure he wouldn’t actually shove a knife into the prime minister’s increasingly hunched back, but there’s something about Dom that makes you think he might experience some degree of satisfaction if such a thing were to happen down a dark alley one night.

And really, of course, I do realise that it wasn’t my attack on Mr Cummings which riled the hate-mailers. It was that I dared to question the actions of the prime minister and also a well-known West Country MP.

“Stay away from politics,” wrote one angry hate-mailer. “You know nothing about what it’s like to run a country – you know nothing about politics or politicians – stick to writing about your wretched dog.”

Good point. Although I’d claim to know as much about politics as the next countryman, I really do not know about politicians. It seems to me that they, and the people who hang around with them, have been formed or moulded in some slightly different way to the rest of us – as if they are made up of some substance which is far more malleable than normal skin and bone.

Which is why we mere mortals often get the feeling we can never really tell what they’re up to.

Look at David Davis... Back during Brexit, he was Boris’s best ‘leaving’ mate, yet this week there he was sharpening his back-stabbing knife on the back-benches.

“In the name of God, GO!” cried DD, presumably hoping this would be the biggest and best back-stab since Geoffrey Howe stuck a long thin blade into Margaret Thatcher during his resignation speech in the Commons in 1990.

And how about the bloke who this week crossed the Commons to join the jeering bunch on the other side?

I don’t know about you, but if I’d spent months campaigning hard – promoting one particular political party day and night until I was quite literally blue in the face – I’d not have the gall to jump ship just two years later. Would you have the courage or the guts to admit, so publicly and dramatically, that you’d got things so incredibly wrong?

I might be old and ugly and beyond caring about my self-image, but how embarrassing is it to have to say: “Hey everybody! Remember what I was saying about brilliant Boris and the Tories? Well, forget all that! I’ve seen the light and this time you really can believe in me!”

For their part, the Tories thought they’d get one back on the Labour leader after someone found a photo of him sipping a pint. But Starmer? Partying? Doesn’t seem likely. The world might believe in the idea of Bad Boy Bojo gettin’ down and groovy with the kids, but the rather grey Honourable Member for Holborn and St Pancras?

As I write, a loud noise – so incredibly loud, it shook the cottage – has just reminded me that while we can all have a joke and a jibe when it comes to politicians, we ought to be taking them extremely seriously indeed.

Two of the latest F-35B fighter jets have just roared overhead at about 500 feet, with ear-shattering effect. It’s been some time since I’ve seen warplanes flying so fast and so low over this valley, and it worries me.

On Exmoor there’s an old adage that says: “When the warplanes practice low over the hills, there’s a war in the offing.”

Given the present situation in the Ukraine, we need our politicians to have their eye strictly on the ball rather than on their own futures or careers.

On Exmoor there’s an old adage that says: ‘When the warplanes practice low over the hills, there’s a war in the offing’