Boris Johnson had little choice but to back Dominic Cummings

Little has escaped the Dominic Cummings drive-to-Durham episode unscathed: Boris Johnson and his cabinet are discredited, the reserves of goodwill the public hold for the government are running critically low, the lockdown consensus appears to be falling apart. And now BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis is the latest to find herself in the maelstrom.

In a monologue on Tuesday night Maitlis told viewers: “Dominic Cummings broke the rules – the country can see that and it’s shocked the government cannot.”

She was right. The following day Durham police confirmed that they considered Cummings’s activities to be in breach of lockdown guidelines. And reams of polling show Maitlis captured the public mood.

But of course the question is not whether she was right, but whether the BBC – an impartial state broadcaster – was the right place to say it. And the question is not whether she “spoke truth to power”, as her champions claim, but whether she should be editorialising like this in the first place.

Plenty of people are dumbfounded as they witness the government eviscerate its reputation in slow motion

Mercifully, this was just a brief episode in the otherwise interminable Dominic Cummings psychodrama. The BBC released a statement about impartiality, Maitlis appears to have received a slap on the wrist and the world continues to revolve on its axis.

But as the whole Cummings saga wends its way into a full week of headline-dominating news – bolstered by interventions by Emily Maitlis and Durham police – plenty of people are dumbfounded as they witness the government eviscerate its reputation in slow motion in a bid to protect the job of one political adviser.