RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Desperate Dominic Cummings should have come clean sooner

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Those who bothered tuning in to the Dominic Cummings press conference expecting to see Beelzebub berating the assembled media corps will have been bitterly disappointed.

He only had the one head, no fangs and flashes of fiery thunder were conspicuous by their absence.

What we got was a shifty Northern bloke, pushing 50, patiently explaining why he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong driving from London to Durham to self-isolate after contracting coronavirus.

It’s a point of view. Not everyone will agree with Cummings that he behaved reasonably and legally, but he didn’t sound as if he intends to resign and Boris isn’t going to sack him.

The most powerful argument in favour of showing him the red card was the fact that he appears to have blatantly breached the lockdown rules he helped to write.

While the Boys and Girls in the Bubble were ululating at the prospect of claiming a high-profile scalp, this story has resonance way beyond the self-regarding, navel-gazing cloisters of Westminster. It would be wrong to dismiss it as just another crazy political feeding frenzy.

For the past couple of months, millions of people have been cooped up at home to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Those unfortunate enough to have contracted this nasty disease have been confined to the spare bedroom for a fortnight, their meals left outside the door. Not everyone has had the optional luxury of retreating, like the Cummings family, to a cottage on their parents’ farm.

So if the man considered the second most powerful figure in Government after the Prime Minister feels entitled to flout the official guidance, then why the hell should the rest of us feel obliged to abide by it?

Yet when Cummings began his belated explanation yesterday, in the Downing Street Rose Garden, it was impossible not to have some sympathy with his predicament.

He and his wife Mary Wakefield had both gone down with symptoms of Covid-19. They concluded that there was no one in London who could care properly for their child in the event that both of them were hors de combat.

So they piled into their Land Rover and headed 260 miles up the A1 to his parents’ spread in Durham, where they would have the use of a cottage 50 yards from the main house.

Cummings’s two nieces, aged 17 and 20, would be on hand to shop, cook meals and care for the child.

Be honest, if that kind of arrangement was available to you, wouldn’t you take advantage of it?

Perhaps if Desperate Dom had come clean when the media first started sniffing around at the end of last week, the whole sorry tale may not have unravelled in the way that it has.

It turns out that some of the reports over the weekend were patently untrue.

For instance, he didn’t drive back to Durham after returning to work in London when his period of isolation was complete.

But he did drive 30 miles to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’ and have a stroll by the river. As you do.

And he admitted to stopping on the way back so his son could go to the toilet, something which should have been filed under ‘Too Much Information’.

This was where his credibility began to fall apart. He should have shut up when he was ahead on away goals. That’s not to say what he did was a hanging offence. 

I’m prepared to accept that he acted from the best of motives — as any father would, according to Boris.

It’s just that one would have expected a special adviser to the Prime Minister to have given more thought to the consequences. Didn’t he appreciate how it would look once the Left-wing media got wind of it?

Probably not. That’s the trouble with first-class intellects. They tend to be woefully short of common sense.

It’s too simplistic to paint this predictable hyperbole as a conspiracy cooked up by Remainers anxious to exact their revenge on the main architect of Brexit. Plenty of Tory Leavers have also expressed the view that Cummings should be sacked.

That’s the unequivocal genius of the man — he manages to upset just about everyone, friend or foe.

What was absent yesterday was any hint of an apology. Regret, yes, but no contrition. That was a mistake.

For what it’s worth, I’ve swung both ways on what should happen next. In the normal course of events, I’d be vehemently opposed to giving in to a mob stirred up by the Daily Mirror and the Guardian, on a deliberately flawed prospectus.

But I do appreciate that people are genuinely angry at what they see as Cummings’s cavalier disregard for the rules which apply to everyone else.

It was only when Tony Blair’s Liar In Chief Alastair Campbell turned up on Sky News immediately after the press conference to demand Cummings’s head on a spike that I finally decided he had to stay.

Until it was revealed that part of the case against Cummings had been fabricated, I thought he might have to fall on his sword.

Special advisers should never become the story. And the last thing a depleted Boris needs right now is a serious distraction from battling Covid-19 and Getting Brexit Done.

I entertained the thought that he could be sent into exile for a while and then brought back quietly once the fuss had died down and the outrage circus had moved on.

After all, Labour’s Peter Mandelson was forced to resign in disgrace, not once but twice. And he ended up being resurrected by Gordon Brown, formerly an avowed enemy, as Deputy Prime Minister.

Even though I’m fully behind Cummings’s ambitious agenda of severing all links with the EU by the end of this year and draining the fetid, suffocating civil service swamp, no one is irreplaceable.

If the Queen could summon up the fortitude to shoot her favourite son, Prince Andrew, when he became an intolerable embarrassment, then there was nothing to prevent Boris dispensing with Dom.

Having said all that, I’d be loath to hand a victory to the forces ranged against Johnson, who are exploiting a health crisis not of this Government’s making to further their own selfish political ends.

And, as I wrote last week, I detest the sanctimonious creeps who delight in grassing up their fellow citizens for transgressing the lockdown guidelines.

In Cummings’s case he was shopped by a retired 70-year-old schoolteacher, who Googled his number plate to prove that he was in Barnard Castle without reasonable excuse.

This is the kind of sinister Lives Of Others behaviour which belonged in Stasi-controlled East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Frankly, the idea that the Old Bill should be ordered to scour automatic number plate recognition cameras and the GPS on Cummings’s car to establish exactly where he was at any given moment is despicable.

Such self-righteous vigilantes should not be given a scintilla of encouragement. Nor should the Guardianista lynch-mobs laying siege to Cummings’s home.

It’s been an unedifying few days. Cummings is chastened, although insufficiently contrite.

But Boris needs him and Britain needs Boris. Unless there’s worse to come, he shouldn’t resign.