Brian Reade: The Brex Pistol Tories again prove they’re Rotten to their core

The general rule about political scandals is if it’s still the main story after a three-day news cycle then it is one.

So the fact that Dominic’s Adventures In Wonderland – which was broken by my colleagues Pippa Crerar and Jeremy Armstrong last Saturday – has dominated the agenda all week, hints that The Blind Hatter’s actions were pretty scandalous.

But you knew that. As did the police. And every Tory MP. The real scandal is that Dominic Cummings is still in a job and that his deputy, Boris Johnson, is hastily bringing forward policies which fit with his master’s latest soundbite: It’s Time To Move On.

Suddenly we’re doing Trace and Test when it looked likely to come in around the same time as Trick or Treat, and pubs may be opening next month, presumably to get us all blind drunk so we can’t see Barnard Castle.

Of course, we will eventually move on from this cautionary tale about people who made the rules
breaking the rules and seeing no wrong in it.

But the details won’t be forgotten and hopefully neither will the main lesson – that vast swathes of ordinary voters were conned into thinking they were being held in contempt by a wealthy elite when those words summed up the conmen.

Last December, millions voted for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, neatly packaged as a colourful man of the people whose burning ambition was to take on the Establishment.

When the only aim of the self-serving Old Etonian, who called his £250,000-a-year wage for writing a Daily Telegraph column “chicken feed”, was to rise as far as his bluster would take him, dropping everyone he’d used along the way.

A man as down to earth as his co-conspirator Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose wife’s ancestral pile, the 365-room Wentworth Woodhouse, is the UK’s largest private house.

Cummings wants to be seen as the Johnny Rotten of Westminster, the elite-loathing maverick who spits on the Commons’ mace. Yet, like Johnson, yet he too went from private school to Oxford and likes hanging around in aristocratic circles. So much so that he married the daughter of a Baronet, Sir Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield, who owns Chillingham Castle in Northumberland.

Plastic Johnny shot to fame alongside the self-proclaimed Brex Pistols, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, when they seduced the British people into believing that a privileged clique in Brussels had been conspiring against the working class for decades. And plain-speaking blokes like them were destined to save them from the Enemies of The People.

That’s Farage, the ex-public school stockbroker, who said Brexit had left him “skint” despite having two EU pensions, a five-figure radio presenter’s salary and a £4million house in Chelsea. And Banks, another private schoolboy who became a multi-millionaire insurance salesman and diamond mine owner.

The political history of the past decade, both in Britain and America, is of millions of working-class people giving power to wealthy scam artists who duped them into believing they had their best interests at heart.

When all their heart desired was to get richer, more powerful and, as we’re seeing with this Cummings cover-up, look after their own.

As the real Johnny Rotten asked the crowd at the end of the Sex Pistols’ final US gig: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”