Will Dominic Cummings get fired?

[Breakdown]

Dominic Cummings is currently under a huge amount of pressure to resign for flagrantly breaking the UK's lockdown guidelines while showing symptoms of Corvid 19 (and later testing positive). Cummings is Boris Johnson's special advisor and has a great deal of power in Westminster, despite being hated by a fair amount of Conservative MPs. He was also the director of the Leave Campaign in the Brexit referendum. He's basically a bit like a bald Rasputin.

At the moment Cummings appears utterly unrepentant, so I guess the pressure is now on Boris Johnson. Other officials have previously resigned for less serious breaches of this policy, so there is a clear precedent. Will Boris throw Cummings under the bus? And how would Johnson cope without the guy who tells him what to do?

 

[Agema]

Hard to say.

I agree in that I don't think the Conservative Party (and thus the UK) is run by competent MPs with a good idea how things work or what to do. Cummings is probably the "brain" of the current Tory government, supplying it with ideology, direction and so on.

For Cummings to go therefore rips the intellectual foundation out of Johnson's administration. And that's possibly exactly why a fair chunk of Tories want him to go, because if he goes, they and their ideas can try to fill the gap (not that I trust any of those mediocrities either). Alternatively, it might also represent a sort of principle that those MPs think they climbed up the greasy pole so they could run the country, and are offended about an unelected, upstart, Northern English wonk calling the shots instead. (At least he went to an independent school and Oxford Uni, otherwise it'd really be knives out.)

So Johnson is clearly going to resist Cummings going very strongly. He might be able to resist his MPs, but what might finish the matter is the right wing press. I have much scorn for the British right wing press, but where I will grant it some favour, it's that it pretty reliably resents people in government "cheating", even from their own side.

 

[Agema]

Well, according to Boris Johnson, Cummings "acted responsibly and legally and with integrity and with the overwhelming aim of stopping the spread of the virus and saving lives." I would call this almost certainly untrue. One way or the other that's a no, he isn't being fired.

Interestingly a tweet - rapidly deleted - appeared on the official UK Civil Service feed: "Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth-twisters?" (I guess someone could have hacked the account - at least that's what everyone normally says about dodgy tweets).

I sometimes wonder whether people like Cummings don't have blackmail material on their bosses. Although to be honest, I think it really is just that Boris is fucking clueless about how to run the country, and needs Cummings to tell him what to do. Cummings goes, Johnson will extremely vulnerable. Likewise Cummings needs Johnson, because he's toxic to just about everyone else and needs a PM who has no idea what he's doing without Cummings there.

 

[Baffle]

Fuck it, I'm gonna go spit through care home letter boxes, because that's what my kids would want me to do.

 

[Nick Calandra]

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