Dominic Cummings’ usual place at Downing Street press conferences is lurking at the back in a scruffy T-shirt, glaring. So seeing him – the éminence grise, the backroom guy – in clean-looking shirt sleeves in the sunny No 10 garden, addressing the cameras, with his boss the prime minister nowhere to be seen, was an extraordinary inversion of the norm. And it didn’t get any less strange. In his day job as Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Cummings prides himself on wrong-footing opponents by never making the obvious, straightforward next move. Monday’s bank holiday press conference suggested he applies the same approach to family life. His justification for driving the 250-odd miles to self-isolate in a cottage in the grounds of his parents’ property was so complex it might have helped if he had had a whiteboard to sketch it out on. His wife was ill, and he too might well have contracted coronavirus, but at the same time he was indispensable to the fight against the virus and wanted to go back to Downing Street. He was concerned that his London home was a potential target, not that it stopped him driving the family back to it the moment he was given the green light to do so. And his 17- and 20-year-old nieces were clearly the best choice for emergency childcare, despite living halfway across the country. As for the half-hour jaunt to the local beauty spot Barnard Castle, it was merely a way to check whether he was up to the journey back to the capital. “We just thought, let’s whizz down the road and see how I feel.” The woods he was spotted strolling in on another occasion belonged to his parents.
In some aspects at least, the statement was a demonstration of Cummings’ mastery of communications. His demeanour was subdued and respectful, which must have taken a considerable effort since his contempt for “Westminster bubble” journalists, several of whom were eyeballing him, is legendary. He and his No 10 colleagues will have been hoping the public would watch him laying out the events of those undoubtedly difficult days – during which his son was hospitalised and Cummings himself suffered a severe bout of the virus – and feel sympathy and understanding for his plight. They will also have been counting on the public’s dislike and suspicion of journalists. Lobby hacks have been beamed into press conferences from their book-lined spare bedrooms since the onset of the crisis: but on Monday they were invited along to stand up as Cummings the devoted father delivered his statement not from a podium (of which No 10 has plenty), but seated at a modest folding table. The intention appeared to be to shift the power balance, making Cummings appear more humble and the journalists prurient and bossy. In order to sympathise, though, the public will have had to find Cummings’ actions in that torrid period comprehensible. That might have been made easier if he had felt able to admit that his decision to hit the motorway was, with hindsight, a bit rash. But apparently he still thinks it was perfectly reasonable, as was the quixotic test-run to Barnard Castle at a time when the public were allowing their children a quick turn round the local park at best. Perhaps it might have helped, too, if he had admitted, when asked by Jason Groves of the Daily Mail if he had driven a coach and horses through the spirit of the coronavirus regulations, that he might have stretched them a bit. Instead, he leant on the get-out clause about those caring for children, saying: “The guidance doesn’t say you’ve just got to sit there”. Many thousands of parents who came down with Covid-19 and thought “stay home” meant exactly that may feel they have been taken for mugs. It might also have been easier for viewers to walk in Cummings’ shoes had the story not been peppered with reminders of his privilege. It’s not his fault, of course, but few families will have had the option of a handy self-isolation cottage on their parents’ estate, with woods on site for pleasant walks while convalescing (and many might have thought it was wrong to hare across the country to get there, even if they did). Johnson has already shown that he is determined to stick by his right-hand man. Perhaps ironically for such an obsessive consumer of focus groups, Cummings’ fate is now likely to hang on what the public make of his performance – and whether they judge that however baroque the reasoning, his heart is in the right place.