Durham’s former chief constable has warned that Dominic Cummings’ lockdown behaviour has made it more difficult for officers to enforce the rules and has been used by some as an excuse for law-breaking. Mike Barton said the decision by the prime minister’s chief aide to drive to Durham at the height of the coronavirus pandemic had “damaged trust in the government and in the rules”. After the trip was exposed by the Guardian and the Daily Mirror, Barton said: “People were actually using the word ‘Cummings’ in encounters with the police to justify antisocial behaviour.” Speaking to Times Radio, he said: “If the public don’t think the police are operating in a fair and impartial way, you won’t get their trust and you won’t get their support. People who make the rules shouldn’t break them. Otherwise, you can’t expect the little people to do it.”
Barton, who retired last year after a seven-year stint running the force, also criticised Cummings’s failure to apologise for his actions and the excuses he gave for them during a Downing Street press conference. “His bare-faced effrontery in the rose garden was staggering,” he said. Barton said Cummings’s explanation for his trip to Barnard Castle was worse than childish. He said: “To say that he drove 60 miles with his child in the back of the car, on his wife’s birthday, to go to a beauty spot to test his eyesight, just beggars belief. I wouldn’t have expected a seven-year-old boy who was caught red-handed to have come out with such a ridiculous excuse.” He added: “So do I think that damaged trust in the government and in the rules? Of course it did. And that’s what the studies are now saying.”
Research published on Thursday suggested that the Cummings lockdown scandal was a key factor in a breakdown of a sense of national unity over the pandemic. Barton also criticised the government for trying to defend him. He said: “It ill behoved the government that you had ministers trotting out a defence of Cummings when there wasn’t one.” A three-day investigation by Durham police found that Cummings probably broke health protection rules by driving to Barnard Castle. But as the investigation was confined to his movements in County Durham, it made no finding on his decision to leave London. Durham police said it would not act retrospectively against Cummings. Asked if Durham police had done a good enough job of investigating Cummings, Barton said: “I don’t know anything about the investigation.” But he added: “If you lose the trust of the public, you cannot police.”