What will she tell her grandchildren in years to come?
Holding up a placard saying ‘Cummings you are full of sh*t!’ as she joined a screaming mob haranguing the Prime Minister’s senior adviser outside his house, where he lives with his wife and four-year-old son.
Perhaps she’ll proudly show video footage of the scenes. And the newspaper articles.
It’s probably too much to hope she’ll look back with any semblance of shame.
It’s become a feature of British political life – especially on the liberal Left – that the moral certainty of a position only exists in direct proportion to the viciousness deployed in defence of it
We’re near the end now. The point at which Coronavirus 2020 stops being our lived experience and enters the realm of legend and myth. Government Ministers privately acknowledge lockdown is collapsing.
Schools and shops are gradually reopening. Soon, what for the past ten weeks has been ‘the new normal’ will be elbowed aside by a return to the old realities of life.
What will she tell her grandchildren in years to come? Holding up a placard saying ‘Cummings you are full of sh*t!’ as she joined a screaming mob haranguing the Prime Minister’s senior adviser outside his house, where he lives with his wife and four-year-old son
When it does, we’ll begin to tell our own tales. Just like our parents and grandparents did with their wartime experiences. Of sacrifice and hardship and collective endeavour.
The Thursday evening clap for the NHS. The children’s rainbows spontaneously appearing in windows across the country. The Queen’s moving promise that ‘we will meet again’.
But there are things that will be forgotten. In particular, a convenient veil will be drawn over the fact that the population initially confronted Covid-19 with trademark British humour and stoicism. And then, slowly but surely, were driven to the edge of collective madness.
On one level, Dominic Cummings has no one but himself to blame for the firestorm that engulfed him and the Government. He’s characteristically fought his battles with ‘a no quarter asked or given’ brutalism.
And he can hardly complain when his enemies – having finally cornered their prey – opted to repay him in kind.
‘He can’t recover from this,’ said a normally loyal Minister.
‘He’s been exposed for the elitist he is. He’s been overrated since he won a referendum against a very poor Remain campaign and has worked to create an image of a mad genius that I’ve never seen a shred of evidence to support.’
On Wednesday, BBC bosses announced they had – correctly – censured Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis for breaking impartiality guidelines over an introduction to the programme’s coverage of the Cummings story
But the last week hasn’t really been about Cummings the man. It’s been about us as a nation. And the way a country already being pushed to the brink by an unprecedented global crisis finally lost its way.
First, there was the gleeful savagery with which a mob turned not just on the PM’s aide, but on his family.
It’s become a feature of British political life – especially on the liberal Left – that the moral certainty of a position only exists in direct proportion to the viciousness deployed in defence of it.
So we had neighbours behaving like vultures, leaning out of their windows and baying at Cummings. As local Labour MP Emily Thornberry proudly proclaimed: ‘The people of Islington South and Finsbury can always be relied on to say it as it is.’
But, for me, the defining moment came during Cummings’s Downing Street rose garden inquisition.
On one level, Dominic Cummings has no one but himself to blame for the firestorm that engulfed him and the Government. He’s characteristically fought his battles with ‘a no quarter asked or given’ brutalism
It was his revelation that while isolating in County Durham, his sick son Cedi had to be taken to hospital by ambulance.
Normally a child’s serious illness would elicit nothing but sympathy. But not in Britain in 2020. Not in the Age of Coronavirus. This was a national scandal.
His family were condemned, literally, as plague-carriers. Being sick and having visited a ‘rural’ hospital, they were irresponsibly risking spreading their infection.
This is the prevailing distorted mindset. To take your ill child to hospital is a crime. One punishable by summary justice at the hands of the self-styled Covid vigilantes.
But if one of the first casualties of this crisis has been our sense of common humanity, another has been that other perpetual victim in our twisted culture. The truth.
On Wednesday, BBC bosses announced they had – correctly – censured Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis for breaking impartiality guidelines over an introduction to the programme’s coverage of the Cummings story.
So we had neighbours behaving like vultures, leaning out of their windows and baying at Cummings. As local Labour MP Emily Thornberry proudly proclaimed: ‘The people of Islington South and Finsbury can always be relied on to say it as it is.’ But, for me, the defining moment came during Cummings’s Downing Street rose garden inquisition
Her deliberately controversial opening statement – ‘Dominic Cummings broke the rules, the country can see that. But it’s shocked the Government can’t see it’ – was, her defenders angrily claimed, justifiable because it was a statement of fact.
It wasn’t. But let’s put that to one side and test just how important facts and truth really are.
The saga started eight days ago with headlines in The Guardian and Daily Mirror such as ‘Dominic Cummings investigated by police after breaking coronavirus lockdown rules’.
He hadn’t been. In fact, the police had been contacted by Cummings’s father.
He wanted advice on security issues about having the PM’s adviser staying on his property.
Durham Police have confirmed: ‘At the request of Mr Cummings’s father, an officer made contact.’ There was no issue about breaking lockdown rules.
As the police later added: ‘We do not consider that by locating himself at his father’s premises, Mr Cummings committed an offence.’
That initial sensational allegation wasn’t true. Just as the subsequent claim Cummings had driven to London, then back to Durham wasn’t true. And the claim he had been seen strolling along and observing ‘aren’t the bluebells lovely’ wasn’t true. And the claim from a so-called eye-witness ‘we were shocked and surprised to see him’ wasn’t true.
The saga started eight days ago with headlines in The Guardian and Daily Mirror such as ‘Dominic Cummings investigated by police after breaking coronavirus lockdown rules’
But it doesn’t matter. In the Age of Coronavirus, we again have to pick a side. Forget facts. Forget reality. By choosing to protect his family, Dom Cummings transferred off our team. So he must be destroyed. Along with those around him.
On Tuesday, I was invited on to The Emma Barnett Show on Radio 5 to comment on the affair. I raised the question: What should anyone do in a situation where they and their partner were coming down with the disease and realised there would be no one else to care for their vulnerable child?
To which the answer is simple. You use common sense rather than be rigidly governed by guidelines. Your priority is to take your child somewhere safe.
In response, Ms Barnett told of a friend who had texted her. She had been in that position, too. But she hadn’t sought help, she said, because ‘she would have been scared to be stopped by the police’.
This is what we have become in the Age of Coronavirus. Citizens of a country in which mothers are terrified of seeking help for their sick children for fear of being stopped by the police.
It’s time to call a halt to this grotesque charade. It’s ending anyway, so let’s bring it to a close with some degree of decency and dignity. No more baying mobs. No more coppers’ narks. No more police road blocks.
Over the past week, a nation lost its way. It’s time to find it again.