By John Crace
In a week dominated by Cummings not going, there were some vaguely positive developments in sport and the arts
When I first heard that Dominic Cummings was giving a press conference about his midnight flit to Durham, I had to check with my better-informed colleagues on the politics desk that this wasn’t a wind-up. After all, it’s specifically against the special advisers’ code of conduct for them to make public statements. Let alone one in the formal setting of the Downing Street rose garden that had previously been used as the setting for David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s 2010 bromance party celebration. But the Cummings’ show was every bit as box office gold, from his refusal to apologise for anything – Classic Dom could pick a fight in an empty room. There was his admission that he went back to work after his wife fell ill, his belief that having to look after his own child constituted exceptional circumstances, his inability to explain how he and his wife led people to believe they had stayed in London in their Spectator articles, his complaint that the cottage on his father’s farm had been rather basic for his liking. But the trip to Barnard Castle for his wife’s Easter Sunday birthday treat was obviously the highlight. Imagine our finest political brains having had six weeks to come up with a cover story and not being able to do better than an eyesight test. I tweeted that back in the 1970s, I used to take the car for a test drive to see if I was too stoned for a longer journey. The tweet was read by an old friend who pointed out that at least my excuse had the virtue of being true. And that I hadn’t conducted my driving experiments with a four-year-old child in the car. Rather there had been a 21-year-old child behind the wheel.
Source: Digested week: from the trials of Dom to hopeful news of the Proms
Category: Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson, Football, Proms, Politics, UK news, Coronavirus outbreak
