Put your car keys down. Your eyes do not deceive you. Dominic Cummings really is the best we've got

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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

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The final leaf of paper turned, caught the light of late afternoon, and was lowered on top of the pile. The author exhaled. Job done.

In a calm, understated fashion, Dominic Cummings had set the record straight. The lies of the media corrected, and now that the nation had heard for themselves what he had done, and why, he could keep his job and we could all move on.

Now that they knew, for example, that he had rushed home from No 10 to check on his wife, who’d told him she thought he had coronavirus, and that a few hours later he then went back to No 10, the issue would be put to bed.

Because nothing screams “nothing to see here” like the casual news that someone has been breezily commuting between Downing Street and a house whose residents think there is coronavirus in it.

We would learn that he decided to make the 264-mile trip to Durham the next evening. He decided not to tell the prime minister. Deciding what is and isn’t worth telling the prime minister is the kind of decision he makes every day, after all.

And in his judgement, his judgement being the thing that the country helped divide just cannot cope without, this one just wasn’t worth a quick text. “Know you’re busy boss, but I, your most senior member of staff, am about to massively break the lockdown rules.”

Why trouble the big guy with that? It’s hardly a big deal, is it, as the last three days have amply demonstrated.

Still, he was lucky about the petrol, because the decision was complex enough already. His wife was ill, he thought he might get ill, oh yeah, and his house had become a target for protesters.

His getting out of London was a security issue. Because who of us can forget all those huge protests, all that civil disobedience, right at the end of March when you were only allowed to leave your house to go to Tesco?

So with that part cleared up, there was the other, trivial issue about the trip to a local beauty spot thirty miles from the house that just so happened to have taken place on his wife’s birthday.

That, we would learn, from the mouth of the government’s chief strategic adviser, the man without whose brain we cannot function as a nation, was one of those “check your eyesight driving trips” that we all know and love.

By this point, Cummings had become the world’s first known coronavirus patient whose eyesight had been impacted by the disease. So it was crucial that, before driving back to London, a short trip to a lovely little bluebell field should take place, just to check if he could handle the long drive back to London.

The Greek historian Thucydides, who happens to be one of Cummings’s personal heroes, invented an interesting historical technique which was to make up crucial conversations based on what he imagined the people who had them must have said, so he surely cannot object if the same method is briefly applied here.

“Really not sure if my eyes are up for driving, darling.”

“I could drive?”

“No no, chuck the kid in the back and we’ll test it out.”

“I really can drive, darling.”

“No no, it’s your birthday. I’ll drive us to the bluebell field, and if it gets too much, or if the lad needs a wee, we can stop by the riverbank and play in the woods for a bit. You know, just a normal, straightforward, eye test drive.”

At all times, Cummings was very keen to stress that there absolutely definitely wasn’t one rule for him and another for everybody else.

“I don’t think I am so different, and I don’t think there is one rule for me and another for other people,” he said, before explaining that, having taken it into his own hands to drive to Durham, he then had no choice but to drive back again two weeks later.

“If I hadn’t have worked here, I could have just have stayed in an isolated cottage,” he said, by way of accidentally confirming that there is, in fact, one rule for him and another for everybody else

We would also learn that, a few days into his second home self-isolation, his young son and wife had to go to hospital by ambulance in the middle of the night when his son was taken his ill.

This is an awful ordeal that no one should have to suffer, nor have to discuss in public. But even so, it cannot be ignored that lockdowns serve a clear purpose, to lock the virus down in its place, and stop its spread.

Some other countries began with regional lockdowns, to prevent it being transported from high risk regions to low risk. And yet here was the government’s key strategic advisor, explaining that having driven the virus across the country, via five long hours and three people confined with it in a car, he now found himself in the not wholly unforeseeable situation of requiring medical attention.

Ambulance workers were exposed to it, hospital workers, hospital patients and visitors too, probably. And whether, by this point, they had also been exposed to the proper personal protective equipment is not a matter Mr Cummings discussed, for some reason.

But it’s certainly the case that PPE has been sent first where it was needed most. At the time at which Mr Cummings’s family were taken to hospital, there were 12,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in London. In Durham, there were around 200.

It does not take a strategic mind on the stupefying capacity of, say, Dominic Cummings, to understand that this is suboptimal behaviour.

There has been much debate over whether he broke the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. What’s unarguable is that he trampled all over the entire point of it.

And not just the prime minister but absolutely anybody could have told him this, far in advance, which is why he was clever enough not to ask.

It has been intimated that things might not have reached this quite unprecedentedly farcical crescendo if Cummings and co had taken any one of the 50 or so opportunities presented to them to clarify the situation, and explain his actions. No 10 was asked where he was, and how his health was, daily for six weeks. Each time they declined to comment.

Had he been completely honest about it?

“The truth is that answering a lot of things does not clear up confusion,” he explained. “It increases confusion.”

So it was very important that he do the decent thing and keep the little cross country voyage to himself, for fear of “confusing” the public, who are, let’s face it, certainly confused now.

There are so many interwoven ways in which people are confused that it is hard to de-confuse them all. One might be not even so much “why” but physiologically “how” they are meant to swallow all this.

The other, and this really is the big one, is that this guy, who’s had seven weeks to think about it and come up with nothing better than the Top Gear eyesight challenge, this guy really is the guy who is so crucial to the nation’s health that every cabinet minister has rushed like a blind man at the wheel of a Land Rover Discovery to defend him.

But then, the nation’s health is the crucial phrase. At least one crucial public service was provided. If you’re wondering how we came to have the highest death toll in Europe, quite possibly the most damaged economy and the least idea of a clue how to get out of it all, well, a better look at the man behind the wizard’s curtain might explain it all.

An hour later, this woeful story would be put to our actual prime minister. Why didn’t his wife drive? Why would he have to leave London to get away from protests when no protests are possible? His answer?

“It is not for me to comment, you must put those questions to Cummings,” which he knows is not possible. And it is, of course, very obviously for him to comment, because it is only he that can sack him, and he has declined to do so.

A complete non-answer, from a complete non-entity.

Still, no need to pick up the car keys. Your eyes do not deceive you. This really is the very best we’ve got.