Another thing: Dominic Cummings is a master of media manipulation. The two photos of his “exit” from Downing Street – one coming out of the door with the warm yellow light inside the house giving us the feel of watching a US film about a London Christmas, and the other on the pavement with his box, with a red double-decker bus, the Cenotaph, and the Palace of Westminster in the background – were sheer genius.
They are the kind of thing that a business would pay a leading advertising company multi-millions for.
But he is throwing the accusation now that “Boris Johnson wanted herd immunity”. What he really means is that Boris Johnson wanted to achieve herd immunity before a vaccine was ready, by letting the virus kill off a large part of the population, and by letting another large part of the population die who needed life-saving treatment in hospital but who wouldn’t be getting it. But he feels he can’t say that, perhaps because he himself is known to have had the same position.
He is also calling Boris Johnson a “clown”. Was this something he only discovered recently? Of course it can’t have been. And it is anyway an exaggeration. The implication is that Cummings only won the general election for the Tories so that he himself could control the government, with Boris Johnson as his dimwitted puppet. How far can he go in actually saying that out loud? He is choosing to meet the enemy on unfavourable terrain, and as a man who has read Sun Tzu he should know what happens next.
This could be spectacular.