Boris Johnson has defied the pro-lockdown groupthink

Should the name of Dominic Cummings ever make it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, there’s one Cummings phrase our successors are sure to see. ‘Weirdos and misfits’ were what he valued. He said so in his blog, describing his preferred applicants for a job with his team at No. 10.

I like the phrase. Such misfits can so often light the pathway where more timid minds and characters lose their nerve or their way. Cummings has always valued disruptors; always railed against Orwell’s ‘groupthink’; always rated the kind of people who question the conventional wisdom, the nostrums of the hour. And good for him. He’s one of them, and we need such people.

Cummings appears, however, to have overlooked the presence in Downing Street of an eminent example of what he sought: a weirdo and misfit if ever anyone deserved the name. As Covid-19 struck there was, right at the heart of government, a man prepared to challenge the gathering consensus about how to tackle the spread of a virus that might (or might not) turn into a deadly pandemic.