Robert Peston Robert Peston

Dominic Cummings has become a symbol of a very British inequality

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Dominic Cummings knows all about how perception damages public confidence in political parties. Here he is in June 2017:

‘People think, and by the way I think most people are right: ‘The Tory party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me’. That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct. Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.’

And this is what he said yesterday about why it was OK to walk in the Durham woods, when he should have been strictly quarantining because of his Covid-19 symptoms.

‘At one point the three of us walked into woods owned by my father, next to the cottage that I was staying in.

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