It’s a bit late for Dominic Cummings to apologise

Dominic Cummings showed up at the Covid Inquiry dressed in his signature white shirt. Plus, in a nod to formality, he’d added a shoe-string tie , rakishly askew. He was interrogated by Hugo Keith KC, a lawyer with a plausible manner and an expensive tailor. He looked like one of those shiny new MPs with an answer for everything. The kind who switches parties as easily as changing energy suppliers. Keith obviously hoped to make Cummings blush by reading out his famously sarcastic emails. He recited this from the archive.

‘The cabinet’, wrote Cummings, ‘is largely irrelevant to policy or execution… it’s seen by everyone in No 10 as not a place for serious discussion.’

Cummings stuck to his guns on the stand. At the end of 2019, he said, he’d urged Boris to consider ‘radically shrinking the size of the cabinet, back to where it was 100 or so years ago.