The Covid inquiry is Brexit redux

Yesterday saw the latest performance of one of the longest-running dramas in town. In many ways, the Covid inquiry felt very much like a slightly unnecessary reboot (Matrix Resurrections style) of Cummings’s appearance at the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee back in May 2021. We didn’t learn a lot yesterday that we didn’t know then, for all that the political correspondents tried to breathlessly repackage ‘revelations’ about Boris Johnson not understanding life expectancy that we’d known about since July 2021. 

But to me, Cummings’s appearance was actually a remake of an even earlier drama. The 2019 Channel 4 programme Brexit: The Uncivil War was bookended by exactly this scene. Here, Benedict Cumberbatch hauls out his best Cummings mannerisms, and is grilled about his perceived misdemeanours around Facebook advertising at a fictitious public inquiry into Brexit. I couldn’t help feeling that this part of the film represented some kind of wish fulfilment from Remainers, longing for this scene to happen in real life.