The truth about me and Dominic Cummings

It is such a relief that Dominic Cummings has gone. Not for the sake of the country or the government — you can make your own mind up about that. No, no, I’m talking about me. Over the past year or so, the abuse I’ve received on Twitter and Facebook for reporting anything perceived to have originated anywhere near Cummings has been wearing. I’ve never endorsed anything he said or did. That’s not my job, as you well know. My job is to tell you the thoughts, plans, hopes and dreams of the most powerful member of the government (which he was for a period last autumn). Sometimes that was briefed by him, often it was gleaned from old-fashioned reporting. But so triggered are some by him that even sophisticated opponents extended their hate to the chronicler, me — which I ignore, though it’s a dull background noise. Just days before Cummings quit, the virtual world infected the real world, when a posh thirtysomething bloke on Hampstead Heath approached me with his hands in prayer, ‘begging’ me to stop being Cummings’s ‘stenographer’.