What the fury about Cummings’s road trip is really about

Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can’t still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If they are, it rather makes a fantastic irony of the fact that these are the kind of people who often refer to the rest of us at Little Englanders.

If – as so many of us hope – Durhamgate is finally fading away, now might be a good time to survey the wreckage. To look back on these feverish seven days in which journalists have thought and talked about little else other than the question of where Cummings self-isolated when ill, and ask what on earth it was all about. Why did some people get so het up about Cummings’ drive to Durham? And why, even more strikingly, did Boris Johnson refuse to bend the knee to the whipped-up media fury by sacking Cummings?

I think it’s pretty clear.