Danny Kruger, the Tory MP who is an old friend of Dominic Cummings and his spouse, got it right last night. The ‘affaire Cummings’ – as the French would put it – is no longer about the most powerful aide to the prime minister and the minutiae of how he interpreted coronavirus quarantine rules differently from most of the country.
Kruger argued that attacks on Cummings are attacks on Boris Johnson, because the PM has so conspicuously become Cummings’s human shield. So as another Tory MP told me – a grandee no less – this is now all about the PM himself and how he governs. It is about why Boris Johnson rates Cummings so highly, and why he needs him at the centre of his government.
That is what the official representatives of the parliamentary Tory party, the executive of the 1922 Committee, want from the PM: not Cummings’s head (they wouldn’t say no to it, but they accept it is in the PM’s discretion to hire and fire aides); but an account from the PM of why Cummings matters so much to the way his government operates and why his cabinet seemingly matters so little.
As Tory MPs tell me, what the debacle has exposed – as if that was not already obvious – is the power of Cummings (symbolised in his use of the Downing Street garden for his press conference) and the weakness of cabinet ministers (despatched to dispense barely credible justifications of Cunmings’s actions).
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