Brendan O’Neill

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.

The media’s Dominic Cummings story has completely collapsed. He did NOT go to Durham a second time, which was reported on the front page of the Sunday Mirror and the Observer. He did NOT have any physical contact with family members. The police did NOT talk to the Cummings family about the Covid lockdown guidelines. Cummings did NOT carry on doing things that everyone else had stopped doing — he even missed the funeral of his uncle who died from Covid. He did NOT leave his London home for leisure reasons — he left it because he was receiving death threats as a result of media demonisation. He was very ill, his wife was ill, and at one point his child was taken to hospital in an ambulance in Durham.

The Dominic Cummings story is deeply disturbing. No, not the fact that Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, took what they considered to be essential steps to ensure the welfare of their young child, but the fury and the bile that have been heaped upon them for doing so.It really is something. For the entire weekend the media and the Twitterati have been raging against two parents who were ill, or at risk of falling ill, and who did what they thought was best for their kid in this situation: drove from London to Durham so that family members could assist with childcare if necessary. In a more morally coherent era than ours, the media might even have celebrated such parental commitment Parents taking measures to protect their child is perfectly normal.

I know good news is not allowed in coronavirus Britain. Instead we're all meant to cower before the death stats, fume at photos of people on beaches, and nod along as Piers Morgan bursts yet another blood vessel over what a calamitous PM Boris is. Pessimism is your highest duty in this strange, fearful nation we have become. Optimism is tantamount to thoughtcrime. How else to explain YouTube's disgraceful decision to take down a video interview with Karol Sikora, the perky professor of medicine whose reason and hopefulness on the Covid crisis has helped to keep me, and many others I'm sure, sane over these past three weeks. Confidence in humanity must not be tolerated! Well, sod it. Here's some good news. Look away now, Piers. The virus is disappearing from London.

For some people, it isn’t enough that we have locked down our daily lives. They want us to lock down our brains, too. Raise so much as a peep of criticism about the shutdown of society in response to Covid-19 and you will be raged against. And the cry is always the same: ‘Are you an expert? No. So shut the hell up.’ Only experts are allowed to speak at the moment, apparently. The rest of us — us lowly, non-expert plebs — must simply sit at home and await our instructions from on high. Those daily coronavirus news briefings feel, at times, like sermons from the mount. It is there, often from the mouths of people none of us ever voted for, that we discover how we must conduct our everyday lives and how long we will remain under house arrest.

The vast majority of Brits are behaving sensibly in this Covid-19 lockdown. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for some police forces. Some coppers are using this extraordinary emergency to throw their weight around and treat the public like aberrant schoolkids in need of a scolding. There’s a Stasi feel to some of the excessive policing of the lockdown. Consider Derbyshire police’s use of drones to spy on people walking in the Peak District. Like jumped-up busybodies, the Derbyshire force posted a tweet yesterday saying its drone unit had been flying over ‘beauty spots across the county’ capturing images of people taking a stroll. https://twitter.com/DerbysPolice/status/1243168931503882241?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw This is deeply sinister.

There was an extraordinary moment in the government’s Covid-19 news briefing yesterday. Boris Johnson was asked: ‘Prime Minister, people aren’t acting responsibly, so when are you going to bring in the police?’ Boris was aghast. ‘Bring in the police?!’, he said, looking, as one would hope he would, horrified by the prospect of the UK becoming a police state that arrests people for going outside and strolling in parks. Guess which side in this telling Q&A got the most flak? Yep, not the journalist wondering out loud when cops are going to step in, but the PM who has an instinctive loathing of such an authoritarian prospect.

We’re all worried about older people right now. But I’m worried about the young too. I fear they lack the social nous and moral muscle to deal with a crisis as profound as the Covid-19 pandemic. I fear that the cult of fragility is so widespread among the youth that some will struggle to rise to the occasion of facing down this wolf at the door of our society. Our first priority must be the elderly, of course. We know Covid-19 is more dangerous for them than it is for other age groups. (Though I wish the media would stop giving the impression that every old person who catches it dies. That isn’t the case. To spread fear among the old is its own kind of disease, causing moral and mental harm to people who often feel isolated enough as it is.

Many of us suspected the Labour party was on a suicide mission. Now we know for sure. The party’s suspension of Trevor Phillips over allegations of Islamophobia feels like a turning point. It is surely one of the final nails in the coffin of irrelevance that has been enveloping this party for a few years now. The casting out of Phillips confirms two things about Labour under the baleful, Stalinist rule of the Corbynista left. First, that they will brook no dissent. No questioning of their deathly creeds of identitarianism and multiculturalism — a questioning Phillips has pursued with great clarity and purpose in recent years — will be tolerated.

Isn’t it amazing how all the woke rules for how to talk about women and people of colour go flying out the window when it comes to Priti Patel? You can say anything you like about Patel and the PC set won’t bat an eyelid. In fact they will cheer you on. Patel is possibly the only female, Asian-heritage public figure in the UK who enjoys absolutely none of the protections of political correctness. It’s always open season on Priti. So for years we have been told that we shouldn’t call successful women ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’. Those are sexist insults against women who have simply shown the kind of resolve and determination that men are celebrated for, feminists say. And they have a point.

Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are born without a sex. That is easily as loopy and anti-scientific as saying the Earth isn’t a sphere. Butler, the Labour MP for Brent, was taking part in another discussion about Labour’s interminable slide down the trans rabbit hole. Labour has completely lost the plot on this issue.

There has been a revolt in Ireland. Not a huge one. It isn’t a Brexit-sized rebellion. It isn’t an all-out populist protest against the establishment of the kind we have seen in the US and various European countries in recent years. But still, the result of Saturday’s general election is a brilliant blow against the Irish establishment and its obsessively pro-EU, anti-Brexit leanings. People are talking up the election result as a humiliation for Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Leo Varadkar. It certainly is that. Varadkar’s attempt to make the election about Brexit — and about his apparently brave efforts to frustrate Brexit — fell spectacularly flat.

Friday was Brexit day. The day that the largest act of democracy in the history of this country was finally enacted. The day when the wishes of 17.4m people finally became a reality. And how did the BBC, the national broadcaster, mark this extraordinary democratic day? With a sneer, of course. A smug, aloof, bitter sneer at the entire country. Not only did BBC reporters huff and moan at the mass pro-Brexit gathering in Parliament Square, coming off like anthropologists who had happened upon some bizarre, exotic tribe. It also chose that day to push out anti-Brexit nonsense via its kids’ wing, CBBC. Yes, even children must now be subjected to the media elite’s Brexitphobic claptrap.