Like Thomas Cromwell, Dominic Cummings will fall. Until then, how much damage can he do?

The route to demi-fascism doesn’t necessarily involve tanks on the streets. When a population is indifferent to the threat, it can come by stealth, writes Matthew Norman

The gravest danger to liberty is the one that attracts the least attention (PA)

The classics scholar in Downing Street knows this already but the etymology behind the plague du jour’s name is this.

Under a microscope the virus resembles a crown, the Latin for which is corona.

You don’t need a microscope to identify that there are two coronaviruses creeping this way from China. Which one will prove deadlier, the literal or metaphorical, won’t be apparent for a while.

But the ancient pathology of the avaricious monomaniac clasping at kingship is on the global march, and it has the makings of a pandemic.

Less than three years after President Xi of China demolished the barriers between himself and lifelong rule, Vladimir Putin is doing the same.

In Washington last week, meanwhile, Donald Trump subtly revealed his self-estimation by (slightly mis-) quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson in the context of impeachment: “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

Even as #YouAreNotaKing was trending on Twitter, the UK’s fusty old constitutional monarchy was sniffing the acrid aroma of something new.

Boris Johnson’s wish to be king (of the world) predates his first Latin lesson. Out of the mouths of babes… Some half century after he lisped that ambition in his nursery, we find him embarking on the greediest power grab since Henry VIII removed England and Wales from the dominion of Rome.

The Thomas Cromwell in this reworking of medieval history is Dominic Cummings, reports of whose political demise were exaggerated.

Cummings’ own power grab has been astounding to behold and continues unchecked. After destroying one powerful check on elective tyranny by masterminding the campaign to leave the EU, he appears determined to dismantle the rest on his liege lord’s behalf.

The effort to subsume the Treasury within the No 10 machine may not succeed (most prime ministers with large majorities have tried and failed). But the assault on the independence of the BBC looks unstoppable.

Whether ending the licence fee is as inevitable as Cummings briefs his cyphers in the press, the threat alone will neuter the BBC’s already weakened commitment to exposing outrages enacted by this government.

The gravest danger to liberty is the one that attracts the least attention. But anyone who read Cummings’ remarks after the Court of Appeal briefly stayed that monstrously shaming deportation flight to Jamaica should have felt a shiver of terror.

According to ITN, Cummings referred to the need for “urgent action on the farce that judicial review has become”.

There is nothing farcical about it. Judicial review is a central and vital facet of the independent judiciary. Under our constitution, it is one of the three equal and counterbalancing branches alongside the executive (government) and legislature (parliament). For centuries, this is how our democracy, flawed as it is, has survived.

After its brief resurgence during the War of Brexit, the Commons has returned to its more familiar role as glorified rubber stamp by the size of the Tory majority. Johnson-Cummings, or Cummings-Johnson, will have no resistance there.

They can banish as many people of colour to poverty in alien lands as they want, knowing there are no Ken Clarkes or Rory Stewarts left to represent the dwindling conscience of a brazenly racist political movement.

What they cannot do, for now, is ignore the rule of law with the same contempt they lavish on fundamental decency. The judges are the only obstacle left in terms of throwing the lives of the desperate and powerless as chunks of meat to the alligators of the press and the barracudas of a xenophobic electorate they mean to keep well fed and pliant.

How close an interest Johnson takes in such trivial concerns isn’t clear. Being vindictive by nature, he will want payback for the 11-0 Supreme Court verdict on proroguing parliament. But he may be wholly content to play the king, and leave the execution of this neo-Reformation to his Cromwell.

If so, we are entirely in the hands of an eccentric who is as obscure to the public as unelected by it. Like Steve Bannon, his erstwhile equivalent in both dress sense and influence at the court of Donald I, he has nothing but arrogant scorn for the existing democratic structures.

The grunge lords of anarchy feed off chaos and the opportunity it creates to refashion the world to their tastes. These deranged Terra Formars believe in the cleansing force of fire. They would burn more than judicial independence for their egomaniacal cod ideologies.

The route to demi-fascism doesn’t necessarily involve tanks on the streets. When a population is indifferent to the threat, it can come by stealth.

The European Court of Human Rights will shortly cease to be any defence against abuses like the deportation of a man who had lived here his entire life to Jamaica, following a dangerous driving offence in which no one was hurt.

If Cummings realises his threat against the judiciary and the BBC, what will survive to defend the values Cummings himself tragicomically affects to cherish?

“Extremists are on the rise in Europe,” he piously declared months before the referendum about leaving the EU he blamed, with no discernible ironic intent, for that.

“It is increasingly important that Britain offers an example of civilised, democratic, liberal self-government.”

How the deportees scrabbling for food and shelter in Montego Bay would be tickled by that one.

Cromwell didn’t survive for long after masterminding the original Brexit for Henry, and Cummings probably won’t either. It is the way of kings to fret when their designated hitmen accumulate vast power of their own, and in time a different government will be elected to begin the work of restoration.

The alarming question today, surveying the other coronavirus creeping towards us, is what the hell will be left to restore?