‘Gove stuck to the line that it was perfectly normal to visit castles to check you haven’t gone blind’

In this extract from his book, ‘The Cummings Files’, political satirist Arthur Mathews has found diary entries, blog posts and notes to self that offer ‘valuable’ insight into Dominic Cummings’s brain

(Arthur Mathews/Faber and Faber)

The Tory Party grass-roots, all of whom are over 75, don’t like the idea of all of them having to die to achieve herd immunity. Do we have another option? Called in Boris and Hancock for a brainstorming session. What are the options? I told them: sometimes it’s a good idea to confuse the opposition by coming up with an idea that is IN DIRECT OPPOSITION to one’s previous proposal.

Hancock was a bit perplexed by this, but Boris got it immediately. One minute, completely opposed to Brexit, the next, totally in favour of it. It’s a great way to wrong-foot your opponents. So I decided we should go for the OPPOSITE of herd immunity … which is COMPLETE LOCKDOWN.

Because we need THE SCIENCE behind us, I rang up Neil Ferguson at Imperial to give us his backing. He wasn’t at his desk, and the phone was picked up by a cleaning lady. She said that she wasn’t an epidemiologist (or a scientist of any kind) but she thought that, yes, lockdown seemed like a great idea. I said that there was a possibility that she wouldn’t be able to see any members of her family for at least a year, but she said she was OK with that. Great – we got what we wanted: Imperial backs our lockdown!