From Covid-19 and Dominic Cummings to George Floyd, Boris Johnson just doesn’t get it – he is behind the curve and out of touch

It is a common mistake in politics to confuse media agenda with public opinion, and this is one of those moments

Anyone who reads my blog will know I have in recent days been engaged in what Matt Hancock would call a “herculean” effort – straining sinews no less to gather and analyse the letters Tory MPs have sent to constituents complaining about the Boris Johnson/Dominic Cummings scandal.

It was my own fault, a tweet, urging people to write to their MP, with a link to tell them how, and a plea to send me the responses when they came. Cue avalanche, and more than a week on, still they come. Visit my latest blog if you want a line-by-line analysis of the latest beauty to land, from Jacob Rees-Mogg, dreadful grammar and punctuation and all… what do they learn at Eton, these posh boys?

I have posted tens of thousands of words on my website, in seven different “episodes”, so will not go into the letters in detail here, but if I were to knit together the endlessly repeated cut and paste sections taken from the “line to take” sent out by No 10, and boil the hundreds of letters down to their essence, it is this:

“Dear Constituent… Thanks. Lots of anger out there. I get it, because of all the sacrifices people (me included) have made. However, Dominic Cummings held a press conference, he answered lots of questions, he did what any father would, Jenny Harries the deputy chief medical officer said it was OK (she didn’t by the way), the Durham police are not taking it further, it is now time to move on, and get behind our wonderful prime minister in the amazing job he is doing to defeat this virus.”

Just as many have played word and phrase bingo at the wretched No 10 briefings, so I found myself doing the same with these MPs’ letters, and “move on” is far and away the winner.

The No 10 team will feel they have succeeded in that. The Cummings story has slipped down the news agenda. This is the one thing that preoccupies Johnson – who has never really moved on from glib journalist to serious politician – more than anything else. The death of George Floyd in the US, and the protests that have spread here, have occupied the news, and fuelled anger, in a way that Cummings was doing in Britain a short while ago.

As with Covid-19, Johnson was too slow to see the possible ramifications of the Minneapolis murder here. As with coronavirus, he assumed British superiority would ensure we avoided the worst of the fallout. As with Covid-19, he was wrong. As with the virus, by the time he vaguely took it seriously, and did one of his Bunker-TV home videos, an awful lot of damage had been done, this time to the police, statues and the standing of his government.

The news agenda man in him will have at least taken some consolation in Cummings, whose unbelievable press conference in the Downing Street garden came on the same day as George Floyd died in the USA, sliding down and eventually off the bulletins as the Floyd case moved up them.

Of course, I am sure he would rather people were not throwing thing at the gates of No 10, and reminding each other of his record of casual and not-so-casual racism, nonetheless he and Cummings will be thinking: “Job done, we toughed it out, saw them off, nothing to see here, the country has moved on. The Cummings saga is over.”

They are wrong. It is a common mistake in politics to confuse media agenda with public opinion, and this is one of those moments. In the real world, the issue will not go away, because it speaks to something seriously wrong at the heart of government, and because there are too many unanswered questions.

The latest sign of that was the initiative announced by two lawyers, Mike Schwarz, of Hodge, Jones & Allen, and Matthew Ryder, a QC from Matrix barristers’ chambers, backed by a group of nurses, doctors, scientists, Covid-19 survivors, families of coronavirus victims and what politicians like to call “ordinary people” from around the country… “A Citizens’ bid for the prosecution of Dominic Cummings.”

Two things struck me, reading through the detail of their plan. First, the level of legal examination already done, not just of what Cummings did, and the inconsistencies in his story, but also of what Durham Police and the Metropolitan Police did or, more to the point, did not do. Second, the kind of people backing the fight for the case to be re-examined and, if it is not, to launch a private prosecution.

There seemed to be no “celebs” involved, no rent-a-quote publicity hunters, no professional campaigners, nobody with a vast social media following. There were more northerners than southerners, so the “metropolitan elite” jibe is less easily thrown. A mental health nurse from Hull, a building society worker from Wakefield, teachers from the regions, administrators, doctors, directors of small companies, and several people who had their own tragic story to tell, of friends and family lost, of parents and grandparents who died alone, of loved ones unable to attend funerals – a common theme in the hundreds of exchanges with MPs that were sent to me.

Like Lisa Green, manager of a physiotherapy business in Colne Valley, Yorkshire, who was quoted in the “Citizens’ bid” press release. “The government think they have got away with this, but the anger is real and it will not go away. It’s not just about what he got up to in Durham, and his eye-test test drive, or his walks in the woods; it is the fact he left London in the first place. When I think of the people who died alone, or the people who could not attend funerals, or the people separated from families on the front line, it makes my blood boil to see him claiming his circumstances were exceptional, and it shames the government to see Boris Johnson and the entire cabinet pretend there was nothing wrong with what he did. I will be happy to support in whatever way I can the case against Cummings.”

So will I. So, I suspect, will many of the thousands of people who have been fobbed off and patronised by their Tory MPs, told that Cummings did nothing wrong because he had exceptional circumstances. If you could not visit, comfort, or bury a loved one, because you buried every instinct in your body and stuck to the rules, and you see Cummings get away with it, that anger is not going to evaporate just because the news caravan moves on. There is not a constituency in the land where that anger is not burning, growing, and ready to erupt again, when the time comes.

There were many attempts made to get rid of that statue of Colston in Bristol. They all failed. Then something awful happened in Minneapolis, someone caught it on camera, the footage went round the world, people took to the streets in protest, and suddenly Edward Colston was sinking to the river bed.

I don’t know what it will be that will light a fresh match to the Cummings tinderbox. But it will be something, and I confidently predict Cummings will not last as long atop his pedestal as Colston lasted on his.