PM will dodge Dom’s bombs
NOT since he was fighting for breath in a Covid intensive care ward have Boris Johnson’s many enemies had a happier day.
For seven candid hours their trusted new ally Dominic Cummings hurled grenades at his old boss, branding him chaotic, unreliable, fatally incompetent and utterly unfit to be PM.
Dominic Cummings is a highly intelligent man genuinely motivated by delivering for the British people[/caption]
It is an odd verdict to arrive at AFTER masterminding his 80-seat majority and joining him in Downing Street. But then Cummings, the maverick eccentric, also claimed he himself should have been nowhere near No10 either.
We happen to believe he’s wrong on both counts. We just regret that the two men could not work together.
Yesterday’s bombshells came so thick and fast and for so long it was hard to keep up. Boris wasn’t even the vengeful aide’s main target. His focus, rightly, was civil service “groupthink” and the catastrophic initial advice to the PM from Public Health England and Sage.
Villain-in-chief, though, was Matt Hancock whom he machine-gunned again and again, claiming the Health Secretary should long ago have been fired, especially after allegedly discharging OAPs untested into care homes.
Every word was relished, accepted not as opinion but as cast-iron fact, by the same people who have spent a year calling Cummings a mendacious charlatan.
Cummings branded Boris chaotic, unreliable, fatally incompetent and utterly unfit to be PM[/caption]
PUBLIC DOES NOT TRUST HIM
This new faith was unshakeable, even as he suddenly produced a brand new motive for the infamous County Durham/ Barnard Castle excursion, about which his public confession last May was meant to have been the definitive word.
And there lies the problem. The Sun admires Cummings. He is a highly intelligent man genuinely motivated by delivering for the British people and without whom neither Brexit nor the Tories’ 2019 triumph would have happened. But the public largely does not trust him.
Plus, even Cummings admits a genius such as Bill Gates would have struggled to handle Covid, as Boris did. Most sane people cut the PM the same slack.
It does not surprise them that a newly elected Government was knocked flat by an unprecedented, deadly non-flu pandemic, with no option but to rely on “expert” advice and complacent assurances which tragically proved worthless.
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They know too that, given the damage to the economy, Boris’s misgivings on lockdowns — including the proposed “circuit-breaker” last September — were not misplaced. Especially after seeing one fail in Wales the following month.
And they recognise that our Government was one of many whose Covid response was found wanting. The key difference since being the stellar success of our world-leading vaccine rollout.
Voters are more likely to credit the Government with that and our rosier future than rake over the terrible bleakness of 2020 and the chaos in Downing Street.
