Like many British people I have spent much of the foregoing weekend incandescent with a fury I did not know I possessed. Not because Dominic Cummings and his family broke the rules about quarantine and lockdown. But because of the reaction of the British government which, in order to preserve one of its unelected advisers from ever having to humble himself sufficiently to admit an error, has destroyed its own regulations which had done so much to preserve life and health, cast aspersions on the veracity of the Durham police force and gaslighted (gaslit?) the nation on what following the guidance meant. Most unforgivably of all, it has taken the sacrifices of many ordinary people and told them that if they had been cleverer and better people, they need not have made them at all.
The outlines of the story are known by everyone, the detail to no one – except probably the Cummings family. If you include the disingenuous account of their self-isolating period which his wife Mary Wakefield wrote in The Spectator before the story broke, the Cummings camp has provided at least three conflicting accounts of it all, and failed to address any of the central questions: did they really have no friends, family or colleagues in London who could have supported them? Could Cummings’s sister not have driven down to London if both parents had become seriously unwell? If this was all within the regulations, why was it kept secret and why did they claim that the police had not been in contact with them?
So at first glance this is a fairly typical story of political hypocrisy. Why has this been so viscerally upsetting?
First there is the anger that one would feel at any story of this nature: someone powerful has done wrong and has faced no consequences. There is one law for them, and another for us. But that’s not it.
Then there’s rage at the insult of the government basically telling us that we had all misunderstood the laws and guidance and we were allowed to do this all along. But that’s not it.
Then there’s the horror at the wider implications of the defence: how the guidance be enforced any longer? Which could lead to people taking greater risks and a resurgence of infection rates. That is extremely dangerous. But even that is not quite it.
It is because the government has said that Cummings’ decision was not just understandable, it was right. He followed his instincts and cared for his child without thought for the greater good, and that was morally admirable.
All over Britain, people have been making very difficult moral decisions. Ill parents have locked themselves in with young children and had a hellish time. People have supported friends and family struggling with mental health issues and loneliness, but have not been able to sit with them in the dark hours and give them a hug when they cried. People have not visited family members, who have died. We have watched others suffer. We have all felt the same instincts to love and protect that Cummings has done, but we have suppressed them – not because of the rules but because we believed it was for the greater good, to get the virus under control, to protect others, strangers even. And the cost of that has been a feeling of guilt, that lurks always at the back of our minds. Perhaps we were wrong? Perhaps we should have gone?
The government has basically told us that we are right to feel guilty because we should have gone.
On Twitter yesterday, I came across a man whose mother lived in Ayr; she had become very ill, he worried should he break the rules and go and see her, how ill was she? and then she died. Alone. He wrote: ‘I don’t hate Dominic Cummings. I hate myself.’