If there’s one unbreakable rule in politics, it’s that where Dominic Cummings goes, drama usually follows.
So when the prime minister’s Brexit mastermind left Number 10 suddenly last November with all his stuff in a cardboard box, having fallen out with (among many others) Boris Johnson’s fiancée Carrie Symonds, Westminster held its breath. Yet the tell-all blog some assumed he'd write about his time inside Downing Street never came.
The first hint of trouble emerged only this spring with a series of anonymously sourced and potentially embarrassing stories about an £88,000 designer makeover of the No 10 flat in which Johnson, Symonds and their baby son Wilf live. If reports that they just couldn’t live with Theresa May’s “John Lewis nightmare” weren’t galling enough for anyone currently making do with their landlord’s knackered Ikea, it turned out £30,000 of the cost was covered by taxpayers – aka people who can only dream of scraping that much together for a house deposit, never mind for luxe wallpaper - and Johnson then reportedly tried to find a rich Tory donor to cover the rest. It wasn't lost on friends of Cummings' old foe Carrie that the stories blamed all this on her supposedly expensive tastes, in what they see as a sexist and underhand way of attacking a woman with a political mind of her own.
Cummings hasn’t confirmed or denied being involved in what's inevitably now dubbed the Wallpapergate leaks. But he did break cover last week to say he warned Johnson at the time that getting a friendly millionaire to pay for his decorators was ‘unethical, foolish and possibly illegal’, given the risk that anyone willing to buy him sofas might want favours in return. Now the Electoral Commission, which regulates political party funding, is investigating whether the law was actually broken. And here’s where the plot really thickens.
Cummings seemingly broke his silence in response to Downing Street briefings that he might be behind some more serious leaks - possibly including the so-called ‘chatty rat’ episode, where an unidentified insider tipped reporters off last October that a second lockdown was coming, seemingly because they didn't trust Johnson to go through with it otherwise. Cummings denies being the guilty rodent, pointing the finger instead at Carrie's friend Henry Newman, a longstanding political staffer. The whole thing ended in denials all round and explosive anonymous allegations that after being reluctantly forced into imposing that second lockdown, Johnson shouted that he’d rather let “bodies pile high in their thousands” than have a third - words he now denies using.
Remember that episode of Line of Duty which ended with Kate Fleming and Ryan Pilkington both pointing guns at each other, screaming? That’s basically Cummings and Johnson now, even if it’s unclear which is Good Kate and which is Evil Ryan. Both are likely to know things about the other which could be damaging if made public, so both have ammunition, and both seem willing to use it. Which leaves the rest of us cowering in a corner like DI Jo Davidson, wailing that we shouldn’t have to watch this.
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Because what really matters here isn’t who said what in a temper, or who looks down on good old John Lewis. It’s that the 127,000 people who have died of covid weren’t just bodies, but people’s beloved grandparents and partners and friends, whose bereaved families understandably want to know if lives could have been saved by locking down earlier. Dominic Cummings is due to testify before MPs investigating the handling of the pandemic in May, and says he'll answer as many questions as they've got. The drama isn’t even nearly over yet.