Here it was. At long last. Dominic Cummings in the flesh at the parliamentary select committee. He was dressed in the same immaculate white cotton shirt that he sported for his ‘agony in the garden’ appearance in Downing Street a year ago. But this time he wasn’t in the dock. He was like a school governor on prize-giving day, handing out gongs, and delivering the odd stiff rebuke to senior prefects.
Matt Hancock got a dressing-down he won’t forget. He was accused of misleading officials and the public.
‘He should have been fired for at least 15 or 20 things,’ said Dom, ‘for lying to everyone on multiple occasions.’
Whoops. Time for Hancock to start work on his memoirs. Boris got off fairly lightly. The weekend newspapers were full of reports that Dom would dump on the PM from a great height. The buckets of manure were empty. He declined to assert that Boris had called the virus ‘Kung Flu’. The rumour that he bunked off key meetings to complete his biography of Shakespeare also went unconfirmed. Dom, at his harshest, complained that Boris was ‘1,000 times far too obsessed with the media.’ The PM will be delighted to have received such a modest score. Most people would put it at a million.
Dom didn’t shy away from dismantling his personal reputation. The country knows him as the ‘evil genius’, the arch-manipulator of people and events, the malign wizard who can hypnotise the nation and bend us all to his will. But he corrected this impression numerous times. He heaped praise on experts who, he said, were ‘a thousand times smarter than I am.’ He even questioned his own role in government.
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