How much damage to the government has Dom’s bomb done?

The more anticipated a parliamentary appearance, the less it tends to live up to its billing. But Dominic Cummings’s testimony before MPs on Wednesday was one of the more remarkable parliamentary moments of this century. His attacks on his former boss were jaw–dropping. He said that it wouldn’t have helped if Boris Johnson had chaired Cobra meetings at the start of the crisis since the Prime Minister didn’t take Covid seriously and that it was ‘completely crazy’ that the country had to choose between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at the last election (this remark was particularly astonishing given Cummings’s influence on the Conservative campaign). But his criticisms of the entire way that the British state works were just as significant. It says something that the claim that the then deputy cabinet secretary described the country as ‘absolutely fucked’ after she had inspected the pandemic plan was one of the less noteworthy moments of the day.

Cummings’s evidence comes just as there is a new, more transmissible Covid variant. Scientists are beginning to get nervous, but Johnson is optimistic and determined to push on with the easing of lockdown restrictions. It is tempting to say that we know how this will end. More scientists will voice their worries in public. The pressure on Johnson to act will grow. Eventually, and reluctantly, the PM will accept the need to once more curtail people’s liberties.

There is, however, a crucial difference this time: the vaccines. They are a reason to hope that the story will not have the same ending, because they should mean that the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths is broken. (Though it should be noted that as of Tuesday, 33 people have been admitted to Bolton hospital with Covid in the past seven days, compared with 13 the week before.)