The Cummings road trip debacle is my last straw

I can’t remember the day I realised Santa Claus wasn’t real but I will never forget the moment I lost my belief in the Conservative party. It happened very recently — this morning, in fact. It was an odd day anyway which began with my reading an email from Mary Wakefield, inviting me to write this diary, even as she was appearing on my TV screen: an unnerving experience. Should I accept? Should I pretend that I’m ignorant of the biggest news story of the moment? I’m reassured that the one of the most trenchant and earliest attacks on Dominic Cummings’s road trip was written by Alex Massie and appeared on The Spectator website. It was an extraordinary article and kudos to The Spectator for publishing it.

But much, much worse than the incident itself has been the government’s handling of it and it was watching the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, being interviewed by Andrew Marr a few minutes later that did it for me. He had the misfortune to follow Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, who spoke with such grace and lucidity that I was reminded of those pipe-smoking boffins who used to turn up in Foyle’s War, the epitome of British reliability and good sense. Even before Shapps began speaking I was bracing myself. George Orwell — who else? — got it right. ‘Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Pure wind would be a generous description of Shapps’s attempts to manipulate the wriggle room he had given himself — and the Prime Minister’s press conference later the same day was even worse. What is the word for it when the entire country sees what is obviously true but is repeatedly told that it isn’t? And when the person telling you doesn’t really care? Shamelessness.