Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

What else could Dominic Cummings have done?

Photo by DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images


The question is, does Dominic Cumming’s four-year-old son possess preternatural resilience – a bit like the infant John the Baptist who went off into the desert as a boy. Or does he, like my own children at that age, need a bit of feeding, occasional supervision to stop him playing with matches and a bath at bedtime?

If the former, and the child can fend for himself at this tender age, then it would indeed have been wrong for Mr Cummings and his wife Mary Wakefield (of this parish) to have taken themselves off to Durham, where his family lives, where his sister and nieces were volunteering to take care of the little boy. There, he and his wife, who had come down with coronavirus, could isolate in a separate building knowing their little boy would be looked after if he needed to be.

But if the child is like every other four-year-old, there weren’t that many options available to Mr C. He and his wife could, of course, have bribed a nanny – maybe they have one – to live 24 hours in his virus-infested London home, or to take the child away somewhere else rather than stay with his family. But that would, presumably, have breached the guidelines in a different fashion. Nannies, like cleaners, are out of action during lockdown, remember?

I cannot see what other course of conduct open to the Cummingses would have been more moral than the one they adopted

So the question to ask Piers Morgan and Ian Blackford, who have both been demanding that the PM sack Dominic Cummings, is what they would have done in the same circumstances? If both they and their wives had similarly contracted an illness which leaves you hors de combat, flaked out, unable to register what’s happening to you, well, who would have minded their children, had they been that small?

I honestly can’t see the problem.

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