Full disclaimer: this is, obviously, written by someone who is very much not a fan of the Tory party and its politics, and that absolutely influences some of the rhetoric here. However, I do genuinely believe that the sources provided here speak to the factual basis behind the rage expressed in this post, which is why I have only included facts that can be sourced and not some of the current, unverified theories about his actions, and why the public is, at large, so rightfully angry. This may be a polemic, but it is also backed up with citations, so it’s a polemic with legs. Not literally. It’s not, like, a gross polemic millipede.
Facebook decided, despite ignoring just about every single racist, transphobic or sexist comment that I’ve ever reported, that ‘he should be launched into the sun’ was a threat of violence that justified the removal of my post after 20,000 shares. On that note, I want to clarify that I do not believe Dominic Cummings should be harmed, or that his family should be harmed or hounded in any way. I simply believe he should be fired from his government position. This is a call for the government to do the right thing and remove him from the position of authority that he has proven unworthy of holding, not for anyone to do the wrong thing. This post is not intended to whip up a frenzy of hate. It is, quite literally, a sweary explanation of all that he’s done in government. That really is it. So, on that note, on with the swears.
I am not a Voice of the People or a political pundit, but an American asked me to try and explain the whole Dominic Cummings fiasco, and I know some people on my Facey-b are not British, so maybe this will help to explain why every single (addendum: maybe 87% of ’em) British person you know is currently vibrating so furiously with rage that it’s probably registering on the Richter scale. This will be Long and Sweary, so apols in advance, but it is also fully sourced, so that’s nice.
So you know when you’re out walking in the street and all of a sudden you can just tell that you’ve stepped in chewing gum, because your shoe feels oddly sticky, but there’s nowhere for you to wipe the gum off, so you have to wait until you get home and then you pull off your shoe and there’s just this huge, amorphous blob of shit-and-saliva coated gum, and it clings to all the grooves in the tread of your shoe and it takes half a roll of toilet paper to get it off, and you just wish you were never born? That’s Dominic Cummings.
- He was one of the devious, morally bankrupt fuckstains who was responsible for the Vote Leave campaign in 2015–16, which (unfortunately, in my humble Remoaner opinion) successfully campaigned for Britain to leave the EU, and was later found to have broken electoral law [1] by spending more than its campaign budget and funnelling it through allied campaigns. It was also fined for improperly collecting people’s phone numbers and spamming them with political texts [2]. He was later found to be in contempt of Parliament [3] for refusing to take part in an investigation about whether the campaign had relied on fake news during the referendum. He was also later revealed to be a huge hyposhit, which is a portmanteau I just coined to describe a hypocrite who is also a complete unremovable shitstain, when it was reported that he’d taken over €200k of EU subsidies to manage his land [4].
- He was the Special Advisor to Michael Gove before this, a man who consists of approximately 98% tapioca and 2% spine. When he was the Secretary for Education and Cummings was his advisor, Gove completely decimated England’s education system and made working conditions practically untenable for teachers [5]. Cummings’ complete lack of moral fabric was pretty famous within his own party, with even Mr Fuckthepoor himself, David Cameron, referring to him as a ’career psychopath’ [6]. When someone who is, in essence, a hard-boiled egg cooked on the flames of a £5 burnt in front of a homeless man is calling you a psychopath and doesn’t mean it as a compliment, you’re probably a bit of a shit.
- In July 2019, when sentient gargoyle wrapped in ham Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, he made Dominic Cummings his Senior Advisor. It soon became pretty apparent that he was untouchable in this role after he fired (read: had her frogmarched out of Parliament by literal armed police) Sonia Khan, an aide to Sajid Javid, without asking Sajid Javid’s permission, something he wasn’t actually allowed to do, and then, instead of giving him a thorough telling off for overstepping, Boris Johnson gave him retroactive powers to fire anyone he wanted [7]. This pattern of Cummings blatantly acting outside of his sphere of responsibility and indeed permission and then being backed up by the Prime Minister came to a big ol’ motherfucking head this week WHEN:
- Dominic Cummings, a man who thinks a ‘soul’ is just a different way to spell the bottom part of a foot, broke the lockdown rules of the UK [8] by driving his wife, who was symptomatic with COVID-19, and child 260 miles from London to Durham [9]. Despite the official line being that anyone with symptoms was to quarantine themselves, Cummings decided to drive halfway up the fucking country for ‘childcare reasons’, and says they didn’t make even one stop at at services along the way, so I guess they just all wore nappies for the 5 hour, 260 mile drive, or something. This is blatantly a fireable offence, not least because another adviser, Neil Ferguson, resigned for breaking lockdown rules recently [10], which was met with stern grumbles of ‘yeah, you NEED to resign, you terrible ingrate’ from just about every Tory minister. However, instead of pressuring Cummings to resign or punting him into the sun, Johnson defended him [11], saying he had ‘followed his fatherly instincts’ (a hilarious defence, seeing as Johnson’s own fatherly compass is pretty fucking broken) and acted with ‘integrity’. Some fellow ministers, notably Health Secretary Matt Hancock [12], who’d chided Ferguson for breaking lockdown rules, defended Cummings on Twitter, trotting out lines about what a great father he was and how people are just being MEAN to a WORKING FATHER, and it became pretty apparent that Cummings was not going to face any sort of reprimand at all.
- Shit, my friends, hit the proverbial goddamn fan [13]. People rightly pointed out that thousands of people across the country had been unable to follow their ‘fatherly instincts’ because they’d chosen to follow the, uh, actual law instead [14]. There is some evidence that he may have travelled to grieve his dead uncle [15] with his family, although he has denied this, which, while VERY SAD, is a total slap in the face to people who have been unable to grieve their dead relatives with their family because they’ve followed restrictions (in the UK, funerals are limited to very few attendees, wakes are banned, burials can be attended in very limited numbers and cases, and you can’t visit dying people in the hospital.) Thousands of people have missed the deaths of their loved ones, or been a single parent and had to care for a child while symptomatic, or not seen their children whilst ill, or had to grieve a death alone. Essentially, by defending and exonerating Cummings, the government has told these people ‘we know we said you couldn’t hold your dying mother’s hand / care for your sick child / visit your ill relatives / grieve as a family, but… turns out you could’ve, lol!’
- Now, there are calls from some rare Tories who have evolved to have a spine for Cummings to be fired, the whole country is basically saying ‘well, if he can do it, then why can’t I?’ and threatening to break lockdown, and we’re all wondering exactly what it would take for them to finally fire Cummings. You could tip a whole (EU subsidised) farm’s worth of manure on Cummings and none of it would stick, except this manure also carries a deadly virus. It’s super.
Cummings’ press conference was also a complete and utter shitshow, during which he tried and failed to explain himself by a series of increasingly hilarious means [16]:
- Firstly, he was more than half an hour late, which really did set the tone of complete disrespect and disdain that he clearly intended, so kudos to him for knowing how to make an entrance, just like any supervillain should. In Britain, being half an hour late is basically just as rude as turning up on time and slaughtering everybody. Possibly even ruder, because at least, with the slaughter, you wouldn’t be making people’s tea go cold.
- His primary defence was literally ‘the public aren’t angry because I made this trip; they’re angry because of the way the media reported on it, and I think they’ll calm down once they hear my side of things.’ Reader, we did not calm down. Cummings has a long and storied history of taking a leaf out of Trump’s book (not one of his ghostwritten ones) and blaming the fake news media for everything, and unfortunately it’s worked out pretty well for him so far, but it completely fell flat this time as journalist after journalist bombarded him with proof, accusations and questions that made even me, someone who would suck my own tears back into my face if I was cutting onions next to Dominic Cummings on fire, wince.
- His other defence was ‘I had to leave my house because people don’t like me and I didn’t feel safe in my house, and that’s why I lied and said that I was in London the entire time,’ which does rather beg the question of why our taxes go towards providing government security, to be honest. Maybe we could have put all that money towards PPE after all.
- Another hilarious defence was ‘when I made the 45 minute drive to visit Barnard Castle, sat there for 15 minutes, spoke to a passer-by, then had a little stroll in the woods with my wife and child on the way home, I was actually just testing my eyesight to see if I could make the longer drive back home,’ which is simply comedy gold on several levels: firstly because it’s illegal in the UK to drive a vehicle if you’re worried about your eyesight [17]; and secondly because if your metric for whether you’re safe to drive or not is ‘can I see that bloody stonking great castle in front of me?’ then you’re probably not actually safe to drive. Essentially, he blatantly went out for a little jaunt and is now trying to make up an excuse, but I’m quite disappointed that ‘I was testing my two eyeballs’ was the best that a man who frequently lies for a living could come up with.
- He also says that if anyone feels betrayed by his actions and decides to follow his example and break lockdown rules, it’s the fault of the media (exact quote: ‘[…] the coverage over the past couple of days could encourage people to behave in a certain way’) which is not so much passing the buck as spotting the buck on the distant horizon and taking a 260 mile detour to avoid it.
- He claimed during the press conference, on multiple occasions, to have spoken out about the threat of a coronavirus pandemic in 2019. It appears as though he may have edited his public blogs from 2019 to include or clarify references to coronavirus in — drumroll please! — April 2020 [18]. Oh,
- Above all, he flatly stated several times that he had never offered to resign or even considered resigning, and that he thinks the public will see his side of things after the press conference, which seems optimistic, considering that Twitter is currently overflowing with more bile than a leak at the urology ward. He’s currently trending with the hashtag # cumgate, which is quite funny but I think also a little unfair, because semen is at least responsible for bringing life into the world, whereas Dominic Cummings apparently endangered lives so that he could look at a castle.
So, tl;dr Dominic Cummings should not resign. He should be fired, effective YESTERDAY, and then, very possibly, launched into the sun. But not literally. Just metaphorically. For a start, that would be a huge waste of resources in these unprecedented times.
Sources:
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44856992
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47623413
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47712040
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/10/dominic-cummings-owns-farm-got-eu-subsidy
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/apr/02/nut-no-confidence-michael-gove
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/18/david-cameron-dominic-cummings-career-psychopath
[9] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52782913
[10] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52553229
[11] https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-52792200
[12] https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1264162359733555202?s=20
[13] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52793991
[14] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/siblings-of-13-year-old-uk-coronavirus-victim-ismail-mohamed-abdulwahab-develop-symptoms (tw for death of a child)
[15] https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/dominic-cummings-trip-county-durham-18306147
[17] https://www.gov.uk/driving-eyesight-rules
[18] https://twitter.com/jwiechers/status/1264953956758884354
