“Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Drive 250 miles to Durham. Pretend you’re still in London. Visit local beauty spot on Easter Day. Travel back to London. Travel back to Durham. Stay at home. Protect the prime minister. Protect his senior adviser.” Somehow the government’s lockdown slogans have got a lot less catchy over the past 36 hours. How much must Boris Johnson hate Grant Shapps?
If it was a punishment beating to send Grant out to do the Downing Street press conference on Saturday, it was waterboarding to ask him to do the Sunday morning media round after, overnight, further allegations about Dominic Cummings’s cavalier approach to lockdown – Classic Dom had morphed into Classic Classic Dom – were broken by the Guardian, Observer and Daily Mirror.
At best, the transport secretary could claim he had a little more expertise in his departmental brief, having been involved in three car wrecks within a day. The question on most people’s lips by the end of the morning was whether Shapps was being deliberately stupid or whether it came naturally to him. The more philosophically minded were also wondering if the two were mutually exclusive.
As usual when there is a crisis in government, Boris was nowhere to be seen. His cowardice is rapidly becoming an even greater problem to him than his laziness, incompetence and lack of morality.
The prime minister is paralysed with fear. Keep his senior adviser and lose the trust of the entire country and rapidly growing numbers of his own MPs. Or sack Dom and revert to his natural state as a directionless, clueless, ball of ambition laced with need. The further complication is that Boris doesn’t even know if he can sack Dom, as it’s Dom who is effectively running the show.
So it was left to the hapless Shapps to defend the indefensible. First on Sky’s Ridge on Sunday and then on the BBC’s Marr Show.
“Can we talk about the dualling of the A66,” Grant pleaded, somehow hoping the subject of Classic Classic Dom wouldn’t come up. ‘Er, no,” Sophy Ridge insisted. Was he still standing by the line taken by most members of the cabinet that it had been perfectly OK for Cummings to have taken his family on a moonlight flit at a time when he himself had no symptoms of the coronavirus and the official government guidelines were for people to stay where they were and put themselves in self isolation?
“Oh yes,” said Shapps confidently. The government had always been very clear that no one should really pay any attention to the lockdown regulations. They had really just been a series of vague suggestions and he couldn’t understand why almost everyone had been so supine as to slavishly follow them in an effort not to spread the virus.
In any case, it wasn’t as if we were talking about some chav or single mother here: Dom’s parents had their own private estate with a separate outhouse so everything was totally above board.
It was all downhill from there. Even though Ridge pointed out that she had broken the habit of a lifetime in giving Shapps advance notice of the questions so he couldn’t say he didn’t know any of the answers, it still turned out that the transport secretary didn’t know anything. In fact he had gone out of his way to know nothing. He couldn’t say if Cummings had stopped for petrol or a pee on the 250-mile journey up north. He couldn’t say if Boris knew Dom was in Durham. He couldn’t say if Cummings had broken the 14-day isolation rule to go to Barnard Castle, though he could quite understand if he had because the town was a wonderful tourist attraction.
“Cummings is a stickler for keeping to the rules,” Shapps said. A career-ending moment on live TV as Dom would be spitting blood to hear that. Grant would be toast. Cummings’s whole persona has been based on his being a rule-breaker, the disruptor dedicated to breaking up cosy elites. Now here he was being firmly portrayed as a fully paid-up member of the establishment. Moreover, one who was deemed so important to government that the rules that applied to the little people didn’t apply to him.
Shapps begged for more time to be allowed to talk about the A66. “It really is very important,” he said. Hell, if it helped he could even talk about a new cycle path in St Albans due to open in 2023. Or a new ferry service across the Ouse.
But Ridge was having none of it. She went for Shapps forensically, and time and again all he could do was smile vacantly, just playing for time knowing that at some point his ordeal would come to an end.
Except it was only just starting as Andrew Marr would be covering much the same ground little more than half an hour later. If anything the outing on Sky had only left Shapps more traumatised rather than better prepared as he became more and more sweaty and less and less coherent during the course of the interview. A low bar admittedly.
The Durham police were basically a bunch of liars who had been caught out telling the truth. And even if Dom had been to Barnard Castle he definitely hadn’t gone walking in a bluebell wood on a second visit to the north-east in April, because he had been assured Dom hated bluebells as they were the epitome of bourgeois remainer flowers.
So if he and his family had been seen, it must have been one of the many teams of body doubles that have plagued the Cummings family for years now. In any case, even though he definitely hadn’t talked to Dom or Boris over the past day, he knew for a fact that Dom hadn’t done any of this because they had told him so directly. And if there was one thing Cummings and Boris could be relied on for it was their advocacy of the truth.
“Please can we talk about the A66?” Shapps sobbed again. It would save so many lives during the pandemic on the route between Penrith and Scotch Corner. Marr looked at him with something approaching pity. The transport secretary was just collateral damage in a battle No 10 was sure to lose anyway. There was no way for the government to retain credibility with Cummings still in post.
As it was, the cabinet had as good as admitted that everyone was free to interpret the lockdown however they saw fit. But on the plus side we had all learned more about the A66.
