Dominic Cummings’ antics over the last week haven’t just dominated news headlines in the UK – they have also afforded him a global infamy rarely granted to British politicians, let alone a special adviser.
Media outlets around the world have covered the story, with the responses ranging from incredulity at his brazen political survival – to bemusement at Britain’s focus on a single individual driving to Durham.
Cummings already had some profile around the world thanks to his portrayal by Benedict Cumberbatch in James Graham’s television film Brexit: The Uncivil War, which was shown to a limited audience on HBO in the US and elsewhere in the world. But the sight of a prime minister spending a week defending an aide in the face of enormous media and public hostility has piqued interest from audiences around the world.
Readers of the New York Times were told on Wednesday that Johnson “went to the mat yet again” for his “embattled” adviser as they attempted to answer a question facing their baffled readers: “Why was he clinging to an aide who is so obviously damaged goods?”
Coverage of the scandal was widespread across Europe. The prominent German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,wrote nine stories on Cummings in the space of a week and seemed at times astonished by his influence on the prime minister. The newspaper described him as the “öffentlichkeitsscheue, geheimnisumwitterte und oft diabolisierte Cummings” – publicity shy, shrouded in mystery, and often vilified.
Readers of the French newspaper Le Monde were told on the front page that “Boris Johnson refuse de sacrifier son ami Dominic Cummings, qui n’a pas respecté le confinement” – telling readers the prime minister’s friend broke the lockdown rules.
The mockery of Cummings’ defence went global. One individual even paid for Cummings to appear as a cardboard cut-out at an Australian Rugby League match. The prime minister’s adviser could be seen wearing his spectacles and staring out from the crowd at the Sydney Roosters match, many thousands of miles from the town of Barnard Castle, where he said he headed on a 60-mile round trip during the lockdown to check his eyesight.
The New Yorker magazine – published in a country where swathes of the population have been rising in public revolt against the infringement on their liberties caused by lockdown restrictions – tried to explain the row as a “very British debate about rules”.
The outlet described how Cummings’ defences for his actions “veer from arrogance to downright loopiness”.
“The Cummings story, for all of its distinctly British battiness and its focus on Tory personalities, misses much about how jumbled the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis has been. In a sense, the strictness of the UK’s lockdown rules – which are already easing, and will do so more next week – does not reflect the strategy as a whole,” wrote staff writer Amy Davidson Sorkin.
“The government was relatively slow to introduce them – losing time with a flirtation with the idea of allowing the virus to spread in order to achieve ‘herd immunity’ – and undisciplined in its message.”
