Many summer blockbusters don’t live up to the billing, but Dominic Cummings’ devastating insider account of the covid pandemic was a popcorn special.
In a seven-hour “I know what you did last Summer” script, the rogue confidante hammered his former boss’s character, or what’s left of it.
At least four times Cummings said he regarded Johnson as “‘unfit” for the job, that thousands died “unnecessarily” at his hand and reaffirmed Johnson would rather see “bodies pile high” than agree to a third lockdown.
For all the disdain of Cummings and his vengeful motivation, these claims cannot be discounted.
The most bitter poison was reserved for Matt Hancock but that was unfinished Brexit business, the last cabinet Remainer led to the scaffold to be hanged when the public inquiry begins.
Cummings himself was the spy who came in from the cold, a defector arriving with sheaves proving he was the innocent cog in a dysfunctional Downing Street machine.
He was miscast, he insisted, as the evil genius behind the government which failed Britain.
His script fell apart a bit when Cummings tried to explain that Barnard Castle trip again. Producers would demand another rewrite as the excuses evolved from an eyesight test into a security concern.
Like all good movies there were subplots, a vengeful reference to his nemesis Carrie Symonds, a cameo for Dilyn the dog and a walk-on part for Donald Trump. This movie had it all.
Some scenes wrote themselves, like deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara in a Downing Street room declaring: “I think we are absolutely f****d, I think this country is headed for disaster”.
Every film has a tagline, the one sentence summary that sells the whole story.
For Jaws it was “you’ll never go in the water again”.
Among his many damning accusations a single line from Cummings’ testimony will become Boris Johnson’s epitaph.
Cummings said: “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die”.
