Just as Leona Helmsley, the American tycoon jailed in 1989 for tax evasion, thought “only the little people” paid into the public purse, only the ordinary folk must obey coronavirus laws in Boris Johnson’s Britain.
In gifting a special pass to his rule-breaking rule-maker, the Prime Minister’s warped judgement is the most poisonous issue in this affair.
By protecting Dominic Cummings after he flouted regulations everybody else is expected to obey, a corrupt Tory elite is socially distancing itself from the country.
The PM, a cynical liar who fibbed to catapult the UK out of Europe, then deployed deceit to win an election, has unintentionally isolated himself from popular opinion.
To watch the acumen vacuum exposed on live TV was to see a charlatan divorcing himself from reality.
This may prove Johnson’s political death warrant, a potentially fatal miscalculation, revealing this privileged pair in their ivory tower are out of control – a pair of chancers wrongly believing they are exceptional.
Tory MPs demanding the aide’s resignation, among them Brextremists from Cummings’ Vote Lie 2016 campaign, is the sound of rebellion.
Tone-deaf Johnson’s inability to grasp that he’s the one being damaged the longer Cummings is retained, is the conceit of a leader haemorrhaging followers. Meanwhile, Labour is secretly willing the PM to waste more political capital clinging to a liability,
Battered over his mishandling of the plague – deaths topping 60,000 and a nine-day lockdown dither sending many to early graves with 1.3 million extra infected – the bungler is blind to his point. One shrewd Tory MP whispered to me that his party is prepared to dump Johnson as ruthlessly as it ditched Theresa May.
Johnson and Cummings are provoking the very voters who delivered a thumping Parliamentary majority last December to revolt when abused as fools.
One law for Cummings and another law for everyone else might be no contradiction to a PM who retreated to his own second home, Chequers, while hectoring the nation to stay put and not go to a caravan or cottage.
To the rest of us it’s blindingly obvious that the letter and spirit of lockdown lectures were road kill on the 260 miles between London and Durham.
Left-wing MPs hope, and Right-wing fear, that Johnson’s spell over a large slice of the population is fading.
The pandemic has exposed incompetence on a deadly scale, from testing fiascos and PPE shortages to care home killing zones and a Get Out of Jail Free card for his slippery aide.
By denying verifiable facts and lying, Johnson is operating a Donald Trump mini me government.
The ferocity of the public backlash points to Johnson finally running out of road on the trip to Durham.
