Dominic Cummings – good manners cost nothing
The key for modern unscrupulous politicians is to get between their critics and the electorate. Trump, Corbyn and Cummings have all spent hours talking about how the media is fake, bias and sitting in ivory towers laughing at the little people. It’s a potent siren song for any voter and Cummings clearly counted on it when he marched out of his front door saying to the waiting journalists ‘remember Brexit? You got that wrong too.’
But he’s been caught in the populist’s trap – suddenly becoming into the arrogant, elitist enemy that he had always attacked. Every act, from the banning of the Mirror to the scruffy appearance has been to project an image of power and superiority to everyone else. Well if you are arrogant on the way up, it’s savage on the way down. Brewdog have released the ‘Barnhard Castle Eye Test’ beer and a population online are seeing memes endlessly repackaging the same jokes, until the rage subsides.
It didn’t have to be this way. He could have delivered a dignified statement about mistakes and the panic of a parent. He could’ve left the impression that he visited the castle because he and his wife had promised that if they both made it they’d go for her birthday. Or that they worried about their son without them. Disappearing into a Number 10 backroom with a pearl-handled revolver, he would have been respected – and would have been back.
This should have been about dignity, and it should have been about common sense. He must still believe that the public will forget it and move on. But if this doesn’t stick, if the power of grief and the skype-funerals, the thousand of families who couldn’t be with their loved one as they died and the collapse of millions of livelihoods don’t stick then what does that say about our democracy and its ability to dislodge those undeserving of leadership.
They've crossed a line in being able to recognise right or wrong
Retired - but always prepared to help from extensive experience gained at he very top of venue/events industry
4 年Sheryl below is right and we all would have moved on. This in the day of the power mad, used to be called Chutzpah but I guess that is not PC anymore, the public can have long memories watch the future.
Cummings strategic innovation is to recognize a truth: in the digital era particularly, the public make politicians and policy - and no one else. If you can keep your pubic sweet, everyone else can go hang. As you say, the problem arises when you piss off your public - personified for the Tories by Workington Man - which is what Cummings has done here for the first time. He did not read his own playbook. He and Johnson will pay a price.
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4 年I have no desire to see him in power at all, to be honest. But you are right. A dignified and genuine apology, an immediate resignation - and it would have been easy to bring him back later in the year, saying he's learned his lesson and was needed, as an architect of Brexit, to get it fully done.