Dominic Cummings alleged breach of lockdown rules discussion

[Djgr]

This is true. I don't remember there being 10 pages of posts when Stephen Kinnock broke the lockdown rules, but then he was not the architect of Brexit and Boris Johnsons storming majority at the last election.

And Stephen Kinnock had NOTHING to do with the creation of the lockdown laws and guidance. Seriously do you not see the difference between Kinnock and Cummings? Because I'll tell you what. You're in the minority

 

[Bantamzen]

This is true. I don't remember there being 10 pages of posts when Stephen Kinnock broke the lockdown rules, but then he was not the architect of Brexit and Boris Johnsons storming majority at the last election.

And don't forget he is one of the chief advisers to the PM who is accused of breaking the very rules he helped put into place....

 

[Busaholic]

Shouldn't Emily Maitliss be brought into Downing Street to conduct an interview with the Duke of Durham (not to mention Barnard Castle)?

 

[Darandio]

This is true. I don't remember there being 10 pages of posts when Stephen Kinnock broke the lockdown rules, but then he was not the architect of Brexit and Boris Johnsons storming majority at the last election.

I'm amazed you cannot distinguish the rather large gulf between the two situations.

 

[bspahh]

Again, the autistic comment was made by a rapidly deleted tweet on twitter (by a tory MP I beleive). It's amazing how the spread of Fake News can be used in the context of situations like this.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1264731537913925632.html is a twitter thread where someone tried to find the source that first said that Cummings's son is autistic. The source was someone who misreported something that he had heard on the radio.

His son may be autistic, but there does not seem to be a public statement that he is.

 

[Dave1987]

The defense of the 260 mile trip was to self isolate with childcare nearby was weak, very weak considering the rest of the population was being told *do not leave your house if any of your family have symptoms*. But the 60 mile round trip to 'test his eyesight' is utter nonsense on a new scale. He got caught having a jolly against the rules and then had to come up with some kind of excuse. It is very very clear who is the most powerful man in Government and it is not an elected individual. Its an advisor that the PM cannot seemingly afford to get rid of. Number 10's dismissal of the Castle visit as nonsense from "campaigning newspapers" and Cummings words to the press of "who cares what you think" just shows how much Cummings thinks he is above everyone else. He has to go or BoJo has to go end of...

 

[edwin_m]

Nail on the head. This is all about the media "luvvies" wanting to get back at DC - they've been waiting for the opportunity. To most people outside the media, it's a non story and it's time to stop the circus.

This is true. I don't remember there being 10 pages of posts when Stephen Kinnock broke the lockdown rules, but then he was not the architect of Brexit and Boris Johnsons storming majority at the last election.

As well as the many other reasons why Cummings might be treated differently from the average well-known person, this is somebody with a track record of lying and then brazening it out. A significant fraction of the population considers he has seriously damaged the country by his previous behaviour, he has only himself to blame for that, so it's hardly surprising that he gets a rougher time of it than would almost anyone else bar Boris himself if they'd been caught doing the same thing.

Having said that, I'm not sure Boris would have had the nerve to try the "caring father" line...

 

[Harpers Tate]

So what you are saying is we should of all socially distanced , stopped working , close our businesses etc , without being asked. And yet one of the few people that has access to the figures and fact's about the contagion , decided to not use his common sense and decency and act rationally.

If "we" were as rational as we believe we are then, yes to the first part. And to the second part, again, it's relatively unimportant when set against the pandemic itself.

So you are quite happy to just ignore the fact that one of the most powerful people in this country, a man who drew up the guidelines for us all to follow for our safety has managed to disregard these guidelines and just do as he pleases?

It's unimportant. People are getting ill and/or dying.

I mean, one of the most senior advisers to government (and arguably the person with the most power in the country atm) ignoring government advice that he was helping to shape and potentially breaking the law, is something many people would care about and is a pretty important thing in itself surely?

The point is - it ought not to be. There is a potentially lethal pandemic going on. Perhaps those who think this is "important" (whether it be the media, politicians, or anyone else) hadn't noticed that rather large elephant.

 

[baz962]

If "we" were as rational as we believe we are then, yes to the first part. And to the second part, again, it's relatively unimportant when set against the pandemic itself.
It's unimportant. People are getting ill and/or dying.
The point is - it ought not to be. There is a potentially lethal pandemic going on. Perhaps those who think this is "important" (whether it be the media, politicians, or anyone else) hadn't noticed that rather large elephant.

Ok so we should be rational , but not Cummings.

 

[WelshBluebird]

There is a potentially lethal pandemic going on.

Errr which is precisely why people are having a go a Cummings for doing what he did.
His actions could well have helped spread the virus, and given people are now using him as a defense for breaking lockdown rules and guidelines, his actions could well further spread the virus even now.

 

[Harpers Tate]

.....people are now using him as a defense for breaking lockdown rules and guidelines, his actions could well further spread the virus even now.

It is not his actions that will further spread the virus, beyond any direct damage he has (probably not) caused directly; it is the actions of (not so) "rational" people who are, as you say, using him as a defense to go around catching and spreading it. Which is my point entirely.

 

[Iskra]

He's just coming across as strange and increasingly delusional. Perhaps he enjoys the attention?

Coronavirus: Why did Dominic Cummings say he predicted it?

Dominic Cummings's 2019 blog mentioned coronavirus, but only after it was edited in April 2020.

www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus: Why did Dominic Cummings say he predicted it?
By Faisal IslamEconomics editor

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• Coronavirus pandemic

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Of the many details about travel plans, eye tests, and drives made at Dominic Cummings's Rose Garden press conference on Monday, one thing stood out to me that does matter, and will matter well beyond the future of one adviser.
One of the absolutely core issues in assessing the government's early performance in combating the pandemic, is whether it left it too late to impose the lockdown.
Scientists involved in pandemic planning have pinpointed a specific error - that it was too reliant on existing mathematic modelling of the pandemic based on influenza. They say it had not accounted for the fact that coronavirus was a different virus.
This had two principal vital differences.
Coronavirus is far more contagious than the influenza models, and, unlike flu, there are no approved existing vaccines or treatments.
This rendered the available pandemic stockpiles of treatments and pre-purchase of tens of millions of vaccines unusable. So only testing, tracing, or forms of social distancing and lockdown were going to work.

Media captionDominic Cummings: "I believe that in all the circumstances, that I behaved reasonably and legally"
So for the PM's chief adviser to claim, in the middle of his defence, "only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses" is worthy of some inspection. Such prescience would indeed have been impressive and helpful, and he does have a long-standing and well-known interest in mathematical modelling and big data.
Looking at his blog, there is one reference to coronavirus, and it was indeed in a blog written in March last year. But it wasn't quite as billed. It is a blog about the risk of a pandemic starting from a leak from a biological lab.
The point of it is that governments should pay money to "Red Teams" to try to break security at such institutions, including £1m to "honey trap" the security bosses.
If this is the writing that "explicitly" warned of the danger of coronaviruses, then it rather suggests that a key No 10 figure believes that biolab security is the relevant issue.
But then things get even stranger.
Mystery
The internet archive Wayback Machine, which tracks the changing versions of publicly available websites, shows that the blog was edited some time between 9 April and 3 May this year (after the pandemic started) to insert the reference to coronavirus and Chinese labs. This was first pointed out by a data scientist Jens Wiechers on social media, and can be seen here.
It is in the form of a new quote from an article already linked to in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was not in the original blog.
And the sitemap of Mr Cumming's blog corroborates this, showing that this post was indeed edited at 20:55:20 on the evening of 14 April this year, still available here. This happens to be the day Mr Cummings returned to work from his Durham trip.

• I don't regret what I did, says Cummings
• The families who stayed away in lockdown
• Dominic Cummings: What did he do during lockdown?
• Analysis: Johnson failed to close down Cummings story

It is a mystery why he felt the need to burnish his credentials as a coronavirus sage so much that he pointed to having explicitly warned about something that was only added to his blog after the event.
There is no other reference to coronavirus or Sars or Mers on his blog. There is a page on the mathematics of pandemic modelling and "herd immunity" in a long essay written on the education system in 2013, but no references to coronaviruses.
It is difficult to see why editing a year-old personal blog would have been on any list of priorities for any No 10 official on a day like that - in the middle of the period where hospital deaths had peaked the previous week, but care home deaths were still mounting.
But Mr Cummings clearly felt the need on Monday to point to examples of prescience on this specific issue.
The context of his quote on coronavirus was to help disprove the allegation, first made in the Sunday Times, that he had backed a so-called "herd immunity" strategy.
I've asked No 10 for a response on the change to his blog, the reference to Chinese biolabs, and whether he stands by the idea he explicitly wrote about the dangers of coronaviruses.
A source acknowledged that the blog was updated and pointed to the fact that the original blog from last year linked to the separate article [in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists] which did discuss coronaviruses.

 

[Darandio]

He's just coming across as strange and increasingly delusional. Perhaps he enjoys the attention?

Saw this briefly touched on in the thread last night but it's certainly gained traction in the media today. Lies after lies after lies. The bloke is so far up his own backside that he thinks he's more intelligent than the internet.

 

[baz962]

It is not his actions that will further spread the virus, beyond any direct damage he has (probably not) caused directly; it is the actions of (not so) "rational" people who are, as you say, using him as a defense to go around catching and spreading it. Which is my point entirely.

So to get this right. If I , a person with no symptoms goes out , I will spread it. But if Dominic Cummings goes out , with symptoms and his wife , they won't spread it. Makes no sense .

 

[WelshBluebird]

It is not his actions that will further spread the virus, beyond any direct damage he has (probably not) caused directly; it is the actions of (not so) "rational" people who are, as you say, using him as a defense to go around catching and spreading it. Which is my point entirely.

1. He traveled whilst him and his wife were symptomatic from what I understand. They likely stopped at a service station and I am reading they took their son to a hospital up there. How on earth do you know he didn't directly spread it?
2. As for other people using him as a defense - surely my point is that if he had not done this, or had come out and accepted he was wrong to do so and quit, then people would be less likely to go about knowing they can use "but he did it" as a defense.

 

[alex397]

It's unimportant. People are getting ill and/or dying.
There is a potentially lethal pandemic going on. Perhaps those who think this is "important" (whether it be the media, politicians, or anyone else) hadn't noticed that rather large elephant.

The fact that people are getting ill and/or dying is precisely why people are so angry about this and think this is an important issue.

Still not quite sure how anyone can support DC's decisions, and who think we should just move on. I do have sympathy with his predicament, but he should have just said he was doing what he thought was right at the time, but now realises it was misjudged, and apologise, like a grown-up!

 

[stevetay3]

Say this had all happened last year ,with an election looming, would their stance on DC be the same?

 

[Cowley]

Say this had all happened last year ,with an election looming, would their stance on DC be the same?

Who’s stance?

 

[alex397]

Say this had all happened last year ,with an election looming, would their stance on DC be the same?

With an election looming, the right-wing media (which makes up most of the mainstream media in the UK) were doing all they can not to get Labour in power, so I don't think the stance would be the same from some sections of the media. Not really relevant now anyway.

 

[Darandio]

Say this had all happened last year ,with an election looming, would there stance on DC be the same.

Tory stance? You'd think not but it's a strange one here where Cummings seems to hold much more sway than he actually should. The consensus seems to be that he's above dismissal because he knows too much and if he spoke about it the damage could be incredible. I say this in jest but it's really quite like a movie in some respects, the least troublesome option is not to sack him but to get rid of him by other means.

 

[westv]

If Covid19 had been last year would the election have been postponed anyway?

 

[VauxhallandI]

Judging by the frankly insulting interviews Gove is doing in his defence; he should go too.

He can't possibly think we believe his tripe therefore he is in as much contempt of the population as Cummings is.

I hope the northern folks that turned to the Conservative party at the election might start realising that they are getting the square route of BA from them.

 

[Esker-pades]

If Covid19 had been last year would the election have been postponed anyway?

There wouldn't have been an election to postpone.

 

[fgwrich]

Tory stance? You'd think not but it's a strange one here where Cummings seems to hold much more sway than he actually should. The consensus seems to be that he's above dismissal because he knows too much and if he spoke about it the damage could be incredible. I say this in jest but it's really quite like a movie in some respects, the least troublesome option is not to sack him but to get rid of him by other means.

Funny enough the Guardian has just posted this article tonight. A Standout paragraph to me was this one "Anyone who imagines his defence of Cummings is born of loyalty is unfamiliar with the concept “Boris Johnson”. This is actually a simple story: a man with no ideas is too terrified to sack his ideas man. Or to put it in the complex intellectual terms it deserves, some street heckler once shouted at David Hasselhoff: “Oi! Hasselhoff! You’re nothing without your talking car!” Cummings is the talking car to Johnson’s Hasselhoff."

The truth about why Cummings hasn't gone: Johnson is too terrified to sack him | Marina Hyde

The prime minister’s decision is not born of loyalty to his adviser – he just can’t get rid of his ideas man, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

www.theguardian.com

 

[VauxhallandI]

We are now in the position where the government are looking at refunding fines of people convicted of abusing the lockdown rules.

All this to continue the farce that Cummings didn't, you couldn’t write this.

What next? Changing the Highway Code?

 

[Djgr]

We are now in the position where the government are looking at refunding fines of people convicted of abusing the lockdown rules.

All this to continue the farce that Cummings didn't, you couldn’t write this.

What next? Changing the Highway Code?

Changing all the mileage signs between London and Durham to make it seem nearer

 

[nedchester]

He's just coming across as strange and increasingly delusional. Perhaps he enjoys the attention?

Coronavirus: Why did Dominic Cummings say he predicted it?

Dominic Cummings's 2019 blog mentioned coronavirus, but only after it was edited in April 2020.

www.bbc.co.uk

Or maybe he edited his blog more recently:

A 2019 Dominic Cummings blog post was recently edited to explicitly mention a coronavirus - Full Fact

The Wayback Machine website shows the edit being made in mid-April 2020.

fullfact.org

A 2019 Dominic Cummings blog post was recently edited to explicitly mention a coronavirus

 

[Darandio]

Or maybe he edited his blog more recently:

Well yes, that was the whole point in the article above yours.

 

[squizzler]

It is unfortunate that these actions can only serve to damage the family name as I'm sure like many on these forums I consider the QSK-19 to be one of the classic prime movers in our scene.

 

[nedchester]

Well yes, that was the whole point in the article above yours.

I think I was trying to point out that the content of the 'Fulfact' website tend to be more trustworthy than those of the media outlets.