I make no comment on her politics, but the previous UK Prime Minister had exactly the demeanor you could ask of a public servant.
It feels like she was the last of her kind, and it is governments of salesmen from here on in.
If you encounter someone in your life who exhibits the culture of rule bending, bring technically correct, or trying to get away with something, then please hold them to a higher standard, especially if they have any kind of public role.
The alternative is these double speaking wheeler dealers — in this example, one who is concocting a self serving interpretation of the lockdown rules — who break that most golden of all rules: do unto others as you would have done to yourself.
Or as I like to say it — what if everyone behaved like you did?
> but the previous UK Prime Minister had exactly the demeanor you could ask of a public servant.
Who, Theresa May? She was a big user of 'spin' and chicanery too, only -- she wasn't very good at it. She had her own "master of the dark arts", Nick Timothy, who was fired after her embarrassing loss in the polls.
I think you'd have to go to John Major if you want an old-style Tory. Tony Blair himself was a big user of 'spin' and media management. IMHO, and this may be controversial, there's nothing wrong with spin and media management if there's some sincerity behind your beliefs, and Blair was an unabashed left-of-centre neoliberal, like him or hate him. Obama had a very good spin machine too, but of course there was a fair amount of substance to the man -- I say this as someone who laughed at his Nobel Prize win.
The current lot are very empty in the ideas department, are incompetent, and are only clinging on to power thanks to the first past the post system which makes it hard for a divided Opposition to win a plurality of seats. That is, any pretence of governing from the centre is gone. They're happy to use data science to ferret out the path to victory and use polarizing social media messaging tactics to win key seats.
May did have a public persona of duty, but she was also exceptionally dishonest both publically and privately with allies and opponents alike. She was running a non-stop gaslighting operation on the public and MPs, and she was never honest about what choices were available. Nobody would trust a thing she said by the end. She also did more than anyone else to widen the brexit divisions with the loss of losers consent on the Remain side of the brexit.
I'm not particularly outraged about what Cummings did under lockdown. Having a medical emergency in the family ourselves a few weeks back we were actually encouraged by healthcare workers to do something similar, though in fact we decided against.
I am outraged that he didn't at the time realise that others may need to do similar, and issue clarification on the rules to publicise that this sort of thing was permissible.
I agree with this take. I think almost everyone can understand why he would have done what he did, but that's because lots of people were caught in similar situations and had to make the difficult decision whether or not to follow the official guidance that he was involved in making.
Lots of people did follow the guidance despite it being really difficult for them to do so, and it's yet another story where it seems to be a case of 'rules for thee, but not for me'.
The right way to handle this would have been to confess and apologise and say it was a lapse of judgement - I think lots of people, understanding the difficult situation he was in would have accepted that. To brazen it out and claim it was good judgement and responsible behaviour is to admit that the government guidance and response as a whole was flawed.
I think it's more a case of social attitudes being about 50% split* between "follow all rules whatever" and "use them as guidance but apply your own judgement".
Of course when making the rules you should bloody well get them right in order to be fair to people with the first kind of attitude.
*if I remember correctly from my previous work on the british social attitudes survey
Absolutely. It’s like the imperial college guy. I think he deserves an outrage for his fantasist models, but him not respecting the lockdown after he recovered from covid, and could neither infect or be infected, is common sense. The lockdown was aimed at reducing the pace of infections, not to enforce some petty rules when they don’t make sense. The outrage is really only about loving the rule over what it is trying to achieve.
Evidence from coronaviruses that cause common colds show the ability to be reinfected but even in that case immunity still lasts for months rather than days. In the case of a more severe disease like SARS, antibody responses have been found after 17 years. We don't know enough about Covid to make a good guess about immunity but it seems unlikely that someone could be reinfected days after recovering.
I am sure it is possible, but we haven’t seen any significant number of reinfection. There were stories in South Korea but apparently they concluded it was on account of unreliable tests.
And the questions about how long the immunity lasts are about how many months not how many days.
Sadly, when you have rules in society you will get people who will try to enforce those rules just because they are the rules. In some sense it is logical - this will get bad rules changed quicker, but in another sense it just causes harm to people.
It's not so much the travel to Durham, it's the travel to Barnard Castle ( a 60 mile round trip) to 'test' his eys, including a nice little walk along the river bank - on a day that just so happened to be his wife's birthday.
There's is no fathomable justification for that and exposed his contempt for the rules.
I'd be contemptuous of such stupid rules too. How is going for a walk outdoors a problem? Why is it relevant how far he drove to get there? I can't help but think that the Brits have taken the scolding aspect of this lockdown way too far.
> How is going for a walk outdoors a problem? Why is it relevant how far he drove to get there?
The lockdown rules the country was under set these rules as a condition - you may leave the house only to exercise, and you may not travel to get to a place to exercise. This was to stop people going to tourist spots, petrol stations and other places they may interact with others.
You're right in a way - a single family doing it probably causes no actual harm because they're the only people present. Now - who gave this unelected government advisor special permission to go there and be that single family, while nobody else could, and was locked down hard?
Because this government decided it was a problem, then chose to look the other way when Cummings ignored these rules. Countless people have been forced to let their loved ones be buried or cremated without traditional ritual closure, or have not been there through the last days of others, all because the government convinced them that it was the right thing to do for public health. Maybe it was, but it should strike a nerve when someone professing these guidelines ignores them for a much sillier purpose and is lauded for his "integrity" and qualities as a "father." Were those ordinary Britons bad sons, daughters, siblings, and parents for not evading the same rules for their loved ones? Did they act without integrity?
A funeral, attended by many people, is rather different than a drive and walk through nature with the people you live with. Anyhow, the hypocrisy angle makes sense. Two strikes for everyone involved: one for coming up with the stupid rules and two for then breaking them themselves/covering it up.
Even if it wasn't a problem (which it was, at the time he did it). It's his covering up of his actions + colleagues backing him up, which is the real issue here.
He's so blatantly lying about the "eye sight test", it shows a total lack of respect for the public and his role as part of the UK government. They should be, if anything, following the rules more than anyone else in order to set an example.
At one point we were not allowed to drive for anything non-essential. (was this the case for Cummings at the time? it's still the case where I live in Wales)
Stated reasons were (1) reducing load on health services from road accidents (which has worked - my friend in A&E says he's "never sat around on his arse so much at work before"); (2) reduce transmission of virus at fuel stations, risk to breakdown services, etc
The restrictions in Wales were generally stricter than the English ones. In England, people were somewhat advised against driving to national parks or other green spaces to walk, but ... well, read the wording of the Government's own contemporary FAQ and see: https://web.archive.org/web/20200402224312/https://www.gov.u... Quite vague and fuzzy, isn't it?
If I remember rightly, there was actually a bit of a controversy over this because the police in some areas got it into their heads that no-one should be driving to places to walk full stop and started pushing that message and complaining about people not following it, even though that wasn't actually a rule. Though it's entirely possible a lot of the media coverage of that has also been memory-holed and only exists in the Wayback machine; the BBC in particular have been completely rewriting articles a lot lately.
(The restriction to one session of exercise per day was also only legally enforceable in Wales and not England, for some reason, even though it was part of the advice in both.)
> If I remember rightly, there was actually a bit of a controversy over this because the police in some areas got it into their heads that no-one should be driving to places to walk full stop
There was a law mismatch here. The government were saying you can't do that, however the legal powers they had (and the powers they delegated to the police) were not sufficient to actually stop people for some of the things they were stopping them for.
I think Derbyshire police were the worst for that.
So it's possible here that Dominic Cummings didn't break the lockdown laws, but he certainly broke the lockdown rules his own government were telling the public.
Yeah I'm not very enamoured with Welsh rules at the moment, especially the fact they are only revised every 3 weeks. Personally I'm lucky to live in the countryside, really feel for those trapped in cities though.
I think the other thing that's incredibly annoying is the queue of MPs that support him. When the AG comes out to say that breaking the law is okay or Secretary fo State for the Department for Health and Social Care says it's okay to break the guidelines we know there's a serious problem.
But didn’t he quote the rule saying that in cases like the care of the young child, the rules may not be practical and should be applied as well as practically possible? If the rules indeed had this clause, doesn’t that address exactly your second point?
Yes, which made all the bullshit media emotional appeals about how other people who followed the rules were forced to wait as their loved ones died alone in hospital, how they couldn't comfort them and go to their funerals, etc rather dubious. (Especially since coronavirus spreads really well through funerals and hospitals and really badly through brick walls and visits to outdoor locations after the end of the likely infectious period.)
What made that tactic especially fragrant was the fact that Cummings also had a dying family member in hospital who he and his other family members couldn't visit, comfort, etc during the same time period and rather than consider that maybe this might be a reason to step away from that argument, everyone seems to have doubled down and used his family's grief as proof that they were right.
Tbh I haven't checked the details, but if that was the case, then the government was criminally poor at communicating the rules given the sacrifices others have made in attempts to follow them.
The rules were somewhat ambiguous, which allowed him to break them (on the "childcare exception").
But his account of his actions is so untruthful. It is obvious to most that being on a remote farm would be a nicer environment to isolate than a house in central London. This simply _must_ have been a factor in his decision.
He did not even contemplate seeking childcare support at home, he stated this himself in his press conference, it hadn't even crossed his mind.
His trip was not safe, and should have been used as a last resort. Is that the impression you got? That he had exhausted all other options?
If you had, then I would say you are even more political motivated than those you are saying are looking to give him the "boot".
He claimed he put his child and covid-19 positive wife in a car and drove 250 miles to get child care. But he had childcare available to him locally, and he didn't make use of the childcare when he got to Durham.
He then claimed that he didn't know if it was safe for him to drive or not (his wife can drive, why didn't she?) so he put them all in the car and drove to Barnard Castle.
He's trying to make use of the safeguarding exemption in the law to say he fled London because his family was at risk. But that would only cover the travel from London to Durham. It doesn't cover the travel from Durham back to this risky dangerous home in London.
I could never forgive her after her stint as home secretary, after she instituted additional mass surveillance and argued strongly for far more, as usual, all under the guise of "keeping us safe".
But as much as I disliked her for her stance on surveillance, I do have to say that she had an impossible job in that limbo state after the brexit vote.
But she was also exactly the wrong person to do that impossible job. As you say, the job was impossible, but the best chance of success would have required someone who was amazing at making deals (rather than trying to forge a course that ignores those you disagree with), getting people to compromise and come together, and the ability to question your own assumptions.
It wasn't impossible, was it? Johnson has proven that.
She used the same tactic as Boris Johnson by calling an election to try and get a big majority which could implement the referendum in the face of opposition parties who had voted for it but now refused to actually abide by it. She was such a poor politician she instead lost her majority and ended up in a limbo controlled by her opponents. She had a party filled with MPs who openly lied to the voters during her disastrous GE campaign, saying they'd implement the Brexit vote and then immediately turning around and doing everything they could to stop it once elected. She did nothing to get a grip on her party and just drifted, completely lost and weak.
Then Boris Johnson stepped up.
1. He won the party leadership.
2. He kicked out a huge number of MPs (>40?) that had openly betrayed the voters, in some cases by switching after being elected to a party with the exact opposite of the policies they ran on. This plunged him deep into minority territory.
3. Parliament was filled with MPs who knew they'd lose the moment an election occurred due to those betrayals, and thus for the first time in history Johnson was faced with an opposition that kept voting against a chance to take power - the entire reason for their existence! Yet he still managed to get another general election.
4. He forced all of his prospective MPs to take a public oath that they'd actually implement what they said they'd implement in the party manifesto this time. He flushed out huge numbers of them that were untrustworthy.
5. He ran a strong campaign that gave him a huge majority.
6. He filled the cabinet with people who were committed to "getting brexit done" as he put it. He brought in a notoriously tough advisor who has already supposedly squashed multiple plots to reverse the referendum.
7. He replaced the Brexit negotiator with someone who is actually interested in negotiating and who believed in British independence, vs Theresa May's picks who didn't.
Except for the first step these are all things Theresa May could have done but was too weak or politically un-astute to do. Hardly impossible, it just required political strength and leadership.
You make some good points, but I still think it was a largely impossible job. As much as you believe Boris has succeeded where she failed, he hasn't actually got any better a deal from the EU than she did, and we're still arguing about when Brexit should actually happen (we've only had a repreve due to the COVID situation!).
Realistically, the EU holds all the cards here.
But I'm not going to argue much on this, as I strongly dislike here actions as home secretary, and believe she would have gone further on mass surveillance after Brexit - I'm not here greatest fan.
Regardless of her political stances, there is plenty to critique.
The "sound" old public-school-boy* persona that used to rule Westminster used to be considered trustworthy by the ruling class. Now it's widely seen as risible. Wherever we see honour or holiness we should be very careful IMHO, it's often two-faced.
Theresa May's "selfless-public-service" persona represented inflexibility to the point of negligence. I don't doubt that she did personally suffer for it. But in taking the lines she did, she inflicted far more suffering and pain in some of the most vulnerable in society. She persisted with a disasterous public policy with Brexit. Whatever the politics of it, the inflexibility that formed the subtance of her persona was dysfunctional.
She'll be remembered for her "hostile environment policy" and "Brexit means Brexit".
> "then please hold them to a higher standard, especially if they have any kind of public role."
Thing is, the law doesn't allow one class of persons to be held to a higher standard.
Everybody is supposed to be held to the same standard.
Of course, it seems in this situation that certain people in public service can exempt themselves from the common standard altogether with no punishment.
The offence of Misconduct in Public Office, as the name suggests, applies only to those in public office. So it's not a higher standard - it's another, different standard. You or I couldn't be prosecuted for the offence (assuming you don't hold a public office...).
I don't get it. You or I can't be prosecuted under it because we're not in public office, but people in public office can be prosecuted under it, thus there's a class of people held to higher standards.
There's a bunch of stuff that you and I can do, but that we couldn't do if we were in public office.
Members of the public are expected to meet one standard. There are additional -higher- standards placed upon people in public office.
I don't understand how a law that applies to a certain class of people, but not everybody, is not treating that certain class of people differently.
The law creates the higher standard. Behaviour that's perfectly legal for most people becomes illegal for people in public office because we expect higher standards from those people and we expect these higher standards so strongly we created a law to enforce it.
I haven't liked Theresa May since she went full Janet Reno over video games during her time as HS. It was the first time I heard her name probably. Minor thing but strikes a cord with me. As PM she was just marginally better than Johnson.
For me it was throwing out or suppressing evidence-based reports and policy recommendations on drug harms during the coalition years, causing at least one home office minister to quit in protest.
Because clearly her biases are better than evidence driven policy. Was glad she only lasted a year or so.
The article which he quoted in length in 2019 [0] hasn't been modified and did mention both SARS and Coronavirus. He's just amending the quote he took from it.
Obviously the first time he quoted it, he didn't think it was relevant to show the example, so contracted it by hand to "[An example]" [1].
In 2020, he realises that specifically mentioning SARS and Coronavirus in a blog post about the dangers of biolabs causing a global pandemic will either seem relevant or look prescient so he adds it back into the quote [2].
This implies that in 2019, he had read the article and was aware of threats like coronavirus/SARS, but didn't think it was the important aspect of what he was discussing. So his crime here is a bit like rewriting your CV for a new job -- not lying about what you know or have done, but using different words that emphasize new aspects to the new audience.
> In 2020, he realises that specifically mentioning SARS and Coronavirus in a blog post about pandemics will seem relevant or look prescient so he adds it back into the quote
And that’s the problem isn’t it? He claims that he talked about the risks of Coronaviruses before the pandemic, and yet the only evidence is an article about biolab security (frankly not particularly relevant unless he’s insinuating that’s the origin of this virus too) amended well after the current pandemic began.
> Experiments on viruses that could cause a
> global pandemic killing many millions were
> halted but were recently cleared to resume
> and will be conducted in these ‘top
> security’ labs.
He was talking about pandemics and quoting an article which does mention SARS and coronavirus.
This is a tiny gotcha "oh but you didn't technically use the word SARS or coronavirus yourself when quoting the article the first time so it doesn't count".
It's pretty close. I mean, he wasn't talking about specifically coronaviruses, because that's not the only kind of virus that could escape from a biolab. But he contracted discussion of SARS and coronaviruses to "[An example]".
Editing old blog posts is probably not the right way to do this. But bear in mind the whole biolab escape theory is entirely plausible. Such things have happened before. The 2007 foot and mouth epidemic in the UK was traced back to an escape from a lab at Pirbright. There were at least two outbreaks of Marburg Virus (ebola) in the USSR due to lab escapes.
I don't really understand the certainty many people here seem to have, about how it couldn't possibly have come from the Wuhan lab. How could you know that? Such escapes have happened repeatedly, that was sort of the point of Cummings' blog post.
At his press conference Cummings said that he was definitely not in favour of herd immunity, and was not against lockdown. And he said that he could prove this because of his writing about coronavirus.
To me the problem isn't that he edited the blog to include the word coronavirus (because I agree, it's pretty clear he was talking about coronaviruses and flu viruses). The problem is that his blog post says nothing about lockdown or herd immunity. It's a moderately interesting idea about increasing security at biolabs. So his blog doesn't support his claims.
> Cummings said that he was definitely not in favour of herd immunity, and was not against lockdown.
Well, we already know that he was actively pushing for earlier lockdown within the SAGE meetings (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/top-aide-...) so he should be off the hook for that bit of misinformation (earlier in the year the media were trying very hard to make it seem like he was the architect of "herd immunity").
Imagine CNN has a report on the chances of Hillary and Donald in 2015. A few weeks later someone copies the stuff about Hillary's chances and makes no mention at all of Trump.
After the 2016 election they then edit their post to paste in the Trump stuff and use that new edit to claim they were writing about Trump's chances a year before the election.
Is that pretty close to the truth or is it virtually the complete opposite of the truth?
> But he contracted discussion of SARS and coronaviruses to "[An example]".
Not sure why you keep saying this. [An example] refers to the example that follows those words, about CDC labs, not an example that he specifically didn't mention.
The fact that he added the word 'coronavirus' does not change the fact that SARS (which he in fact did mention before) was a coronavirus. He just added the word 'coronavirus' next to SARS in an existing sentence to emphasize that SARS is a coronavirus. He updated his article but didn't really change its meaning.
> He just added the word 'coronavirus' next to SARS in an existing sentence to emphasize that SARS is a coronavirus.
That isn't what happened.
He copied a wall of text about Holland, the US, the UK, the CDC, influenza, H5N1, bird flu, Ebola and specifically snipped out the part about SARS/coronavirus and China. (The text he edited in just last month, in bold.)
He basically did the opposite of what he lied about doing.
I'm not sure from your post if you've noticed that he yesterday held a press conference with the national UK media in which he cited the fact that he predicted the threat from coronaviruses a year previously.
>he cited the fact that he predicted the threat from coronaviruses a year previously.
He did, at least about viruses in general. I was specifically remembering him warning about pandemics preparedness when this started. I assume others familiar with him were well aware, too and that it was partially why he played such a big role in the UK's response.
He was talking about pandemics and quoting an article which does mention SARS and coronavirus.
This is a tiny gotcha "oh but you didn't technically use the word SARS or coronavirus yourself when quoting the article the first time so it doesn't count".
He was specifically talking about biolab incidents, which are not how this pandemic started. Using the word "coronavirus" is the only plausible connection to the current crisis, and he fabricated it after the fact for political ends.
We do know that they were studying coronavirus in Wuhan so it is possible that somebody could have been exposed to it in Wuhan's biolab. And, my understanding is that it hasn't been ruled out.
I also disagree that people that had read his blog and that article in particular didn't see them as connected. I had read that article earlier in the year, and I remember being surprised that the UK lockdown hadn't happened earlier since in 2019 he appeared to understand the dangers.
"Although the Wuhan market was initially suspected to be the epicenter of the epidemic, the immediate source remains elusive. The close relatedness among SARS-CoV-2 strains suggested that the Wuhan outbreak probably originated from a point source with subsequent human-to-human transmission, in contrast to the polyphyletic origin of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (14). If the Wuhan market was the source, a possibility is that bats carrying the parental SARSr-BatCoVs were mixed in the market, enabling virus recombination. However, no animal samples from the market were reported to be positive. Moreover, the first identified case-patient and other early case-patients had not visited the market (15), suggesting the possibility of an alternative source."
He's using his rambling blogpost to suggest that he has always supported lockdowns, has never suppoorted herd immunity, and has been aware of the risk of pandemic for some time.
The blog does mention the serious risk of pandemic, but it doesn't mention the other stuff. And it's not talking about public health measures to reduce the impact of pandemic, but using the idea of tiger teams to test biolab security.
To give some context, this is the guy who is currently at the centre of a scandal for breaking the law to drive hundreds of miles to his parents during lockdown, with his wife (who had covid) and child in the car. And didn't even go directly, but stopped by a local beauty spot on the way back. And now he has been coming up with flimsy excuses for this for the last few days, which the government (including the prime minister) desperately parrots lest they would have to admit that one of their team did something wrong.
I’m confused why you aren’t voted up, this is an extremely accurate description that is pertinent to the story.
To give our non-UK friends a bit more context (in case anyone thinks “flimsy excuses” is applying a bit of bias) he was caught going on a walk in a little town near his second home (itself a few hundred miles from where he probably should have been). His excuse was that he was feeling ill and had troubles with his eyesight so he decided to go for a (30 mile) drive to check ... I dunno, if he could see I guess? That thing you do when you have trouble with your eyesight, jump into a car and go for a drive.
Update: the “upvote” point was because your comment was greyed out, and after I upvoted you were still greyed out, suggesting you were fairly deep in the -ve at that point
Not only that, but the drive he took to “test his eye sight“ was with his wife and child in the car, they ended up driving to a local castle, and it happened to be on his wife’s birthday.
Isn't the story itself about a senior government adviser updating his blog, to make it look like he expected the Covid-19 crisis?
The fact that the same adviser ignored his own advice, while both sickening, and amusingly ironic, is incidental here.
It's not incidental - he referenced this blog post in a press conference today, in which he responded to this scandal. (Without apologizing, of course.) The two are closely linked politically, as he is trying to defend himself from criticism by touting his supposed prescience.
To be clearer still, I would love to see him sacked, for a litany of reasons. But this isn't the place to discuss that. At most, I think this article could provide the basis for a decent discussion about what his _real_ opinion on the Covid-19 crisis might be...
I think another poster said it best, this is about him suggesting he did something he didn't to try and look clever. It's pretty interesting in itself, because Dominic Cummings stands on his body of work as a self styled paragon of scientific governance.
Him being an arse is probably somewhat apart from that.
Pretty sure he referenced various forms of 'scientific advice' a couple of times in that interview too. We could start leading this discussion towards the subject of him attending impartial scientific advisory meetings (the SAGE scandal).
Or we could have a lengthy discussion about his eyesight...
I think it's worth drawing a line around stuff like that.
If we want to have a wide open political discussion about a key government adviser, we should probably base it on a more relevant story. But it probably would flounce HN rules.
Also "RTFA"?
Let's be polite. we should be sharing news sources.
> The fact that the same adviser ignored his own advice, while both sickening, and amusingly ironic, is incidental here.
It's a bit worse because it's not just "advice" or "guidance", it is also the law. He broke the law. Plenty of people have had fixed penalty notices as a result of breaking that law.
He did expect this, just about pandemics and viruses in general not coronavirus specifically. Honestly, he should get a lot of credit for it (though he ruined that by editing) given that it's something he has talked a lot about.
> who is currently at the centre of a scandal for breaking the law
There was a recent story about Neil Gaiman travelling from New Zealand back to his home in Scotland. He was given a strict talking to by the police and issued a public apology – and that, as far as I understand, was the end of it. Is Cummings held to different standards?
Did Neil Gaiman travel with his Covid 19 infected partner, or lie about his trip to get himself out of trouble? Come to think of it, has Cummings even apologised?
Also we could hold him to the same standards as his peers - fellow politicians. The closest case I can think of is Catherine Calderwood ...
If a doctor were to prescribe that a patient needs chemotherapy, you wouldn't expect the doctor to get chemotherapy along with the patient, right? Would you even trust a doctor that was undergoing intense chemotherapy with all the mental side effects along with it?
Dominic Cummings is a senior political advisor to Boris Johnson himself. His thinking helps shape the country, and therefore he needs to constantly in top mental form, especially during this crisis.
So, if he feels the need to travel the country as he did, everyone should support him, or face the consequences of having a mentally distracted political advisor trying to help run the country
A doctor administering chemotherapy is such a daft counterargument that I don't know where to start.
Dominic Cummings was infected with the Coronavirus and by moving to a second home and by his own admission using the local healthcare resources in that area he was risking spreading the virus.
> A doctor administering chemotherapy is such a daft counterargument that I don't know where to start.
It's an analogy, you bobblehead.
> Dominic Cummings was infected with the Coronavirus and by moving to a second home and by his own admission using the local healthcare resources in that area he was risking spreading the virus.
One person's effect is so slight, it's negligible. However, having an advisor helping shape the laws and policies of the country not being in top form, is much more dangerous. Bad policy can kill thousands of people.
Not sure about the UK, but in Australia, if I suspected my eyesight was bad, and went for a drive, and was involved in an accident, I would probably be charged with negligent driving. Even if I weren't involved in an accident, the negligent driving would still be breaking the law, but there would be no occasion to prove it.
He cited doubts about eyesight as an excuse for a 30 minute leisure drive. Apparently, one retired police chief suggests that's illegal. Which does sound about right.
He didn’t technically break a law, but definitely broke very clear government guidance – “Stay Home“ is about as unambiguous as it gets. Millions of people took the rules very seriously, missing loved one’s funerals for example, and he drove 260 miles to his parent’s house and a local castle.
The guidance from Government needs to read in conjunction with the law because the guidance describes "reasonable". The guidance was clear: do not leave home; do not travel to second homes; don't mix households; if you need help use your local networks.
You've been allowed to leave your home from Day 1 of the lockdown and there is no law to say otherwise
Edit: Though under reasonable terms, including exercise and food shopping. If you have only obeying the slogans, which was my point, well that's unfortunate
> 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
It then lists some reasonable excuses. Travelling to a second home is not listed in the reasonable excuses.
The government guidance is important because it provides context to "reasonable" -- it expands the list of reasonable excuses.
The guidance at the time was "You must stay at home", "you must not travel", "you must not travel to a second home".
The Crown Prosecution Service guidance is important because it curtails police action. The CPS guidance was similarly clear: travelling to a second home is unlikely to be reasonable, unless it's someone fleeing domestic abuse.
Police guidance tells us how they would have handled Cummings if they'd stopped him as he travelled from London to Durham. The police have said that they'd have turned him back.
Very many people have been fined for doing exactly what Cummings did, and those fines are not going to be withdrawn.
> 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
He claims his reasonable excuse was to get childcare from his family in Durham. That might cover his trip from London to Durham, but it doesn't cover his trip back again.
I'd argue it doesn't cover his trip from London to Durham because he had childcare available in London which he chose not to use.
Dominic Cummings, the highly controversial government to the UK Prime Minister, has been caught modifying an old blog entry to try and make himself look cleverer than he is.
It's great that tools like the Wayback machine are able to objectively prove attempts at lying like this one. I'm afraid, though, that the insane level of polarisation that politics has reached in this day will protect Cummings from any serious consequences: will his own faction care about this at all?
That has nothing to do with this story though. The actual scandal is that Cummings broke the law to drive hundreds of miles to his parents during lockdown, with his wife (who had covid) and child in the car. And didn't even go directly, but stopped by a local beauty spot on the way back. And now he has been coming up with flimsy excuses for this for the last few days.
> 6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.
That has to be read in conjunction with the government and crown prosecution guidance about what reasonable means, and both the Government and the Crown Prosecutuion Service are very clear: that type of travel was not allowed.
Specifically, if you or anyone in your household had symptoms, you were unable to leave your house - including for food and medicine. In any circumstances you were unable to go to a second home. One major reason for this is to ensure there was no strain on the local services - especially hospitals. Cummings caused that strain in Durham.
He has power over the Prime Minister that only the Prime Minister could explain. It is possibly narcissism or implicit blackmail. The Cummings character could dish the dirt and bring the PM down.
The wider Conservative Party do not hold him in high regard. Cummings isn't even in the Conservative Party. The Daily Mail is a good bellwether on this - there is no love for Cummings except from Boris. And Boris has got Brexit done so doesn't need his chum. But he has also been isolated from others during this infatuation with the Cummings.
I really would have thought he'd know better than this.
Without having researched Cummings in much detail, I certainly don't like the political causes he has supported but I have vaguely got the impression he might (despite his history degree) be quite intelligent at managing teams that make good use of data to drive policy - something which would appeal to the HN crowd. Does anyone know am I justified in thinking this, or is it all spinning smoke and mirrors?
It's all spinning mirrors and backroom smoke. Cummings is an accelerationist whose policy is destroy as much as possible so it can be rebuilt. There is no indication that he's in any way competent at making good use of data to inform policy - if anything he's good at finding people who can make data look about right to justify a policy he already likes.
Yes, he’s very much adept at manage teams who use data. In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on Brexit, his big insight was to realise that it was hard work to convince ‘remain’ (pro Europe) voters to vote leave. But instead he had the insight, setup the teams, and got the funding to launch a massive online social media campaign, to find people who had never voted and convince them to vote for Brexit. The models were computer simulations that were regularly calibrated from proxy measures. And then the models told the teams where to spend money on targeted Facebook advertising. Like telling young men in coastal communities that Brexit was better for fishing rights.
Without Cummins’s insight Brexit would not have happened and Boris Johnson would not be prime minister of the UK.
> Without Cummins’s insight Brexit would not have happened and Boris Johnson would not be prime minister of the UK.
It's an interesting parallel universe. Cameron had a slim majority in 2015, and likely would have hung on, but he'd have been up against Miliband for a May 2020 election, which would have had to be postponed. We'd likely have had a government of national unity in Feb 2020
Likewise without having researched in detail, my impression is that he's probably very intelligent at stuff like that, but at the same time, utterly unprincipled.
So yes, I suppose he'd fit right in to the ad-tech world, if he does find himself wanting a career change.
> Does anyone know am I justified in thinking this, or is it all spinning smoke and mirrors?
There's a great deal of spin doctors on all sides that will do anything to make the party they're in look great in-front of the 'media' in order to sweep scandals under the carpet. So it's both.
The guy is undoubtably clever, something like an evil genius here and he knows the mainstream media is on his case for sometime with lots of skepticism of his own story if proven to be completely false. His attitude to answering questions in the Q/A was nothing more than a lure to show the extreme hysteria and anger the media has towards him, just as they ran with a story of 'allegations' of a second trip with no evidence. [0][1] Such stories without evidence are very dangerous.
> No photographic evidence has been published, and the reports are based on the testimonies of two eyewitnesses.
The UK didn't take the lockdown measures and this pandemic seriously from the start and was slow to act and testing targets were not met. The media compared it to the 'flu' and played down the death rates when comparing it to the 2003 SARS outbreak. Perhaps those who weren't socially distant and were clapping close together at Westminster Bridge [2] were just as bad as Cummings 'breaking' the lockdown, shouldn't begin to point fingers. It's everyone's fault.
Personally, if you read his blog, you can learn a lot about the very field you'd alluded to ("...use of data to drive policy..."). And some of it is very interesting stuff.
But much like yourself, I find his political views abhorrent.
Do they still delete stuff when the site removes access via robots.txt? Others can look at this example and later when they also need to do "history hacking" decide to get rid of this problem by removing themselves from the wayback machine. IMHO, if you are important enough to have a Wikipedia page, what you say publicly should be immutable.
The quote attributed to him (I've not seen his press briefing myself, so I can't say whether it's accurate) is this:
> Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.
There are three key bits there:
> I wrote
The blog post is some 1800 words, two-thirds of which is a verbatim quote from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Once you taken away the leading epigraph from David Deutsch and the rather long title, there are barely 400 words of actual content from Cummings.
> about the possible threat of coronaviruses
In its original form, the post does not mention coronaviruses. The only pathogens mentioned are Ebola and various types of flu, and those only appear in the extensive quote from BAS.
> and the urgent need for planning
The only planning it refers to is greater security for laboratories studying dangerous pathogens, specifically the use of red teams to test the security of British research facilities. There is nothing about preparing for pandemics, whether stockpiling equipment, contingency plans for dealing with a pandemic, emergency powers legislation, determining criteria for imposing or lifting lockdowns, etc.
Given that Cummings appears to be using this post as a refutation of the accusation that he initially favoured "herd immunity" as the strategy for dealing with COVID-19 in the UK, his representation of it seems a little disingenuous.
And a curious coincidence he made such a modification when he returned from Durham. Almost as if he knew he'd have to start creating justification for the trip. A coincidence indeed!
What has happened to this posting with respect to its HN listing? It was top of the front page an hour or so ago when I was reading the lively comment thread. Now, I can't see it on the first five pages; found it only by searching for "Wayback" filtered to last 24 hours.
Does HN have a "hide" function, or demote to the darkest depths, and, if so, what triggers it?
I don't have answer to your question, but it might just be that when you examine the details here, it just doesn't seem nearly as bad as the title suggests.
He was indeed warning about pandemics in 2019. ...which is close enough for me. Looks like he added a tag about coronavirus, but there were cases where he mentioned prior coronavirus outbreaks, like SARS/MERS/etc...
Yes, I understand that, but my query was purely about the mechanics of HN; I wasn't commenting on the validity or merit of the article in question. I've nothing to offer in that direction; disinterest born of overload is all I have on that.
I'd be fascinated to know how this apparent flamebait detector (assuming an algo, not a person) operates, but I note that the posting guidelines do say:
. Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
and:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Given that the PM and most of the cabinet seem to have a similar attitude to the truth, the only way this can be significant is if enough Tory MPs have enough spine to back a no confidence motion.
He appears to rank higher than the head of the civil service, previously the most important unelected job. He’s not a party member and is deeply unelectable, so he’ll never be a politician. I think this is his peak.
It feels like she was the last of her kind, and it is governments of salesmen from here on in.
If you encounter someone in your life who exhibits the culture of rule bending, bring technically correct, or trying to get away with something, then please hold them to a higher standard, especially if they have any kind of public role.
The alternative is these double speaking wheeler dealers — in this example, one who is concocting a self serving interpretation of the lockdown rules — who break that most golden of all rules: do unto others as you would have done to yourself.
Or as I like to say it — what if everyone behaved like you did?