Britain’s fall is Cummings
In covering Cummings’s session in front of MPs, our press corps focused more on the circus than the substance, parsing every sentence for snippets of palace intrigue and wondering whose careers he might have holed below the waterline.
Cartoon by Crid.
For years, it has been clear that the machinery of the British state is broken. Our political class is largely comprised of feebleminded, conceited dilettantes. Meanwhile, on the non-political side, our boast of having ‘the Rolls Royce of civil services’ is revealed more with each passing day to be the cruel joke it always was.
We see the results of this institutional uselessness every minute, everywhere. However, the specific systems that create the mess remain largely obscured from view – as do the actions of the individuals who run and staff it. Rather as with a disease, we see the symptoms, but not the cause or its mechanism of action.
It was therefore a unique opportunity to have Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s Chief Aide for over a year, offer a marathon seven-hour testimony to Parliament. Doubly so, given that his stint in Number 10 coincided with the arrival of Covid, which for the governments of the world has acted as a receding tide, revealing who was swimming naked.
Sadly, our press corps focused far more on the circus than the substance, parsing his every sentence for snippets of palace intrigue and wondering whose careers he might have holed below the waterline.
The Fourth Estate has – or at least should have – a vital role in holding power to account, and publicising and interpreting what the politicians in our representative democracy are doing in our name.
However, journalists devote far more column inches to Westminster gossip about which politicians are rising, which are falling, and who is plotting against whom, than they do to the harder and dryer task of examining the effects of legislation and events.
The Cummings testimony was no exception.
Now we have emerged from behind the protective skirts of Nursemaid EU, the British state is simply going to have to get better in its foresight and strategic planning, its control and organisation, its analysis and communication, its efficiency of action, and its selection and training of civil servants and politicians.
In time, perhaps they will be able to move beyond Cummings’s infantile feud with Boris Johnson’s fiancé, and take at least some time to analyse what he has to say about the failings of the state.
Certainly, his allegations of rank incompetence and systemic failure will ring true to anybody who has lived through the last 18 months.
If we do not have a long and hard think about these issues – and sooner rather than later – a disinterested observer might be tempted to agree with the words Cummings alleged the then Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara to have uttered in March last year: ‘I think we are absolutely f****d. I think this country is heading for disaster.’
