Dominic Cummings' Hand Grenades - Asides (IX)

 
Peter Sutcliffe died this week and I vowed that I would not read a single line on the monster that terrorised the north of England, and murdered thirteen women some four decades ago. But then an old Patricia Highsmith piece popped into my inbox, and before I knew it the creator of Ripley had lured me in. It turned out that it wasn't a very good read. The banality of Sutcliffe's personality - the object that Highsmith was pursuing - was no match for the strange, unsettling charisma of Highsmith's fictional creations.

This morning, once again, I find myself drawn into a story that depresses me, but leaves me pondering on the banalities that often lie behind those who display sociopathological tendencies. Dominic Cummings isn't a serial killer. Let me be clear about that. But his actions during spring, in breaking the rules with trips to Durham and Barnard Castle, shattered much of the credibility of that first lockdown, and subsequently the one that we now find ourselves in. Without that journey, taken by a man right at top of government and responsible for setting in motion key policies, hundreds, even thousands, of people may not have died.  

Tim Shipman's piece in The Times, on the machinations, briefings and counter-briefings that have occupied Number 10 over the past few days, is full of jaw-dropping observations that would greatly amuse if they weren't so serious.

Aside from an unsettling image of Boris Johnson cooking sausages as Lee Cain, the former Number 10 press secretary, mashes potatoes and swede, the detail that jumped out at me from this piece was a colleague's observation that "Dom's favourite gesture at the moment in conversations is to pull the pin from an imaginary hand grenade and then throw the grenade over his shoulder as he leaves the room." If this is true – and it rings true - Cummings clearly sees himself as Die Hard's Hans Gruber, but to most of us he's got far more in common with Alan Partridge (thank you to a Twitter chum for flagging up the Accidental Partridge observation). That the 'disruptor supreme' was seen in his garden, a few days after the Barnard Castle debacle, dancing to Abba's 'Dancing Queen' seems to clinch it. I smile. And then, angrily, I check myself. 

I read the 'grenade' comment back a few times. As I do so, I keep in mind Cummings' trip to Barnard Castle, combined with the smirk that he made as he left the Downing Street garden, knowing that he’d gotten away it and that there was nothing any of the press-corps or the wider nation could do about it. Indeed, as he smiled, hundreds of people remained hooked-up to ventilators in ICUs, fighting for their lives. And this leads me to remind myself that the UK has thousands more Covid-19 casualties than any other country in Europe. My smile has gone. It's not funny at all.