Good morning. Here is a sole link to a piece on Dominic Cummings’ return in front of the Covid inquiry. It’s not too long, but with all the papers carrying reports of it today I thought to send it, having once written a longread on the man. I remain fascinated by his refusal to adjust the way he moves through the world despite its evident costs. It’s not to his credit. Yesterday’s appearance felt like a bout – one ended by knockout.
1—“Cummings stared blankly in response, and then began again to boil.”
On Tuesday 31 October, Dominic Cummings returned as if from the dead for his usual performance. He was giving evidence on the 15th day of the Covid inquiry into how government decisions were made during the pandemic. This is what he does now, and has done for more than two years – on the BBC, in front of MPs, and on his own Substack: he runs over an increasingly distant past in a bid to restore a long-destroyed reputation.
At the Covid inquiry, held in an unremarkable building in Paddington, he faced his least sympathetic interlocutor yet: Hugo Keith KC. The pair presented two models of a man. Cummings was, as ever, unkempt, slumped in his chair in a crumpled white shirt with the top button undone, his black tie loose, his hands invariably crossed, or on his head, or holding his face. Keith, in contrast, was a picture of British propriety: dark, tailored suit; Windsor-knotted pink tie; crisp white shirt; expensive watch; a poppy lapel already on display in October.
It has been a strange, silent year from Cummings: he has lost 16,000 Twitter followers and barely posted on his blog (for which he charges thousands of subscribers £10 a month). He has spent much of his time tweeting about nuclear escalation in Ukraine, describing Western involvement in the war as “even dumber” than Iraq. He believes AI is the transformative event of our age. He has left British politics behind, although he occasionally mounts his mad cry for a new Tory-displacing party to be built on the rubble of the old. His pallor on 31 October suggested he has been inside the entire time.
Thanks for reading. Catch you next time. Have a good week.