Cummings & Covid: The Beginning of the End for Brexit?
Front Page of the Daily Star, 27 May 2020
“Got Brexit Done!” chimed the Daily Mail, Britain’s most widely read newspaper, as the UK finally left the EU at the end of January, “The government has kept the faith of the British people”.
As Boris Johnson rode to a landslide victory last December, resulting in a ‘stonking’ 80-seat majority for the Conservative Party, it’s no coincidence that most of Britain’s right-leaning press had voiced their support for his campaign. A country emotionally exhausted by endless Brexit debate and by three and a half years of almost daily parliamentary chaos, the message from Johnson was simple, ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘Defeat Jeremy Corbyn’.
This ‘right-leaning press’ includes The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Sun, as well as their Sunday publications and to a certain extent The Times and The Sunday Times. These newspapers were instrumental in reaching out to the electorate in the weeks running up to the election. However sceptical The Times and The Sunday Times were about Brexit, their regular attacks on Corbyn’s policies were enough to persuade vast swathes of traditionally Labour-held constituencies into electing Conservative MPs.
Yet just four months later, the entire spectrum of national newspapers had turned on the Prime Minister, due to his (mis)handling of Covid-19. Britain was slow in enforcing lockdown measures and held controversial mass sporting events across the country far later than its European counterparts. Scenes of over 251,000 people attending the Cheltenham horse race festival while Italy had already recorded over 1,000 deaths haunts the Government, as just seven weeks later, Britain recorded the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe.
While the rest of Europe’s economies were locking down, Britain’s plan to keep business as usual was a gamble that backfired. Johnson appeared to lead the way, boasting that he was “shaking hands with everybody” and trying to convince the public that his “mitigation strategy” would work. He only attended a high-level government crisis meeting, known as COBRA, five weeks after the government had recognised the risk of the virus spreading to the UK.
And it was only until Imperial College London’s Professor Neil Ferguson published a damning report on how the governments policy would result in 250,000 excess deaths that the government sprang into action in enforcing the lockdown.
With Covid-19 consuming almost the entire bandwidth of the British media, it was inevitable that investigations would start into the government’s woeful lack of preparedness. Scandalous revelations show how a pandemic rehearsal drill in 2016, codenamed Exercise Cygnus, predicted that the health service would collapse and Britain would suffer from a devastating lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.
After its slow start in responding to the virus, the government made matters worse through a consistent campaign of confused messaging over people’s lockdown rights. On a Sunday evening on 10 May, the Prime Minister announced to the nation that its message of “Stay At Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” had been replaced by “Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives”. The message, no doubt orchestrated by Johnson’s special advisor Dominic Cummings, prompted ire and confusion amongst the British public which had no real idea of what it meant.
No one individual has contributed more to both a government’s success and its failure as Boris Johnson’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings. As the former director of Vote Leave, Cummings spearheaded the campaign to get Britain out of the EU. By reframing the debate about Britain’s sovereignty into one mainly about immigration, Cummings proved himself invaluable in persuading millions of first-time voters to support Brexit. The master of the three-part slogan, Cummings offered Leave voters to “Take Back Control” and to “Get Brexit Done” if they voted for the Tories in the December election.
Cummings’ indispensable role as the Conservative Party’s ‘ideas man’, meant that the government was prepared to back him no end in his latest scuffle with media. He had broken the lockdown rules, which he had designed, by driving 260 miles across the country and then a further 60 miles on a sightseeing trip to Barnard Castle. Yet each minister in turn was prepared to justify the lame excuses and incredulous explanations of his behaviour in print, on radio and on TV. This wasn’t Cummings first faux pas on the pandemic either. His insistence on ‘herd immunity’ acting as the silver bullet that would both cure the nation of Covid-19 and keep the economy running was lambasted in Professor Ferguson’s report.
The right-leaning press, once wrapped around Cummings’ finger, is now slipping away. Genuine questions as to whether Cummings’ actions have caused a spike in people breaking the lockdown rules are being batted away by Johnson. Tabloids now slam the government with “It’s one rule for us and another rule for the people in 10 Downing Street”. The Daily Star’s cut-out “do whatever the hell you want and sod everybody else mask” is the exemplar.
Will this shift in the media’s support damage Johnson’s chances of delivering on his No.1 manifesto pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’? Less than half of Britain now trusts the government to provide accurate information on the pandemic, so why would they trust them on Brexit? The Cummings saga has injected a dose of realism into government’s agenda, especially as the UK reaches the 30 June deadline to extend the transition period. Maybe there are some negative consequences of a no-deal exit? Perhaps Johnson will blame all the damaging effects of a no-deal on Covid-19? Perhaps Brexit is hard after all? Hang on, didn’t we say that Brexit was already done?
In responding to Labour MP Yvette Cooper who asked whether the PM will choose to protect Cummings or to put the national interest first, Johnson replied “my choice is the choice of the British people”. By pursuing Brexit, a political project justified as ‘the will of the people’ Johnson has deluded himself into believing that the daily decisions he makes have the full-throated supported of the entire electorate. Yet, if they can no longer trust his government, perhaps it’s the end of Johnson, Brexit and the choice of the ‘British people’.