THE wave of hostility directed towards Dominic Cummings over his role in campaigning for Brexit, along with his ambiguous status both inside and outside the establishment, initially had the effect of encouraging fascination and even sympathy for his position, sometimes extending to the idea he was some kind of mad genius.
Nobody of sound judgement could maintain a positive attitude to Cummings following Wednesday’s Parliamentary appearance which was a masterclass in intellectual mediocrity and misdirection, but some mystery persists. Is he perhaps only pretending to be an idiot?
Cummings’s long testimony seemed constructed to push two main agendas: the myth that the essence of the government failure was in failing to impose the lockdown policy quickly enough, and the claim that government actions have been defined by incompetence rather than deliberate criminality.
With respect to the former there remains no evidence whatsoever that lockdowns have saved a single life, and accumulating evidence that they have killed tens of thousands in the UK alone. In years to come, as the consequences of missed cancer screenings and routine operations start to bite, along with the suicides and the collateral of economic destruction, this number is likely rise to six figures.
Cummings’s presentation of the lockdown argument was no more sophisticated than anyone else’s. It depended on systematic evasion and falsified predictions delivered in hysterical language. In truth, the case has long been closed. Lockdown has zero positive medical effect. Nevertheless, Cummings and his masters insist on retaining it because of its use as a weapon of economic and political war.
Cummings’s additional testimony points in the same direction. By emphasising the incompetence of the government in failing to act with CCP-style ruthlessness, he aimed to deflect from the political and moral corruption which has defined the UK response, and simultaneously push the system still further in a repressive direction.
Here again, systematic government criminality, including the refusal to distribute cheap and effective pharmaceutical remedies and the government terror campaign masterminded by Michael Gove and the Sage propaganda unit, were left unmentioned by Cummings because both actions represented strategic decisions designed to maximise damage rather than simple mistakes.
At the same time, the human cost of this programme was attributed to scapegoats, in particular the visibly stupid Matt Hancock, blamed for the tens of thousands of medical murders in care homes-turned-death camps where the elderly were cut off from their families, denied effective medical treatments and left to suffocate unattended. In truth these deaths are the responsibility of Gove, UK branch manager of the global Great Reset, and he should answer for them in The Hague.
The original pandemic plan, Cummings insisted without any evidence beyond Neil Ferguson’s long-discredited pseudo-models, was completely inadequate. What was inadequate about it was that it didn’t suit the agenda of corporate and political clients in Beijing and Davos. Evidently this cannot be stated, so Cummings invoked once again the manipulative rhetoric of the Sage propaganda unit, insisting for instance that ‘the NHS would be smashed’. The NHS was indeed smashed, but by lockdown, with thousands of operations and screenings postponed, while spare capacity built at great expense was never used.
The strangest feature of Cummings’s testimony consisted in repeating a series of fundamentally correct statements from Johnson, indicating a reluctance to lock down on the basis of the accurate perception that the damage would be immeasurably worse that the virus. This assessment has now been comprehensively demonstrated to be correct. Supposing that Cummings is accurate here (which cannot be assumed), the outstanding question is how Johnson lost his grip on reality. Did he suffer a kind of nervous breakdown? Or is the purpose of Johnson only to serve as the embodiment of the incompetence thesis, and create a distraction, as the machinery of corruption grinds on in the background?
Meanwhile the conception of Cummings as an otherworldly intelligence has been replaced by a portrait of a weak-minded fanatic. Asked what he was doing in the first two weeks of March last year, Cummings responded, ‘I was having meeting after meeting with people trying to figure out where we were.’ He claimed that the government should ‘have been hitting the emergency panic button in mid-February’, when the correct moment to panic in government is never. A picture emerged of man completely out of his intellectual depth, concealing his failure with aggression and bluster. Perhaps this was also a pose. But it seemed highly convincing.
