Melanie Phillips: Sanctimonious bullying, double standards and sheer absence of humanity

The public hysteria over Dominic Cummings, who held an unprecedented press conference today in the Downing Street garden to explain why he appeared to have broken the spirit if not the letter of the lockdown rules, is far more troubling than anything Boris Johnson’s controversial chief adviser may have done. 

By Cummings’s own account, several media claims about what he supposedly did in the 14 days at the end of March and in early April, claims which did so much to incite public feeling against him, were false. With his wife sick with what looked like Covid, leaving her almost unable to care for their child, with Cummings himself likely to go down with the virus and hounded within his London house by a hostile and threatening public, he drove his wife and son to a house on his parents’ farm in Durham to isolate there, with his sister and other family members leaving food on the doorstep.