the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I spent far too long writing, editing, re-writing, re-editing and generally faffing about on yesterday’s blog post and having realised that, I’m not going to make the same mistake today and will keep this one short. You lucky people!

As I wrote the other day, the real story for me about Cummings’ Going’s isn’t the fact he made the trip – or trips – in the first place.

No, the story for me is that Goings’ is reportedly to be a very smart chap and being so smart, he must’ve known that there was a possibility that news of his trip would leak. Scratch possibility. More like a dead certainty actually. It is no secret that Goings’ isn’t exactly Mr. Popular in Westminster, so for his enemies – any number of civil servants, MP’s and Cabinet Ministers – this was a golden opportunity to get their revenge. The thing is though, he would’ve known all this all this, could have guessed what would’ve happened when this got out, but went ahead and did it anyway.

There have always been two laws, one for the people who make the laws. And the other, far more onerous and subject to punishment by the people who make the laws, for everyone else and this tawdry episode only underlines it. To be shocked by it, is missing the point. The details of it don’t matter – inasmuch as they unsurprising – but the wider point, that the more essential you are to those in power, the greater the impunity with which you can flout the law that applies to everyone else, is starkly illustrated by this.

Boris’s Johnson defence of him makes it immeasurably harder for the authorities to keep the lockdown travel restrictions in place. Because for people who’ve obeyed the rules, played the game because they think that everyone else is, for them to feel that the rules don’t apply to everyone, what do they reason is there to adhere to them? If your loved one died alone because of the lockdown, or you couldn’t go to their funeral you’d be right be feeling extremely fucked off by now.

‘Well if he can do it…’ they will not unreasonably think. That we’re far from all in it together. There is talk today of local lockdowns. Me neither. They’re as likely to be as effective as Boris’s Johnson marriage vows if people think they can do a Goings.’