Archaic power relations allow the Westminster elite to get away with anything – even the deaths of thousands of people
Dominic Cummings’ latest utterances should not be treated as revelations, but rather as corroborating evidence of what should, in a functioning democracy, be treated as Britain’s gravest peacetime scandal. A prime minister sent tens of thousands of his own citizens to premature graves because he valued other considerations more highly than human life.
We knew Boris Johnson resisted demands from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies for a national lockdown in September, even if Johnson’s former senior adviser now fleshes out the prime minister’s reasonings: that most of those dying were in their 80s, whose disproportionate political loyalty to the Conservative party was rewarded by its leader caring not whether they lived or died. It was already clear that Johnson’s administration wanted Covid to “wash through the country”, because they briefed favoured journalists that “herd immunity” was their official strategy more than 17 months ago. Britain has a more severe death rate per million inhabitants than the United States in part because Johnson – alongside Rishi Sunak, whose reputation Cummings has sought to whitewash – wanted to prioritise the economy over life, and ended up devastating both.
