When did Johnson become so dependent on Cummings? Was he always this weak?

There is nothing like a pandemic for exposing the fault lines in leadership, literally as well as metaphorically.

Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, was giving a press briefing on Monday morning when she felt a tremor other than the normal excitable curiosity of the journalists present. “Don’t worry if things start to move behind me,” she laughed. It was merely the earth, she explained, and carried on unfazed. No surprise then that New Zealand has recorded only 21 Covid-19 fatalities and are now well advanced in lifting lockdown.

In roughly the same time frame, over two press conferences, Boris Johnson was facing an earthquake of a different order. Righteous rumblings were the mood as media, opposition, the public and many in his own party clamoured for the head of his powerful adviser Dominic Cummings, who had breached lockdown to travel hundreds of miles up, down and around the country, while believing his wife had contracted coronavirus.

That Johnson did not quell the maelstrom can be seen in YouGov polls that show 71 per cent of the British public believe Cummings broke the law and 59 per cent think he should resign.

Martyn Turner

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Our own leaders have not yet endured any Covid-19 earthquakes. And attempts to compare Leo Varadkar’s picnic in the Phoenix Park to Cummings’s panicked boltings are laughable.

Cummings’s breaches of lockdown are myriad and well documented. At the very least, he has made the job of the British police very difficult.

It is hard to see how anyone could construe a transgression out of Varadkar’s picnic. He and a member of his household (his partner) met two friends (gatherings of four are allowed), within 5km of their home (Farmleigh) and, suitably distanced, enjoyed some food. Is it possible lockdown has made us all so repressed we think eating outdoors is a crime?

Au contraire – the picnic shows that with lockdown easing, happiness is now possible. Because in the dark days of early lockdown, our “experts” sometimes seemed to embody HL Mencken’s definition of puritans: those haunted by the fear that somebody, somewhere might be happy.

Trouble ahead?

Our earthquake might be yet to come. Because lockdowns are to politicians what rough seas are to swimmers: easier to get in than to get out of. Tectonic plates have undoubtedly shifted. The economy is shredded and the kids are not all right.

These are problems for our next taoiseach, God help him. In the meantime, the Dominic Cummings controversy has engaged us all in a compelling lockdown soap opera. His transgressions have provided catharsis for the shocking cost of the lockdown to ordinary lives.

It’s riveting to us because in every country that imposed lockdown, people bought the idea that everybody was in it together. On a global scale, people died alone; on a small scale, cocooners longingly wondered if they might risk life, limb and the long arm of the law to stretch their legs, before withdrawing to the loneliness. Cummings presents the possibility that it was all unnecessary.

On top of that, there is the dramatic potential for retribution on a tragic scale. The man who put Johnson into Downing Street may now be the catalyst for the prime minster’s downfall.

Until the pandemic hit Britain, Boris Johnson was a big figure. Then he got coronavirus.

He has refused to apologise for Cummings, insisting he merely did “as any father would”. Read in cold print, that might give the impression that familiar bluff Boris of the pounding fists and the rhetorical flourishes had finally reasserted himself. The reality brings a different conclusion.

The only thing that has become clear from the press conferences is Johnson’s determination to hold on to his adviser. When did Johnson become so dependent on Dominic Cummings? Was he always this weak?

Brush with death

A brush with death is what happened. It is probably fair to say that the man who bounded to power, trailing clouds of glory last December, had never had intimations of his own mortality. His time in intensive care clearly changed all that.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that a confrontation with your own mortality is life-changing. Vulnerability rather than invincibility becomes the emotional default and confidence is a casualty.

In a politician that change need not be a bad thing. It could result in a development of empathy, a quality singularly lacking in many politicians.

Leo Varadkar’s lack of empathy was the national conversation at the last general election. Awareness of this may well have led to his determination to bring some humanity to this crisis.

Boris Johnson appeared to have a brief collision with empathy on his emergence from hospital. His speech praising his carers, some of them immigrants, was moving – until he announced that as foreign workers they had to pay for any treatment they received from the NHS. His U-turn on that was swift.

Apparently he has shed a stone since his discharge from hospital last month. “Don’t be a fatty in your 50s,” he declared with blithe disregard for the sensitivities of ageism and weightism issues. But as U-turn follows U-turn, he appears to have shed that surefootedness that formerly marked his actions. He is undoubtedly worried about Brexit.

Little wonder he needs the crutch of Cummings.

We should enjoy no schadenfreude over Boris Johnson’s troubles.

Here, it will take time to heal lockdown damage to a generation, from small children showing signs of introversion at not being allowed to approach people to the Leaving Cert students who have been denied all those important rites of passage.

And then there’s the economy.

The earth will be volatile for some time to come.