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Well Oliver, generally I would agree with you that people in our "echo chamber" can often be very out of touch with political realities, however on this one, I think Johnson has massively misjudged.
Tbh, I thought that now that the next ballot box challenge is almost 5 years away, Cummings would be expendable. However it shows that either Johnson thinks he can't cope without the guy, or DC knows where some serious skeletons are buried.
Sifta-
Well Oliver, generally I would agree with you that people in our "echo chamber" can often be very out of touch with political realities, however on this one, I think Johnson has massively misjudged.
I agree, but what will cause him to lose power?
Tbh, I thought that now that the next ballot box challenge is almost 5 years away, Cummings would be expendable. However it shows that either Johnson thinks he can't cope without the guy, or DC knows where some serious skeletons are buried.
Johnson doesn't need Cummings primarily for elections. What Cummings (and Gove) appear(s) to be engaged in is to harness data for unsavoury (and probably illegal) purposes. Although I obviously don't know quite what's going on, I think that what I've heard about it sounds very dangerous.
That the next election is so far away means Johnson will try the least popular things he wants to do now. Standard modus operandi for unjust incoming governments.
I'd like to see Cummings go, although there are probably already plenty waiting in the wings to replace him who are cut from the same cloth.
Oliver Schick
The 'people not adhering to social distancing/isolation' outcry is mainly a middle-class, curtain-twitching thing. It's considered a peccadillo by many, many think it's dictatorial and an infringement of their rights, and if people travel about by car, they're isolated, right? So you then get some people who don't have a lot of power, though they have some and some prominent responsibility, and who do have a certain measure of honour, who resign. Dominic Cummings, of course, has more power, probably as a sock puppet for worldwide oligarchs to implement totalitarian 'government' of some kind in which opposition and protest are made impossible by electoral manipulation, surveillance, and permanently-simmering undeclared-civil-war-like social division, and because he is backed by deep-seated corruption, of course he won't resign.
Even were something else to come out that might contradict what Johnson said today (but he probably checked with Cummings whether there is anything else), he could still feign ignorance, rely on it being said peccadillo, and do nothing. He won't be damaged by it except in the eyes of people who are already his political opponents. On the contrary, as he never apologises for anything, apologising being generally considered a mistake in politics (except decades too late when the apology has become fairly inconsequential), in doubling down he's going to be seen by many as 'strong' even though he is (again) being dishonourable. Again, we're still very far from an election. There's nothing Johnson has to worry about.