As a political neutral I regret to note the party political nature of Councillor Baines’s comment on the Dominic Cummings story.


He claims that Cummings “admitted breaking lockdown rules”. This is untrue. Mr Cummings gave a press conference in which he consistently quoted chapter and verse from the rules.


The media, who talk amongst themselves and believe their opinion represents public opinion as a whole, came with one intention only which was to get Cummings to say ‘yes there is one rule for us and one for the rest of you’.


Not one of them had the nous to ask, ‘You say the rules are on the NHS website but not one of the government’s advertisements contained the message ‘Full Lockdown rules are available on the NHS website’. That was a serious mistake.


To pretend that this is not about party politics is disingenuous. I don’t know much about Mr Cummings apart from the fact that he is an excellent organiser but very confrontational in his attitude towards other people and certainly some of the ideas he has expressed are those which I, as a student of politics since the late 1950s, would regard as impractical and destructive in what is regarded as the art of the possible. 


At the heart of it all is the desire of some to prevent Brexit from being achieved and to undermine the confidence of the electorate in the Conservative Party. It was ironic that some Conservative MPs condemned Mr Cummings before hearing his side of the story. 


For me a serious issue has arisen with the alteration of Mr Cummings’s political blog to give the impression he had greater foresight about the pandemic than in fact was the case. What that means is that he has proved to be unreliable and self-serving on that issue but, I have to ask, who in politics isn’t?


Like Councillor Baines I have followed the rules using a common sense approach of social isolation. If the Prime Minister considers Mr Cummings is indispensable then he will have to accept the consequences of what ensues.


However, I have found one of the best ways of remaining sane is to stop reading the news.


Dr Philip R Thomas
St Helens