An interesting postscript: Cummings recently gave 7 hours evidence to the UK parliament about the government’s COVID response, criticizing it heavily (my shortform summary here).
In this he gave more detail on his trip out of London that had attracted all the vilification. Apparently it followed a crowd of people gathering at his house threatening to kill his wife & children (after a false negative media story about him). Boris Johnson told him to leave London for his own safety, regardless of the rules. This effectively exonerates Cummings (for the main trip).
If this is true, I assume he didn’t state this at the time to protect Boris, and one of the reasons Boris protected him was because Boris knew what had actually happened.
Incidentally in the BBC Radio 4 news report of Cummings’ evidence, none of this was mentioned! Though they found time to interview locals around Barnard Castle about why they think Cummings is so nasty.
An interesting postscript: Cummings recently gave 7 hours evidence to the UK parliament about the government’s COVID response, criticizing it heavily (my shortform summary here).
In this he gave more detail on his trip out of London that had attracted all the vilification. Apparently it followed a crowd of people gathering at his house threatening to kill his wife & children (after a false negative media story about him). Boris Johnson told him to leave London for his own safety, regardless of the rules. This effectively exonerates Cummings (for the main trip).
If this is true, I assume he didn’t state this at the time to protect Boris, and one of the reasons Boris protected him was because Boris knew what had actually happened.
Incidentally in the BBC Radio 4 news report of Cummings’ evidence, none of this was mentioned! Though they found time to interview locals around Barnard Castle about why they think Cummings is so nasty.