On a side issue, as you probably know but other readers may not, Dominic Cummings was central to another case of social reality. For he was subsequently turned into public enemy no. 1 by the British media, when he broke lockdown rules to drive his family across the country to his parents’ home. Most of the public had never heard of Cummings, but he had apparently made enemies in the media (as well as government) by treating them with disdain, and this was their chance for payback.
And so, in a trial by media over several days, it was amazing to see how easily almost everyone in the UK was persuaded that Cummings was the devil incarnate, which continues to this day. (I broke ranks to post a defence of Cummings, or rather a criticism of the public’s ill-founded view of him, on Facebook, which got a lively response.)
Just as amazing was the opposite attitude to the BLM protests in the UK soon after; I don’t think it even occurred to 99% of the public that those were just as illegal as Cummings’ trip. And a politician (Stephen Kinnock) who made a similar cross-country drive to Cummings on the very same day, to visit his famous father, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, attracted almost no media coverage or criticism. This all showing that the law was quite beside the point—merely providing a pretext for demonizing Cummings.
Anyway, in the face of all this media and public pressure, Boris Johnson spent much political capital refusing to fire Cummings, as he was said to be ‘Boris’s brain’ and by far the smartest person in Downing St. Boris even extraordinarily granted Cummings (a mere adviser) his own press conference in the Downing St garden, in which Cummings presented an implausible account of events exonerating himself, to general derision.*
The whole incident provided a pretext (that phrase again) for many Britons subsequently to break lockdown rules. The public mood changed immediately from a wartime spirit of doggedly following government advice to half-disregarding it—often explicitly saying “If Dominic Cummings can drive to Barnard Castle, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t do XYZ”. Regrettably it’s likely this has significantly increased COVID cases ever since.
(*I reckon it should have been played like this: Cummings should have admitted breaking the rules (perhaps inadvertently), and offered his resignation. But Boris should have reluctantly refused the resignation, on the grounds of not rocking the boat in a national emergency, and maybe accepted a fine as punishment.)
Cummings was already pretty unpopular before the Barnard Castle thing.
Some of the unpopularity was because of specific opinions and attitudes Cummings was alleged to have; for instance, he played a big role in the Brexit campaign, so Remainers (somewhere around half the country) didn’t like him, and he was somewhat-credibly alleged to be in favour of a “herd immunity” strategy against Covid-19, which may or may not have been a reasonable idea given what was known at the time but a lot of people regarded as callous.
I’m pretty sure that quite a lot of it was because he was openly, unashamedly geeky, in various senses of that word. A distressing amount of the criticism of him included mockery of his physical appearance.[1] He got a lot of flak for calling for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” to apply for jobs with him, which I think was again mostly a matter of anti-geek prejudice. (One of those weirdos and misfits who got hired turned out to have said some
At any rate, his lockdown-dodging wasn’t by any means the first thing he was attacked for; to whatever extent his vilification was payback for disdaining the media, they got started on it well before that. And I think he would always have been an easy target, even without specific media malice, because unfortunately the population at large doesn’t like weird geeky people.
(I’m not altogether convinced by the parallel you draw between Cummings’s trip and the BLM protests. Most of the complaints against Cummings weren’t so much “how dare he break the rules????!!” as “someone so directly associated with the government should be being extra-careful and not breaking the rules”. Caesar’s wife, etc. For that reason, I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable for someone to think what Cummings did was worse than what BLM protestors did.)
[1] I think this is excusable (if and?) only if either the person being attacked has deliberately exploited their physical appearance for some kind of gain, or whatever it is about their appearance is actually directly relevant to what’s being discussed. Usually neither of these is true, and in particular I don’t believe either has ever been the case for Dominic Cummings.
I think he was only known & unpopular among those who follow politics closely. I expect 80% or 90% of the UK hadn’t previously heard of him. The media coverage of the incident turned him from a niche suspect figure into a universal hate figure.
Re your point [1], people associate physical appearance with attitude. I overhead someone in the street at the time saying of Cummings’ press conference: “He’s so arrogant! Did you see how he was dressed?” I.e. that Cummings was and is deliberately slovenly to show two fingers to the press/Establishment—i.e. that he doesn’t care what they think. Which is probably the case. Or at least, the geeky view that how you dress shouldn’t matter—the two of course being closely related.
(It had been going to be about Andrew Sabisky, who was one of Cummings’s “weirdos and misfits” and resigned after it turned out that he had said a lot of politically very unpalatable things about race, eugenics, and the like. I’d thought I remembered that a lot of the complaints about Sabisky were attacking his weirdness and geekiness as much as his controversial opinions. But when I went back and checked the discussions I was thinking of, that didn’t after all seem to be so, so I cut that bit out. Except that I somehow failed to cut all of it out.)
PS I just realized, one of the main reasons the general public fell in with demonizing Cummings was the very one you identified that delayed reaction to COVID: he seems weird, and reacting to a faroff disease which everyone else is ignoring would seem weird. And seeming weird is the worst thing in the world.
Characterising the reaction to Cummings as about being about people overreacting to a small violation of the rules is misleading. The issue wasn’t the initial rule violation, it was that the initial denial and lack of even token punishment was symbolic of a wider issue in the Johnson government with corruption and cronyism. Caring about hypocrisy and corruption among leaders is entirely rational as it is indicative of how they will make other decisions in the future.
This seems like a post-rationalization. IIRC the way it played out over a number of days was that initially it wasn’t clear what the facts were, and hence what if anything Cummings had done wrong (e.g. whether his journey had been legal, or at least justified). And even if he had done something wrong, I heard one pundit point out that as Cummings wasn’t a minister or public-facing figure there was no requirement for him to resign or be fired (rather than apologise or be disciplined in some way).
But nonetheless the media picture right from the start was that this maverick egg-head weirdo must be guilty of something, even if they weren’t sure what exactly. And the public reacted accordingly.
For example, 3 days before Cummings’ press conference (which IIRC was the first time his side of the story was fully set out) I heard a radio phone-in about what an evil character Cummings must be, in which callers were mostly accusing him of risking his parents’ health by going to stay with them. Or saying he must have stopped at a petrol station and so risked people there (he denied this). It later turned out he hadn’t even stayed in his parents’ house, or had close contact with them, but stayed in another building nearby.
So then it was a question of, was his main journey illegal (with much detailed media analysis of the fine points of the law)? Or if not, how about the short trip to Barnard Castle? Which is what most people—the narrative—have now settled on.
What this all shows is that in this trial by media, Cummings was presumed guilty from the start; and then it was just a matter of finding some crime to pin on him. And once something was found that seemed enough like one, everyone could congratulate themselves that they’d ‘known’ all along, and so their outrage had always been justified.
(I can’t recall which cognitive bias this is—but quite a typical example.)
(To avoid doubt, as I turned out I think it’s very likely he broke the rules and adjusted his story to try to exonerate himself. And clearly Boris mishandled it badly. But my point isn’t about whether he/they turned out to be in the wrong, it’s about the fact the media had it in for Cummings, and had no trouble swaying the public accordingly.)
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.
Congratulations!
On a side issue, as you probably know but other readers may not, Dominic Cummings was central to another case of social reality. For he was subsequently turned into public enemy no. 1 by the British media, when he broke lockdown rules to drive his family across the country to his parents’ home. Most of the public had never heard of Cummings, but he had apparently made enemies in the media (as well as government) by treating them with disdain, and this was their chance for payback.
And so, in a trial by media over several days, it was amazing to see how easily almost everyone in the UK was persuaded that Cummings was the devil incarnate, which continues to this day. (I broke ranks to post a defence of Cummings, or rather a criticism of the public’s ill-founded view of him, on Facebook, which got a lively response.)
Just as amazing was the opposite attitude to the BLM protests in the UK soon after; I don’t think it even occurred to 99% of the public that those were just as illegal as Cummings’ trip. And a politician (Stephen Kinnock) who made a similar cross-country drive to Cummings on the very same day, to visit his famous father, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, attracted almost no media coverage or criticism. This all showing that the law was quite beside the point—merely providing a pretext for demonizing Cummings.
Anyway, in the face of all this media and public pressure, Boris Johnson spent much political capital refusing to fire Cummings, as he was said to be ‘Boris’s brain’ and by far the smartest person in Downing St. Boris even extraordinarily granted Cummings (a mere adviser) his own press conference in the Downing St garden, in which Cummings presented an implausible account of events exonerating himself, to general derision.*
The whole incident provided a pretext (that phrase again) for many Britons subsequently to break lockdown rules. The public mood changed immediately from a wartime spirit of doggedly following government advice to half-disregarding it—often explicitly saying “If Dominic Cummings can drive to Barnard Castle, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t do XYZ”. Regrettably it’s likely this has significantly increased COVID cases ever since.
(*I reckon it should have been played like this: Cummings should have admitted breaking the rules (perhaps inadvertently), and offered his resignation. But Boris should have reluctantly refused the resignation, on the grounds of not rocking the boat in a national emergency, and maybe accepted a fine as punishment.)
Cummings was already pretty unpopular before the Barnard Castle thing.
Some of the unpopularity was because of specific opinions and attitudes Cummings was alleged to have; for instance, he played a big role in the Brexit campaign, so Remainers (somewhere around half the country) didn’t like him, and he was somewhat-credibly alleged to be in favour of a “herd immunity” strategy against Covid-19, which may or may not have been a reasonable idea given what was known at the time but a lot of people regarded as callous.
I’m pretty sure that quite a lot of it was because he was openly, unashamedly geeky, in various senses of that word. A distressing amount of the criticism of him included mockery of his physical appearance.[1] He got a lot of flak for calling for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” to apply for jobs with him, which I think was again mostly a matter of anti-geek prejudice. (One of those weirdos and misfits who got hired turned out to have said some
At any rate, his lockdown-dodging wasn’t by any means the first thing he was attacked for; to whatever extent his vilification was payback for disdaining the media, they got started on it well before that. And I think he would always have been an easy target, even without specific media malice, because unfortunately the population at large doesn’t like weird geeky people.
(I’m not altogether convinced by the parallel you draw between Cummings’s trip and the BLM protests. Most of the complaints against Cummings weren’t so much “how dare he break the rules????!!” as “someone so directly associated with the government should be being extra-careful and not breaking the rules”. Caesar’s wife, etc. For that reason, I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable for someone to think what Cummings did was worse than what BLM protestors did.)
[1] I think this is excusable (if and?) only if either the person being attacked has deliberately exploited their physical appearance for some kind of gain, or whatever it is about their appearance is actually directly relevant to what’s being discussed. Usually neither of these is true, and in particular I don’t believe either has ever been the case for Dominic Cummings.
I think he was only known & unpopular among those who follow politics closely. I expect 80% or 90% of the UK hadn’t previously heard of him. The media coverage of the incident turned him from a niche suspect figure into a universal hate figure.
Re your point [1], people associate physical appearance with attitude. I overhead someone in the street at the time saying of Cummings’ press conference: “He’s so arrogant! Did you see how he was dressed?” I.e. that Cummings was and is deliberately slovenly to show two fingers to the press/Establishment—i.e. that he doesn’t care what they think. Which is probably the case. Or at least, the geeky view that how you dress shouldn’t matter—the two of course being closely related.
?
Oh, whoops. I meant to delete that.
(It had been going to be about Andrew Sabisky, who was one of Cummings’s “weirdos and misfits” and resigned after it turned out that he had said a lot of politically very unpalatable things about race, eugenics, and the like. I’d thought I remembered that a lot of the complaints about Sabisky were attacking his weirdness and geekiness as much as his controversial opinions. But when I went back and checked the discussions I was thinking of, that didn’t after all seem to be so, so I cut that bit out. Except that I somehow failed to cut all of it out.)
PS I just realized, one of the main reasons the general public fell in with demonizing Cummings was the very one you identified that delayed reaction to COVID: he seems weird, and reacting to a faroff disease which everyone else is ignoring would seem weird. And seeming weird is the worst thing in the world.
People don’t like unelected power-behind-the-throne types either. Mandelson was Blair’s Cummings, and he was pretty unpopular.
Characterising the reaction to Cummings as about being about people overreacting to a small violation of the rules is misleading. The issue wasn’t the initial rule violation, it was that the initial denial and lack of even token punishment was symbolic of a wider issue in the Johnson government with corruption and cronyism. Caring about hypocrisy and corruption among leaders is entirely rational as it is indicative of how they will make other decisions in the future.
This seems like a post-rationalization. IIRC the way it played out over a number of days was that initially it wasn’t clear what the facts were, and hence what if anything Cummings had done wrong (e.g. whether his journey had been legal, or at least justified). And even if he had done something wrong, I heard one pundit point out that as Cummings wasn’t a minister or public-facing figure there was no requirement for him to resign or be fired (rather than apologise or be disciplined in some way).
But nonetheless the media picture right from the start was that this maverick egg-head weirdo must be guilty of something, even if they weren’t sure what exactly. And the public reacted accordingly.
For example, 3 days before Cummings’ press conference (which IIRC was the first time his side of the story was fully set out) I heard a radio phone-in about what an evil character Cummings must be, in which callers were mostly accusing him of risking his parents’ health by going to stay with them. Or saying he must have stopped at a petrol station and so risked people there (he denied this). It later turned out he hadn’t even stayed in his parents’ house, or had close contact with them, but stayed in another building nearby.
So then it was a question of, was his main journey illegal (with much detailed media analysis of the fine points of the law)? Or if not, how about the short trip to Barnard Castle? Which is what most people—the narrative—have now settled on.
What this all shows is that in this trial by media, Cummings was presumed guilty from the start; and then it was just a matter of finding some crime to pin on him. And once something was found that seemed enough like one, everyone could congratulate themselves that they’d ‘known’ all along, and so their outrage had always been justified.
(I can’t recall which cognitive bias this is—but quite a typical example.)
(To avoid doubt, as I turned out I think it’s very likely he broke the rules and adjusted his story to try to exonerate himself. And clearly Boris mishandled it badly. But my point isn’t about whether he/they turned out to be in the wrong, it’s about the fact the media had it in for Cummings, and had no trouble swaying the public accordingly.)
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.