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.)
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.)