Classic Dom. He’s got me right where he wants me.
No, he really has this time. He’s won, yet again. He always does.
Despite all special advisors being banned from talking to journalists by Classic Dom, with the self-made exception of Classic Dom himself, it has nevertheless managed to seep out into the Westminster Village that Classic Dom has for some time been faintly irritated by the Classic Dom nickname.
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Well, no more. Classic Dom has surpassed himself. So Classic Dom is his latest manoeuvre – specifically, catching the coronavirus – that it may even have brought the Classical Dom era to an end. In future years, Classic Dom FM DJs may reflect on how Covid-19 was its Beethoven.
For those of us who for almost a full year now have made a living doing little else beyond taking the mickey out of Classic Dom, Classic Dom catching a terrible illness is as Classic Dom as it gets.
Of course, we wish him all the very best in his period of self-isolation, and pray for his safe and speedy return to Downing Street.
Perpetual war is not just no fun without him: it’s impossible. We now know that Cummings’s furtive dash out the Downing Street gates on Friday lunchtime made up the first steps on the march to Sun Tzu’s ninth battlefield.
This is the desperate ground. Our fate is no longer in our hands. All we can do now is head to dominiccummings.com and hammer the refresh button like it’s Glastonbury ticket sale Sunday, praying for the 40,000-word blog post that will be our salvation.
There is, as it happens, a lot of desperation about. Not for the first time in recent days, we turn to the latest premise for our rejected dystopian fantasy thriller series. Book one ended with Boris Johnson becoming prime minister, kicking Ken Clarke and various others out of the Tory Party, purging it of anyone even slightly sane and then winning a landslide election victory.
Book two begins with the prime minister suddenly being derailed by a deadly pandemic, only for the nation to discover that the designated survivor is Dominic Raab.
Obviously, none of this can be true – it’s too ridiculous. It didn’t seem real, even as Dominic Raab strode out to the lectern for the now customary 5pm Downing Street press conference with the triumphant air of a technically innocent man marching out of court to give his defiant address to the waiting news cameras.
The moment had the trademark Raab oeuvre, which is to say that of a junior office equipment salesperson kept on under the condition he attends anger management counselling, forcing his way through to the end of his sales pitch, even after it’s been pointed out in front of the whole room that there’s a violent pornography tab still open on his browser window.
The subject at hand was the tens of millions of pounds that are being spent on a highly complex operation to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Brits stranded abroad. To which the only possible response, to these hundreds of thousands of people is, seriously, why bother? “Stranded” is the wrong word. Being stranded outside Britain at the moment is like being stranded in the street while your house burns down.
We can only imagine the repatriation operation involves rounding up the Brits, taking them to International Departures, sticking them in front of the 24-hour news channels in time for the 5pm press conference, letting them see that Dominic Raab’s in charge, and they’ll stampede back to their hotels and beg to be readmitted, whatever the cost.
The other matter was the ongoing inconsistency around the subject of testing. On Friday, Michael Gove said we had now exceeded the target of 10,000 tests a day. Matt Hancock has since said the same. On Monday we were down to 7,500-odd, via the words of the deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries in a radio interview. Then testing became “testing capacity”. So who knows the truth, other than that whatever the actual number is, however above or below the target that moves to meet its purpose, it’s still several hundred thousand behind, say, Germany.
On the question of why more tests had not been taken, Raab really did say the words: “No test is better than a bad test.” Which is good news, at least, for those still clinging to the hope that the last four years have all just been some sort of computer simulation whose algorithms have been knocked out of sync.
There were, as it happens, some actual Powerpoint slides to look at. The chief scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, had the latest graphs on Britain’s efforts to flatten the curve, or “squash the sombrero”, as Boris Johnson put it just two weeks ago, back when the coronavirus epidemic and its thousands of certain deaths had still not broken free of the prime minister’s emotional range, which stretches all the way from light mirth to out-and-out hilarity. In some ways, it is for the best that he will be sitting these dark days out, lest we be treated to the rhetorical equivalent of Chopin’s funeral march rearranged for solo clown horn.
Unfortunately, though, the press conference was happening in a room with precisely no one in it beyond the people giving it, as Sir Patrick requested the slides be shown on the screen beside him, the TV camera remained in full close-up of his face and his face alone.
Perhaps it’s better this way. The actual data, the actual numbers, are the last thing anyone needs at this point. Far better to just make up your own little story, whatever gets you through. Because one thing’s abundantly clear: no flight of terrible fantasy will soar up the curve of doom as fast and as steep as this stricken one way thunder-looper that appears to be called Reality.
