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Just When You Think The Apocalypse Can’t Get Any Stranger…
Dawn comes early. I sit here at 4am listening to the cuckoo heralding the start of a brand new day and I wonder what it will bring.
Before I go any further, this is not a post about the rights and wrongs surrounding Dominic Cummings. It is a post reflecting on the reaction to a press briefing.
When I trawled my Twitter and Facebook feeds this morning, it was not to write a blog post… until I found a reoccurring theme.
Friends whom I would never class as political, have statuses declaring they have written to their Member of Parliament. They seem angered and bewildered. They want to know why there appears to be disparity between the rules they have followed assiduously, and a trip to Durham by a man who had the bug.
There are others who reflect on the civil service now deleted post. They applaud the tweeter and the tweet, realising, at the same time, the writer’s decision to write this ended their career.
Impartiality, they argue – the heart of that august institution – has been breeched. This is a freedom of speech too far some feel. Yet in the short time it was up – some thirty minutes or so – it was retweeted and liked by many thousands of people. It resonated. Dare I say became for a while a press briefing’s momento mori.
And then there is the front page of the Daily Mail. I will not give that paper more air from my lungs than I must. Suffice to say when they, and the chief writer for The Times, criticise the Prime Minister, we truly are, in my humble mind at least, living through an apocalypse.
More than a Cat 