There is beginning to emerge something almost like a Jekyll and Hyde horror story in the Cummings-Johnson saga. Is the truth beginning to dawn on the Conservative Party that their chosen leader and Prime Minister is in fact no more than half of a person nowadays – and the weaker half at that? That he cannot be parted from Cummings because he has become completely intellectually and emotionally dependent on him for his own psychological comfort. Completely out of his depth in the job, made all the worse by being ‘in charge’ in an actual, real crisis, Johnson seems to have become the lesser part of the relationship with ‘Dom’.
Mr Cummings is the other half of a person in this bizarre compact. Where Johnson has the faux-warmth and mateyness and apparent capacity to connect with people’s emotional side through his blustering Billy Bunter act, Cummings really is the dessicated, strategic psychopath that David Cameron diagnosed – and he should know. Cummings had his opportunity to show ‘human’ and to apologise to the British people for what he did. The Rose Garden in Downing Street was a perfect location for a heartfelt act of public contrition. Instead we were treated to an hour of ‘me, me, me’ – my predicaments, my problems, my options, my choices. We may never know how much of this was freshly confected in the half hour before he appeared.
Johnson seems to have become the lesser part of the relationship with ‘Dom’.
The entire population is faced with decisions every day about putting ‘me, me, me’ second to us, us, us. There are literally thousands of people in much worse domestic situations than Mr Cummings ever was. All single parents with young children are immediately in the predicament Mr Cummings claimed he thought he might be in – of having to care for one or even several young children for a number of days, while enduring the pre-acute phase of the disease.
