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The #Cummings story makes no sense. It cannot have happened as Cummings and his wife and No.10 spinners try to claim. The known facts don't match the narrative pushed by No.10 and regurgitated by the sorry tribe of servile Ministers. A thread that tries to disentangle the tale..
Here's a Cummings timeline from @guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/22/dominic-cummings-coronavirus-and-lockdown-a-timeline
He ran out of No.10 on Fri 27 March. He's reported as already having CV symptoms & self-isolating over weekend 28/29 March. His wife (Mary Wakefield) says he felt 'weird' & then couldn't get out of bed.
He ran out of No.10 on Fri 27 March. He's reported as already having CV symptoms & self-isolating over weekend 28/29 March. His wife (Mary Wakefield) says he felt 'weird' & then couldn't get out of bed.
It seems that Cummings & family were already in Durham on 31st March, according to police reports. So this is just 2 days after he is reported (e.g. Sebastian Payne in FT) as having CV symptoms, which his wife later described vividly (see below).
We learn that he is seen in Durham on 5 April, up & about with his child, at the gate. The same day as PM is taken into hospital. Wakefield says "Just as Dom was beginning to feel better... Boris was heading in the other direction." This means Cummings was ill before 5 April
Wakefield also says “Day in, day out for 10 days he [Cummings] lay doggo with a high fever and spasms that made the muscles lump and twitch in his legs.” This does not add up. If he was truly ill in bed from 28 March to 6 or 7 April, he could not be up & about in Durham on 5th.
But we're also told now (No.10 spokesman) that he travelled to Durham not because HE was ill, but because his wife was infected with CV & he was worried about likelihood of getting CV himself. If true, this might have made him more fit to drive, but it clashes with other facts.
Either he did not have CV symptoms at the time he drove, despite the press having announced that he did, or he did have symptoms at that point (as is probable) - which meant that he absolutely should not have driven 260 miles. If indeed he was the driver (if not, it's worse).
The only other time he could have had even a week in bed would have been from 6 to 13 April, as Cummings was back at work in London on 14th. But that doesn't fit with rest of the story, that by 5 April he was getting better, and that earlier...
..he had rushed home to look after his wife when she began showing symptoms. "A day later he began feeling “weird” and then couldn’t get out of bed," she is reported by the Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8350223/Dominic-Cummings-wife-described-collapsed-spasms.html This had to be before 30 March, if true.
According to Wakefield, it was even more serious: "After a week, we reached peak corona uncertainty. Day 6 is a turning point, I was told: that's when you either get better or head for ICU. 'The little oxygen reader we'd bought on Amazon indicated that he should be in hospital..
...but his lips weren't blue & he could talk in full sentences..." Ms Wakefield said their son had 'administered' Ribena to Mr Cummings with the 'grim insistence of a Broadmoor nurse'.
A nice image - but where's the childcare, & where did it happen? She did not mention Durham.
A nice image - but where's the childcare, & where did it happen? She did not mention Durham.
To put it starkly, either he was really ill as she says, in which case he could not have travelled let alone driven 260 miles, or Ms Wakefield's account is not true. Cummings wrote "at the end of March & for the first 2 weeks of April I was ill, so we were both shut in together."
So Wakefield claims that he was really ill and in bed for 10 days, yet No.10 tell us now that he went with her & son to Durham when she was ill with CV but he was not, but feared becoming so. (NB he has written that he was ill, but did not say that she was also ill).
Conclusion - none of it hangs together. We've been told half truths designed to mask the truth, and we've almost certainly been fed full untruths. Cowardly, they've sought to conceal that they broke the rules, or at least bent them to breaking point. And now Ministers kowtow.
