Okay… This is going to be a long thread as I lay out my case, but I would appreciate if you’ll bear with me:

One of the most evil applications of power is the ability to unmoor the concept of truth.

Autocrats of every political stripe have attempted this. 1/

It’s not just a matter of telling a lie, of saying that black is white, but of knowing that your listeners know the falseness of your words, and still accept your right to say them with impunity.

It is a form of state terror. Stalin did it. Mao did it. Hitler did it. 2/

Putin did it when he smilingly insisted he had nothing to do with the nerve agent poisonings in Salisbury.

Dominic Cummings could have come into the Rose Garden at No 10 and said: I was sick and scared, I wasn’t thinking straight, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.

3/

It would have worked.

But he chose to prove that he could lie to our faces, and force us to swallow what we knew were lies. He did it consciously and as a show of power.

His account was pointedly ludicrous. It began with a lie that was easily checked on the WayBack Machine 4/

He knew his lie about having blogged about coronavirus could be checked. If anyone knows that nothing ever disappears off the net, it is the master of social media manipulation. He knows. He knows you know. He knows you know he knows.

This is a kind of soft state terror. 5/

Much like Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings doesn’t give a shit if he destabilises the government he works for. He doesn’t care if it handicaps the UKs ability to respond to the pandemic. Eroding the structure that holds our civil society together is an aspiration for him. 6/

He chose Boris Johnson and the current government because he knew neither Johnson, nor any of his cabinet have the moral fibre to do the right thing. He knows Johnson will do whatever it takes to keep him as the architect of the recent Tory victory. 7/

He is watching a British government compromise itself beyond redemption for naked power, unbound to any sense of responsibility or competence. And it delights him. The self-satisfied smirk in the Rose garden… is the symptom of his very personal virus. 8/

I have never voted Tory and I never would. But in the middle of a global pandemic that has taken at least 40+K lives in Britain - it scares me to death to contemplate going through it with a non-functioning government that has lost the moral authority to govern by persuasion. 9/

Dominic Cummings is a man who believes that in order to change the world, you have to bring its current structure down. And he’s chosen to do that to Britain in its most vulnerable moment. And if that means tens of thousands of more deaths, economic devastation, whatever… 10/

Like all fanatics, he believes that the ends justify the means. Like all autocrats.

If we let him get away with this, the future will be abyssal.

/End.