Seeing a lot of people saying that the government are lifting lockdown early to distract from the Cummings story. I see the logic in it, but I think it’s the other way around.

I think they actually were perfectly happy to keep the Cummings story running and their refusal to meet it head on by firing him was a deliberate strategy to keep it top of the headlines while they planned to lift lockdown even as the numbers are awful.

I think the decision to lift lockdown had already been taken for economic reasons, and their hope was that, if they self-designed their own “scale”, people simply wouldn’t notice that we were lifting lockdown before any of the conditions had been met.

Cases are still too high, the death rate is appalling, testing and contact tracing have not been scaled up to the required level.

The Cummings story was perfect as it provided an individualised bogey-man right at the moment everyone was struggling to conceptualise the sheer scale of systemic failure.

Now it can continue to be helpful because the narrative is already being shaped that people are not following the rules and using Cummings as an excuse.

It’s fairly obvious where that goes next: it was still those people’s decision not to follow the rules. They still had agency and responsibility.

The truth is that compliance with lockdown likely tracked the deterioration of the government’s communication, which began before the Cummings saga. The messaging became increasingly incoherent. People don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

So, far from the government thinking, “oh my god we so afeared at the anger about Cummings if only the press would stop covering it,” I would say they’re perfectly happy that their “planning” remains profoundly unscrutinsed.

Just as, I assume, they’re perfectly happy for anger to be channelled into the Cummings lightning rod, where they can contain it, rather than spilling out and illuminating all the dark and filthy corners of their hopeless, reckless, fatal strategy.

In this view of things, not firing Cummings makes total sense. As long as they don’t fire him, he remains a useful distraction. At any time, if they need to, they can fire him and thereby execute a symbolic solution to a symbolic problem.

When you look at shit like this, you can see the problem: far too many people still think that we have an essentially decent system with a few flaws and bad apples.

My trust in those in charge has been totally unaffected by recent events because my trust in those in charge never existed.

The notion that trust in a deadly, callous, morally void system can be magically restored by symbolic means is a dangerous and frankly complacent nonsense.