Carl Cort's Hamstring

Maitliss is always good (as is Lewis Goodall), which is why the government are boycotting Newsnight.

Dom must stay!

The Health Secretary did not in fact say the thing that we all heard him say.

Priti Patel was noticeably the only high profile cabinet minister not to tweet in support of Cummings...

Hopefully it's the start of a lot more people viewing the handling of the crisis with a critical eye. While people who hate the Tories anyway have been shouting about the death toll, they've been able to brush off most criticism by saying it's unprecedented, we've done our best, wrong to politicise a crisis etc (plus the PR bonus of the Prime Minister heroically battling the virus himself). That's largely worked for them so far. This weekend though, a big chunk of the country have finally seen what they're really like, and they don't like it. I think they're going to find criticism of they're actual policy harder to shake now.

Political genius right enough. Reminds me of a line in 'Rivers of London' where the main character works as a police officer in the Met. "We can handle looking heavy handed, cruel or even racist. The thing that really damages us is when we look stupid."

The follow-up question should be if someone (in England or Wales) has a couple of glasses of wine, should they check they're safe to drive by jumping in the car and going for a spin?

A side-note, but in the press conference today, Cummings mentioned that he had written about the potential danger of a coronavirus pandemic last year. All part of his genius super-predictor schtick that makes him so apparently indespensible to the government. Turns out that he just sneakily edited an article from last year (on the day he got back from Durham!) to add in references to coronaviruses to make himself seem prescient. Johnson is setting fire to everything to protect this charlatan.

I don't think I've been pleased to see a Daily Mail front page before:

Shapps dealt with it far far better than Johnson. Johnson was visibly raging that poeple had the temerity to question him about this - if he was in a sit-down interview where he couldn't just cut people off he'd have been obliterated.

I do think people are underestimating how much people across the board will be angry about this. Yeah there are vocal morons defending Johnson and Cummings on Twitter, but I'd bet any money that they're people who have broken the rules themselves and therefore don't see the big deal. This isn't like prorouging Parliament, which was a technical thing no-one understood It's not like Grenfell, which was about poor people It's not like Windrush, which was about black people All of those things could be filed away as irrelevant because they're not issues that touch the Tory base. The entire country has experienced the lockdown and the vast majority of us have stuck to the rules. The Prime Minister has just gone on live TV and called us all mugs.

A third one:

Emily Thornberry had to resign after tweeting a picture of a house with some England flags on it.

And another one:

This from one of the government's scientific advisors:

I really don't think this will blow over. They've taken the worst possible approach at each stage:

It's better for the Tory MPs to be attacking Cummings rather than Starmer. That way they can't player the 'bitter remoaner' card.

That was Labour's best press conference in a decade.

The Tories must be gutted that Michael Fallon turned out to be a sex-pest. He did a great job as Secretary of State for Defending the Indefensible in May's government - I've never seen anyone speak so much bollocks with such force and passion.

They've completely f*cked this because they've treated it as part of their 'up is down' culture wars and backed they could drag their supporters with them. Supporters who have been staying at home and not seeing their loved ones because the government told them not to. If he had just apologised immediately, they probably could have ridden out the storm.

I love that his article, presumably designed to show how principled and independent minded he is, inadvertently reveals what gullible morons him and his fellow Brexiteers are: "After all, he [Cummings] said we should vote for the original Withdrawal Agreement without reading it, on the basis Michael Gove articulated: we could change it later. But now with him in power, we are putting in a modest border in the Irish Sea."

The complete silence of Andrew Neil and Fraser Nelson about the biggest political story of the week is quite funny. It's almost as if Cummings' wife has made her bosses look like a right pair of mugs.

It's mad that they've picked this hill to die on, when the arguments don't make any logical sense. Even the likes of Tim Mongomerie and Julia Hartley-Brewer are calling out their bullsh*t.

He's a professional contrarian.

The Tories are popular press, I'm not sure how much Cummings is personally though.