Dear Mr Kruger,
Your unconditional acceptance of the behaviour of your friend Mr Dominic Cummings is profoundly disappointing. In your tweets, and in your letter to the Gazette you have sought to downplay his actions and cast them as just the sort of action any man in that position would undertake.
This is an admirable defence, but it misses the whole point. He is not just any man - he is the most senior advisor to the PM. He apparently did not consider, in his carefully weighed analysis, how his breaking and bending of the rules would look to a national population who had been instructed to abide by them. This alone marks down his judgment below any acceptable level - He doesn't care about a "good look" when that is exactly what he should care about. He set the rules, he must be seen to abide by them, not use cunning artifice to conveniently set them aside. There was no extreme emergency that justified his flight to Durham. He had no reasonable excuse to leave his house, despite his lawyered-up statement delivered on Monday.
His further justification for his outing to Barnard Castle on his wife's birthday is risible, pathetic - and it demeans all those who support it. Even Gove realized how dismal it sounded when having to say that he had also gone for a drive to check his eyesight. Ultimately for all his complex post- justification, he risked other people's lives to look after his family
Your internal note to fellow MPs I'm afraid signals the real truth. Cummings is indispensable to Johnson and you must twist and distort your own judgement to forgive him anything so he can stay alongside our broken PM. I once admired the Tory party for its sense of fairness and honesty. It seems the only things it is now any good at are lies, deception, and the retention of power. Apparently, whatever the cost.
Our COVID-19 death toll is horrendous - approaching the civilian death toll from WW2, we still have no workable track, trace and isolate mechanism, we have lied about the number of tests undertaken, we have lied about herd immunity, we have lied about PPE. The Cummings affair shows we can even lie about a birthday drive to a castle if that's what it takes. And of course, Brexit was based almost entirely on lies and factual distortions and these continue with further lies about the GB/NI border and lies about the EU trade deal.
I'm sickened by what your party's lies are doing to our country. The Cummings affair is important, as I think all those who you deceived about Brexit are now seeing that deceit laid bare. It was perhaps one lie too many.
David Kinnaird
If you have decided, like almost everyone I spoke to yesterday, that you absolutely want to remove this Conservative government from power, then there is a 3 stage decision taken in this order: (1) who is the candidate and party most likely to defeat Dann
