Boris Johnson Refuses To Fire Dominic Cummings Despite Lockdown Allegations
This was originally published on HuffPost UK
Dominic Cummings will keep his job as Boris Johnson’s top aide, the prime minister has confirmed.
The PM says he had “extensive face to face” discussions with the former Vote Leave boss and that Cummings acted “responsibly, legally and with integrity”.
The decision to keep Cummings in Downing Street comes despite claims he twice defied the PM’s Covid-19 “stay at home” restrictions.
The PM is likely to face anger from the public, Labour and his own Tory backbenchers, who broke ranks on Sunday to demand Cummings go.
But Johnson gave a full-throated public show of support to his embattled aide, telling the Downing Street press conference on Sunday he “had extensive face-to-face conversations” with Cummings.
He added “I have concluded that in travelling to find the right kind of childcare, at the moment when both he and his wife were about to be incapacitated by coronavirus – and when he had no alternative – I think he followed the instincts of every father and every parent”.
“And I do not mark him down for that.”
It emerged on Friday that Cummings travelled 260 miles to Durham to self-isolate at his parents’ home in March.
Number 10 had initially defended him, saying the trip was justified as Cummings, who later tested positive for Covid-19, needed help with childcare for his four-year-old son.
Reports in the Sunday Mirror and Observer today, however, claimed that Cummings returned to County Durham on April 19 and witnesses saw him in a town called Barnard Castle.
Johnson also sought to defend his adviser, by saying “some” of the allegations about Cummings’ behaviour during self-isolation were “palpably false”.
He said: “Though there have been many other allegations about what happened when he was in self-isolation and thereafter, some of them palpably false, I believe that in every respect he has acted responsibly and legally and with integrity and with the...
