More than 50,000 Covid deaths and counting – but let’s talk about who gets to sit where in the office

So towering is the self-regard on show, involving the resignation of Lee Cain, and the apparent threat to do so by Dominic Cummings, it almost deserves its own Mount Rushmore

Dominic Cummings (left) and Lee Cain at a Boris Johnson press conference (Getty)

A boilerplate plot structure for political drama is the one in which the protagonist becomes so engulfed in grand affairs of state, and so bound up by their own sense of self-importance, that they conspire to ignore the trivial little events that will ultimately bring them down.

What’s normal is for, say, Tom Hollander in In The Loop to get so caught up in what turns out to be the start of the Iraq War that he ignores the complaints about the structurally unsound wall of his constituency office until it actually has collapsed, directly into his elderly neighbour’s back garden, and thus metaphorically on top of him, too.

This very much should be the narrative form currently evolving inside 10 Downing Street, where big events are also swirling, but unsurprisingly something very different is occurring.

Arguably, we should simply stand back and admire the sheer scale of the egos involved, which have managed to turn their own inter-office rivalries into the principle plotline, relegating such trivialities as a “no-deal” Brexit and a global pandemic to a kind of MacGuffin status. 

More than 50,000 deaths and counting, having just six weeks left to convert Kent into a lorry park – these are merely useful devices through which to advance the real drama, which is about who gets to sit where in the office, and who gets to report to whom, and who’s going to threaten to resign if they don’t.

So towering is the self-regard on show, involving the resignation of Lee Cain, and the apparent threat to do so by Dominic Cummings, it almost deserves its own Mount Rushmore. It would be cheap as well. Stone sculptors always charge more if there is elaborate hair work involved.

Of course, many semi-normal people will wonder whether they are meant to care about somebody they’ve never heard of threatening to resign and then resigning. And then someone they have heard of – namely the guy who drove to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight – threatening to resign and then, shock horror, not doing it.

Many semi-normal people might hear about the Downing Street director of communications resigning and feel positively reassured. It was the right thing to do, after all. We’re in the middle of a pandemic and no one’s got a clue what any of the rules are, not even the actual prime minister. It’s nice to see someone finally doing the decent thing when their position has become completely untenable.

Oh sorry, what’s that? He’s resigned because he threatened to resign if he didn’t get a promotion and then had to go through with it? Oh. Right. I see.

Rumours abound that the Cain self-defenestration is partly the work of new spokesperson Allegra Stratton, whose first televised briefing we still await. Presumably she, like all of us, is just desperately waiting for one complete, shitshow-free 24 hours to come along.

We also learn that Carrie Symonds is involved, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. She’s not just the prime minister’s fiancée, you know, she used to be a special adviser herself, and ran the Conservative Party press office, overseeing such stellar media coverage as the Daily Mail exclusive investigation into her own expenses fiddling. (The allegations are understood to have cost her her job. She denies the allegations. She does not have the job anymore.)

Of course, mainly, the whole thing is just another thrilling blindfold joyride in the Cummings Land Rover Discovery. The great man regularly likens his methods, which amount to little more than imagining everyone to be the enemy and then throwing excrement at them like a psychologically troubled chimp, to those of Alexander the Great.

Having never studied classics, I cannot say with any certainty whether, on his path to conquering all of the known world by the age of 27, Alexander the Great ever threatened to resign over his comms chief being overlooked for promotion and then not doing it. But then, it’s only a metaphor.

At time of writing, he may indeed still go, and, he says, “take” various people with him. To where is not clear, though the spare house on daddy’s farm doesn’t currently have any Men of the People secretly holed up in it, so there might do.

In the meantime, naturally, it’s all of us that lose out. It’s hard to believe it’s only days since the big vaccine breakthrough. And it’s even harder to see how humanity can win this, the gravest battle it has ever faced, without former Mirror chicken and at least partially disgraced former tabloid hack Lee Cain on board.

The plot, as ever, thickens. It is hard to see how it could, at this point, get any thicker. Though obviously, it will.