Cummings: entitled knob versus culture warriors

The media have been full of this stuff. I can't honestly be bothered to discuss it much, partly because it is impossible to choose sides. Cummings did indeed come over as entitled and phoney in his press conference, but the media reptiles are as awful as ever in their coverage.

I thought the Cummings press conference was really amateur for a bloke who is supposed to know how the media work. He gave obviously rationalised explanations for his actions -- far too detailed in some cases (eg he drove to a beauty spot not to get a breath of fresh air and calm his mind but because he wanted to test whether his eyes were good enough to drive). Shades of Prince Andrew's unlikely memory for detail or rigorous moral conduct towards friends. Cummings (Cummings!) thought the media would be interested in his reasons for his actions,but of course they weren't -- they wanted to see him grovel and emote. 

He should have emulated the wonderful performance of C Blair a few years ago, caught out in a dodgy property deal to benefit her kid -- she ended in tears saying she only did what any mother would have done. No-one dared go after her subsequently because she had 'acknowledged' and declared her 'vulnerability'. Cummings should have done the same, complete with stifled tears, saying his heart went out to all the victims, and he loved the NHS.

As it was,he just left the moral ground to the usual suspects. They had been building him up (still are) as some great opinion-former and role model, largely on the grounds that he thought up some slogans for the Brexit campaign (which we know is the only reason lots of people supported that campaign). He was/is the real prime minister, the grey eminence behind Johnson, the real driving force. This great figure was now particularly guilty of causing deaths because people all over the country would claim that he had permitted them to break the lockdown rules (some journos even claim to have known someone who said that). He failed to display what once would have been called 'emotional intelligence', or any sympathy, which means he is indifferent to the deaths of thousands.

Another component was the absurd bureaucrats who thought up the exclusion/lockdown rules in the first place. No rules could possibly appear as other than arbitrary and full of loopholes, yet they were solemnly offered with a ludicrous precision -- stay 2m away, do not drive more than 20 miles, admit some people into your home but not others. Who could possibly take them seriously -- they were jotted down on the back of a fag packet to placate media demands for detailed leadership. Sure enough a whole army of petty officials set out to enforce these rules, necessarily arbitrarily again, including the egregious policewoman who rebuked a couple for letting their kid play in the front garden

The absurd statistics were taken so solemnly by these latter day Puritans. They were only obeying (or relaying) 'the [sic] science'. There were graphs showing gross figures of deaths/deaths in hospital/deaths where the virus was associated/deaths where the virus had caused the death/excess deaths. No-one cared what they actually measured. The media forgot what they had learned about gross figures painted onto buses and took these as Holy Writ. Some outlets also published rates per million, but these are not discussed anywhere near as much -- the gross figures make a case for Britain being the 'worst' country,  and if we add gross figures for the USA we can generate stories about populism causing death llike those summarised on this blog).

The R number --what a joke. Is it a national average (UK or England and Wales?) and if so, what are the regional variations? What exactly is it based upon? How can it be at all credible in these circumstances? At least someone last night pointed out that people assess risks in different ways and those include consideration of local and immediate risks (loads of research on this, of course),and that they have ways of managing risks,some of them quite reasonable (like denying that a national average will necessarily apply to a local area).

Of course,no-one takes any of it seriously. Is the R number accurate -- who cares, as long as it is a useful stick to brandish at sceptics. Do 'unneccesary ' journeys really threaten NHS workers or is this just more finger-wagging at the polluting masses?The point is it helps pursue moral condemnation. Do the journos think anyone is fooled by their hypocritical concern for rules and deaths among the poor?

Have people really been influenced by Cummings to break the rules? People 'must have been 'influenced, not so much by what he did but what it means symbolically, 'in effect'. Has anyone else ever taken advantage of the evident ambiguity of the rules? Have the journos?