UK minister quits in protest as pressure mounts on PM Boris Johnson to sack top aide Dominic Cummings over lockdown trip

A junior minister in Boris Johnson’s government resigned in protest on Tuesday as public pressure mounted on the UK prime minister to sack his top adviser who apparently broke coronavirus lockdown rules by driving across the country.

Johnson’s closest aide Dominic Cummings triggered a political firestorm when it was revealed he made a 430km secret road trip to his parents’ farm in Durham in the north of England on March 27, with his child and wife while she was suffering from the coronavirus.

The trip came shortly after Johnson himself announced he had the illness, and just four days after the UK went into lockdown.

Johns Douglas Ross, a minister for Scotland, quit in protest as Johnson faced a rebellion from MPs in his own party over the controversy.

“I have constituents who didn’t get to say goodbye to loved ones, families who could not mourn together, people who didn’t visit sick relatives because they followed the guidance of the government,” Ross said in a statement.

“I cannot in good faith tell them they were all wrong and one senior adviser to the government was right.”

Johnson has stood by his adviser, saying that Cummings had followed the “instincts of every father” by making the trip. Downing Street said it “regrets” Ross’ decision to stand down.

“The PM spoke to Dominic Cummings at length about the reasons for the action which he took and he is a satisfied with the explanation,” Johnson’s told reporters on Tuesday.

In a bizarre press conference on Monday that lasted over an hour in Downing Street’s rose garden, a setting usually reserved for visiting heads of state, Cummings explained he had made the call to go to his parents’ farm in case he became ill and needed childcare from family members.

“I don’t regret what I did, I have not offered to resign,” he said. “A lot of the anger is based on reports in the media that have not been true and it’s extremely regrettable but the media reporting them were told they were wrong but reported them anyway.”

He then dug himself in deeper by confirming a media report that he had driven almost 25km from his father’s farm to Barnard Castle, a local beauty spot on April 12, breaking another lockdown rule. He said he had made the trip on his wife’s birthday to see if his eyesight, that had been affected by his own bout of Covid-19, was good enough for the drive back to London.

In addition, he also said he took his four-year-old child to hospital in Durham with suspected coronavirus, raising fears he was spreading the disease to another region.

Cummings wife, Mary Wakefield, a journalist, later wrote in the Spectator magazine where she is commissioning editor, about her family’s experience with coronavirus, but omitted mentioning the fact they had left London for Durham.

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“After the uncertainty of the bug itself, we emerged from quarantine into the almost comical uncertainty of London lockdown,” she wrote. “Everything and its opposite seems true.”

Although parliament was in recess, Johnson will on Wednesday have to attend a parliamentary liaison committee where he is expected to face tough questioning as MPs report a deluge of emails from angry constituents.

The government’s defence of Cummings has also been criticised by several leading members of the Church of England, much of the right-wing press that normally supports the government and grass roots Conservative Party members.

“Unless very soon we see clear repentance, including the sacking of Cummings, I no longer know how we can trust what ministers say for @churchofengland to work together with them on this pandemic” tweeted David Walker, the Bishop of Manchester.

“I would be sorry to see Dominic Cummings go. The Government would be weaker, and its opponents emboldened, as a result. But he ought to resign nevertheless,” tweeted Mark Wallace the editor of the Conservative Party website ConservativeHome.

The website published a rolling list of MPs from Johnson’s Conservative Party who have publicly called for Cummings to be dismissed. POLITICO noted that the list’s publication “in itself is not a great sign for the prime minister”.

Cummings, the former manager of the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum is a highly controversial figure, sometimes referred to as Johnson’s “Svengali”. He is accredited with helping the prime minister win the last election with his “Get Brexit Done” campaign as well as persuading Johnson to prorogue parliament, a move later overruled by the Supreme Court.

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Prior to entering politics Cummings lived in Russia for four years where he was involved with an ill-fated attempt to launch an airline, among other projects. Despite being Johnson’s top aide, he is not a member of the Conservative Party.

He has ruffled the feathers in Whitehall by calling for “weirdos and misfits” to apply for civil service jobs, part of his mission to shake up the way government works in the UK.

When Johnson first defended Cummings at a press conference on Sunday, someone tweeted from the official civil service account: “Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?” The tweet was quickly deleted, but not before it had already been widely circulated on social media.

Another message from the cabinet office explained: “An unauthorised tweet was posted on a government channel this evening. The post has been removed and we are investigating the matter”.

The prime minister on Monday apologised for “the confusion and the anger and the pain that people have been feeling” over Cummings’ decision to drive with his sick wife to his relatives but said he believed his adviser had acted “reasonably and legally”.

Cabinet ministers also rushed to defend Cummings.

“Dom Cummings was right today to set out in full detail how he made his decisions in very difficult circumstances Now we must move on, fight this dreadful disease and get our country back on its feet,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock tweeted.

Britain is the country with the most Covid-19 victims in Europe. With nearly 37,000 deaths, and likely high number of unreported cases, the government has been criticised for not locking down sooner. Businesses are gradually starting to open up, and Johnson said certain school classes could resume in June.

Critics said Cummings’ alleged behaviour risked undermining the government’s policy.

“If you give the impression there’s one rule for them and one rule for us, you fatally undermine that sense of ‘we’re all in this together’,” Stephen Reicher, a member of the government’s advisory group on behavioural science, told broadcaster ITV.

Earlier this month, Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist and adviser to the government, stepped down from a key scientific panel after acknowledging he had invited a married woman with whom he was reported to be having an affair to his home during the lockdown. Scotland’s chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, also resigned in April after it emerged she had travelled twice to a holiday home.

Additional reporting by DPA, Agence France-Presse