Some years ago I was laid up with a very bad virus while having charge of a young child. After a day or so I found I could not give her the attention she needed, and at great inconvenience and vast expense I hired paid help.
Here is what I did not do:
I did not strap her into a car, with a sick wife and drive to Durham! I did not in fact drive 260 miles at all.
I stayed put, not so much for fear of spreading infection but because even if some other location would have suited us better, I was too poorly to brave the hazards of any journey at all.
In Cummings' case, the imperative to stay put was enshrined in draconian legislation imposed just days earlier by the administration which he advises! That legislation makes it absolutely clear that anyone showing symptoms of the Coronavirus must isolate in place, and that anyone in contact with a symptomatic person must self-isolate in place for 14 days (at least).
The so-called exceptions to free movement are not mentioned in relation to symptomatic individuals, but to the population in general. You were allowed to leave your home to go to the assistance of a vulnerable child, not to take a vulnerable child on a long journey when he was in your home already!
With the so-called 'game-changer' of Track and Trace, our rights are going to be even further infringed. What if we receive the dreaded tweet from the NHS and it is based on unfounded allegations? (Janice Turner was good on this in her article today 30 May). T&T's credibility depends on the Government knowing what it is doing, but it is perfectly obvious that a key figure at the heart of the machine does not understand his own legislation.
Much of the commentary on Con Home is about Brexit and the potential undermining of Brexit, but why can we not see the wood for the trees here? The people who have undermined Brexit and for that matter the whole agenda of the Government have been the Government, by imposing the wicked Lockdown, and some figures high-up in the Government by ignoring their own dire warnings about the spread of the virus, and by ignoring their own legislation which is supposed to curb it, whenever it suits them personally to do so. They have treated us, the plebs, with contempt.
If Cummings was so utterly irresponsible as to drive 260 miles and risk spreading the virus wherever he went, just days after legislation was imposed on the rest of us which stripped us of our liberties indefinitely, then he is not fit to advise on the running of a whelk stall, never mind advising the Government of the United Kingdom.

Look where defending the indefensible got us in 1974: I loyally campaigned for Heath, while knowing his Prices and Incomes Control policy was statist nonsense. He lost, twice.
Mrs Thatcher's Poll Tax was not brought in because it was generally popular in the 1987 election: it had been tried in Scotland where we duly lost more than half our seats. In places such as London the Labour gang dared not discuss it as they would have needed to defend their Loony Left in local government. Once enacted in 1990 it was all set to destroy us utterly until Thatcher was relieved of her command.
Then we had Major with his insane defence of the ERM. After we were forced out in Sep 1992 Major ought to have gone, but the Party rallied round him and we sleepwalked into the Mayday Massacre of 1997.
Are we going to repeat this folly? The Lockdown is wrong. If we renounce it now and fast, we may be able to salvage the next General Election.

Dom came across as more human than we might have expected, but given the exalted reputation of the brain lurking in that domed forehead, what are we to make of his actions?
To drive 260 miles without any expectation of stopping for breaks, when his wife was sick and he had a well-founded fear that he was about to become sick himself, and with a small child strapped into the back seat was reckless on a number of counts. What if he had been involved in a crash, not even caused by any error of his own? He would have been carted off to A&E and spread the virus: the very sort of thing the lockdown was supposed to make less likely, if there were any logic to it at all.
Yes, he thought he was using his own common sense, but like so many brainy people he doesn't seem to have had much.
Anyway, we weren't allowed to use our common sense in any given situation, were we? We were just given rules and told to abide by them on pain of dire legal sanction!

Brexiteers are tending to line up with Boris and Dom, others are saying different things.
I'm a Brexiteer but only one central issue counts: we cannot defend the indefensible.
We were put into this hideous lockdown by a law partially devised by Cummings. He has broken his own law and the average person across the country is angry and appalled. He must go, but more to the point, Boris must be seen to explain why Dom should go; otherwise it should be the Boss Man himself who carries the can!

I love Bernard dearly as he is a very old friend, but all of this is tosh.
In the case of something like Gonorrhoea, a contact tracer may come and knock on someone's door...'Knock, knock...Hi! you are a bit of a shag-nasty and may have infected about 50 people in the last month, but the good news is that a quick shot in your buttock could save you from years of dripping and give you a new lease on your sex life!'.
The affected person could well see the common sense.
However, in the case of Covid19, the so-called 'contact tracer' is facing a pandemic. Let's suppose that the contact he needs to trace is a petrol pump cashier. Where exactly does he start? If we really want to be Big Brother, we could say "Well, all the customers who ever used that petrol station, and then all the people they ever had contact with themselves". Good luck with that.
Not a cat in Hell's chance, but a marvellous extension of state power. Of course the real irony is that contact tracers going door to door in the course of their work would be the ultimate 'Super-spreaders'!

Grant Shapps is saying "Don't use public transport if you can possibly avoid it".
Boris is saying "Let's get transport back to full service so that people can get back to work".
We are facing a political catastrophe here, and the best thing is for Boris to step aside as he has had his judgement impaired by the very horrible trauma he went through.
That doesn't make Grant right on this: we need to get back to work, and NOW.

Defenders of Hancock need to understand that he is wallowing in this, he is in his element.
Any libertarian would have resigned from the Government out of principle by now.
Hancock is no libertarian.

You've all lost the plot. The MPs are watching each other and the opinion polls.
The only bit of the government's message that made any sense was 'use your common sense'.
If we had had that at the beginning there would have been no need for a lockdown and although the economy would have taken a horrible hit, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad as it's now going to be.

This guy is a socialist: what is he doing on a so-called Conservative site?
When we earn our money we are taxed, when we have a property we pay Council Tax which is just another Wealth tax, and now he wants us to pay twice over? Why should anyone work at all?
We have watched the Millionaire Show this week, and the winner pays no tax at all! Why is this? If you win it on a show: tax free. If you spend your whole life building it up: taxed twice over.
This contributor should be told to go back to the Labour Party where he belongs.

The headlines today have suggested that Boris thinks 'testing' is the 'gamechanger' that will give him his Get out Jail Free card.

Before anyone starts agreeing, let's consider three things: firstly, is there ever a 100% accurate test? Secondly, what are the logistics of 'testing' on the sort of scale envisaged? Thirdly, what is to happen to the data?

Assuming you can ponder points one and two, I will move straight to point three. The only logic of a test which allows someone to be declared to have had the virus and to be no longer infectious is that a new class of citizen is created. The 'immune' would probably be given some sort of documentation, and the 'non-immune', or suspect individuals, would inevitably become the new Second Class.

If it is not envisaged that the 'immune' are to be accorded special rights, such as travelling on public transport without a mask, then what exactly is the intention?

The 'immune', let us for the sake of argument call them the Alphas, would very quickly have the right to work where others, let us simply call them the Betas, could not.

Eligibility for Public Sector contracts for example would most certainly be accorded to Alphas only. Entry to pubs, (as they reopen) would be for Alphas only...can anyone doubt it?

Sitting down at a restaurant would be a privilege accorded to Alphas. Going to the airport and boarding a plane to an exotic destination would be something for only an Alpha to dream about. Going to your little cottage in the country would no longer depend on whether you had worked all your life to buy it and do it up, it would depend on whether you were an Alpha. You could be stopped on the A303 and have your documentation checked. If you were a Beta, the traffic jam by Stonehenge would be the least of your worries.

Very quickly, a black market would spring up in forged documents. Oh, most of the information would be on 'your phone', but that is the easiest of all to forge, and anyway those of us not slavishly attached to 'our phones' would probably be Betas by default.

Well, there was a word for this once, wasn't there? When I first visited South Africa the worst of Apartheid had been abandoned, but the notices "Net Blankes" were still there, even on silly little rural railway stations. The notices were one thing, but if you were white you took one runway, if not you had to take another. Now, Apartheid was not about exterminating the non-white races (all the drivel about 'fascist' South Africa missed the point), it was about separation, but it was a wrong turning.

Are we going to take the same wrong turning, in our own country? Do we create two classes of citizens, for the foreseeable future? (Remember that Boris himself admitted this week that there may never be a vaccine against Covid!)?