 We talked in depth about Dominic Cummings ridiculous statement and his ridiculous account of the events which he thought exonerated him. What's great in this poll is that every single claim that Dominic Cummings made, the country has seen through every single one. Let's get up some of these. The pollsters ask, do you believe Dominic Cummings had to drive to Durham to get child care help? True, only 25% and only 40% of Tory voters. False, 61% and 47% of Tory voters. So they were trying to make this criticism, oh, this is just bitter remainers and bitter Corbynites criticising Dominic Cummings. Everyone in the country, a majority, all demographics, all political persuasions, they think he is lying. They don't think he had to go to Durham to get child care help. Let's go to the next one, feared protesters would attack his London home. You've got to remember this was his key justification for why he had to go. True, 23%, false, 59%. It gets even more overwhelming. Drove to Barnard Castle to check eyesight before driving back to London. True, 8%, false, 78%. That was the largest disbelief and that's, I think, the most memorable part of that story. The final one left the car and sat on a bench at Barnard Castle because he felt sick. True, 16%, false, 66%. Then there was a general question, is he telling the truth overall or not? Yes, 17%, no, 66%. So I mean, that conference, I'll go to you, Dalia, that press conference of him sitting in the garden where what he thought would happen was that he would put aside his side of the story and people would think, oh yeah, that does seem kind of reasonable. Maybe it is reasonable to drive to Barnard Castle because you've got bad eyesight and maybe it is reasonable. Maybe I am exceptional because a newspaper wrote a bad thing about me and then someone said something bad about me on Twitter and that meant I had to leave my London home. How did he call it this wrong? Yeah, I mean, it's been pretty sort of shocking to watch and I think it's because someone like Dominic Cummings has sort of never had to really be held to account in this way and I was very surprised actually when he decided to do that press conference just because I think he's so often the kind of person behind the scenes who's kind of running pulling the strings and running the campaign from behind the scenes. I always thought that he wasn't very much of a front of house guy but I think he got ahead of himself, decided to go for it and it absolutely just blew up in his face. But to kind of go to this, the polling which is just kind of showing that I think people are becoming really aware of two things. First of all, that gaslighting is at the absolute heart of this government strategy when dealing with coronavirus. They keep making explicit errors and then going back and saying we never did that, what you saw, you didn't ever see it, what you experienced was something that you never experienced. And for me, things like the care home situation was exact, it's like we know that our elderly relatives are dying. We know that they're dying because people have been allowed to go back into care homes after being discharged from hospital and not being checked for coronavirus and not having guidance adequately followed. And then to have the government standing up and with such confidence saying we wanted to put a safety net around care homes. It's this kind of consistent but this isn't just kind of like picking apart policies. This isn't stuff that's happening in the shadows. These are deaths and this is an illness and deaths that are happening that now with quickly huge parts of the British population are being touched by it in some way. You mentioned that figure earlier that one in a thousand people, one in a thousand Britons now when it comes to excess deaths are dying. So this is becoming something that people are being directly touched by and then they are being gaslit by the government and this is going to happen again with schools. The school situation is a ticking time bomb. But when it comes to the kind of question of clarity as well, I think another reason why this government is so poor at just being straightforward. It's not just about the fact that they rely on this idea of if things go tits up, we're just going to try and gaslight people and use the machinery of the media that has been so soft on us for so long in order to carry that out. But I also think it's because the government is just so shockingly out of touch that even for me as someone who's kind of knee deep in politics, it still shocks me every day. So with the liaison committee today, you had to see an MP explaining to Boris Johnson that people who have leave to remain can't access government funds because of the no recourse to public funds law, which the idea that Boris Johnson doesn't understand that that exists is so shocking to me because this isn't some nitty gritty policy issue. This is a foundational pillar of the Tories government, particularly since during the, as part of the hostile environment, ramped up by Theresa May. How could you, and this is something that has ruined, has made people's lives a living hell. How could you, as the Tory prime minister, not only not know that that is the case, but not understand how a major policy like that is going to massively shape how people experience this virus. So I think the lack of clarity is partly cynical, a big part, that we want to strategize our words to make sure that we're just about slippery enough that you can't pin anything on us. But I also think it comes from genuine lack of understanding and lack of knowledge and lack of you know, people are saying that what the, the, you know, something that I see a lot of the time is that we should actually view this through a failed state lens, through the idea that actually the capacity to adequately address this virus when it comes to knowledge, when it comes to infrastructure is actually just not there right now. So I think this question of whether or not this is one gas slide too far is really going to determine how this unfolds and what kind of lasting damage this might have on Boris's government. I want to focus or throw back to you, Owen, this question of what were they thinking? Because one of the things I thought today, watching the liaison committee, yes, Boris Johnson was deeply unimpressive and it was, you know, appalling that he didn't know that there was a policy called no recourse to public funds whereby people who have leave to remain can't access benefits. Bizarre. But what was lucky for Boris Johnson is the format of it was so boring. Like I was really struggling to pay attention, you know, it just looked dull. It was very procedural. Whereas what Dominic Cumming speaking in the Rose Garden, they had managed to make a really bad news story for them into like block buster TV, like because of the novelty of it was really excited. Like, I mean, maybe exciting is going, maybe I'm just a nerd. I found it exciting. Okay. So having him there sort of telling his story, and then the journalists sort of standing up and asking him to and for questions. I mean, what were they thinking? Why if you've got a really bad story with loads of holes in it, and none of it is remotely relatable, would you decide I'm going to make an hour long speech to the public and then let journalists ask me questions about it? I mean, it's clearly gone very wrong. But how did this happen? Yeah, I mean, first of all, just quickly on no recourse to public funds. I'm not that shocked that they're not necessarily aware, particularly Boris Johnson, not not not details, man, I spoke as I think even his strongest champions would say aren't aware about the finer details of the violence they impose on people, particularly migrants, purely, as we know, as a political strategy over the last few years to to try and whip up and inside bigotry to deflect the anger away from those at the top, particularly those who bankrolled and conserved it by. In terms of Dominic Cummings in the Rose Garden, they obviously have a strategy. I mean, let's just let's try and at least at least attempt to kind of dissect the internal workings of their minds. What they would what he was trying to do in that in that particular kind of dramatic moment was to bog us down in the granular details. And because obviously objectively, he broke the rules, everything else is noise. But that wasn't a tentative generating noise. It was an attempt to say that we should end up wrapping ourselves up in knots over, did he why did he leave at that moment? What was the reason he had to go? And that we just we'd end up nitpicking. That was the that was the attempt. And I think a lot of it is hubris. This is a guy who, you know, who was the main character of a BBC drama featuring his successful attempts to win a referendum in which the odds on the odds were overwhelmingly, it seems that Romain would win almost every single newspaper commentator in the country for Romain were going to win, whichever side they backed. This is someone who he was seen as a key architect of a conservative majority, which if we're going to be brutally honest, very few people thought would be an 80 seat majority. And I think I think that I think he's just drunk on his own hubris. I also think and it was a quite a striking quote in the Financial Times, a friend of Dominic Cummings was quoted as saying, he doesn't care what happens to the Tories. He's not a conservative. He has no political attachment. The quote said he didn't care if they sank below the Greens. And I think a lot of it is it's his own affronted ego. It's the fact Boris Johnson himself feels so reliant because he's so weak, so reliant on this one advisor that he's allowed Dominic Cummings essentially to, you know, I would imagine Dominic Cummings call any rational violinist that would have said, don't do that. That will obviously make things worse. But Dominic Cummings himself, his her ego, meant that he almost, you know, any sense of hubris, the sense that he's the architect of the spectacular against all odds of victories. I mean, one, I think the evidence that points that by the way, it's just pure ego mania in his part is, I think we're going to mention it, the fact that in that press conference, he declared that he had predicted a pandemic that a pandemic could happen. And he did that last year. And what's been discovered since is he edited his blogs on the first day he came back from Durham to insert that in those blogs. And the reason he did that, and he made this clear in the press conference is he was so angry at being by the Sunday Times, incidentally, for being accused of being the key promoter of herd immunity, including a strategy of protect the economy, let all the people buy just have the Sunday Times sources someday up that he felt he had to actually amend his box in a completely dishonest way to make it look like not only did he not push herd immunity, he was the only guy in the room who thought this was going to happen, one of the only people in the country who thought this was going to happen. Now that was a lie. That was completely dishonest and is an example of why we can't trust anything he says. But it is testament to his own burn ego, but her ego. So I think it's those three things, a bruised ego of someone who genuinely thinks he's a an evil mastermind, I think he relishes being seen as an evil mastermind, someone who thinks I'm essentially a magician. We are going to move on to a slightly different element of this story, which comes from that same poll. So also containing that daily mail poll was a figure that 65% of the public believe the conduct of Dominic Cummings will make people less likely to follow the lockdown rules. We've already got some anecdotal evidence to prove that. So let's get up a tweet from a London anesthetist. So someone working in the NHS, a doctor, I've now had three people tell me in the last 24 hours that they have broken lockdown citing Dominic Cummings as justification. His resignation is genuinely required as an urgent and powerful public health intervention. People are flouting the rules because he did without consequence. So that's from from the medical profession. We can also get someone who is from law enforcement. So a copper. So this London police officer also phoned LBC to tell his experience when he approaches members of the public who are breaking lockdown since this whole Dominic Cummings row started. Let's have a listen to that now. But a good sort of half a dozen people I spoke to today when I've said to them, well, why do you say that? Why do you say lockdown is over? And they say, well, government can do what they want. And as a police officer, I don't know what to respond back to them. I don't know. We don't speak for government. We just enforce the rules. And I don't know what the answer we're meant to give back is. So you absolutely have come across people. Yeah, you're saying that you absolutely have come across people that have used what has happened over the last weekend as an excuse not to follow the lockdown rules. There are three people who have said that to me today. There are three separate groups of people who said to me today, well, if Dominic Cummings can do what he wants, I actually think two people specifically said him. One person said the government, which by which I ultimately assume he's talking about this, can do what they want, then we should be able to too. So why are you bullying me, Mr. Officer, is kind of along the lines of the conversations that I've had today. This government are used to having doctors against them. They normally have coppers on side. I mean, have they have they lost a loyal base there in terms of law enforcement who was saying, because your guy's broken the rules, we can't do our job properly anymore. Yeah, I mean, but once again, this is sort of not the first time that, you know, you would have thought that given that sort of law and order is such a core part of Tory messaging or right-wing messaging, that you think that sort of seeing high-profile conservatives breaking their own kind of laws and their own rules and their own principles, that doesn't tend to have the kind of impact that you would expect it to have. And I think people, they always manage to find a way to weasel themselves out of it. But I think what is so bizarre about this situation, which was sort of as Owen was discussing, was that on the one hand, we have this portrayal of Cummings as being this incredibly, like this incredible strategic mastermind, you know, who kind of single-handedly took on the establishment and won Brexit. But at the same time, how could how could he be both such a strategic mastermind, but then also be so profoundly stupid as to have a whole public messaging thing that relies on individual common sense. And within that talk about driving hundreds of miles in order to test his eyesight. So I guess for me, what this is, what this has told me is that actually a lot of Dominic Cummings's wins are not so much because of Dominic Cummings, but because of the huge amount of resources that he has been able to leverage. I watched a lecture that he did. I actually watched it a while ago because I was just curious about about this sort of like weird little man. And he sort of talked about how he was approached to do the Vote Leave campaign. And you know, he just sort of like would very, very casually just sort of be like, yeah, you know, a few billionaires sort of said that they'll they'll throw like X amount of money behind it. And I kind of think, well, if any of us had that number of resources, then, you know, I just think that maybe we overstate this kind of like genius of Dominic Cummings. And that is really highlighted by the fact that that Rose Garden press conference was possibly one of the worst pieces of PR I've ever seen in my life. But it really does raise the question because in other governments, also in this government, whenever a high profile figure has publicly broken the lockdown, they have been immediately sacked. For me, this raises the question of what kind of power does Dominic Cummings hold over not just Boris Johnson, but also, you know, the circle around Boris Johnson have rallied quite tightly around him. What kind of power does he leverage that he is able to flout the rules in this way, but also take on his own PR strategy that has been an absolute disaster. And still, it looks like might not be held accountable. But once again, as I sort of mentioned before, for me, the absolutely worrying part of this is not even about Dominic Cummings or Boris Johnson himself, I know who they are. They've showed who they are throughout their career. It is the fact the public health impact that this is going to have, which will result in more deaths amongst the most vulnerable. That is the key issue right now. And that is some that. But I don't expect the government to take the measures necessary because it seems that PR rather than public health is the primary, you know, mission of this government. And if it intersects with public health, great. If it goes against public health, well, that's just how it is as far as they're concerned.