2 Wednesday January 19 2022 | the timestimes2
traditionally regarded as a resigning
offence, although the prime minister
has made it clear throughout his
career that he has little regard for
tradition, resigning or offence.
Yesterday Dominic Raab, the justice
secretary, said that if Johnson had
knowingly misled parliament he
would be expected to resign and
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, walked
out of an interview when pressed
on whether the prime minister
had his unequivocal support. As for
Cummings, he appears only to have
scratched the surface of whatever’s in
that cardboard box.
“There are many other photos of
parties after I left yet to appear,” he
said ominously. “I’ll say more when
SG’s [Sue Gray’s] report is published.”
Last night it was claimed that Gray,
the senior civil servant who is
conducting the investigation into
alleged rule-breaking in Downing
Street, would interview Cummings
as part of her inquiry.
It was May 2021, six months after
his departure, when the lid came off.
Cummings was giving evidence to
MPs on the Commons health and
science select committees, who were
conducting a joint inquiry into the
government’s response to the
Covid crisis.
He told them that at first Johnson
treated Covid like “a scare story”,
that Matt Hancock, then the health
secretary, should have been sacked for
“lying” and that many ministers were
“literally skiing” as the pandemic hit.
In case anyone hadn’t quite got the
point, he wrote in his blog that
Johnson was “unethical” and had
fallen “below the standards of
competence and integrity this country
deserves” and mocked him for, he
claimed, his intention to leave office
after the next election to “have fun
and make money”.A
venging angels
do not often take
the form of a
balding middle-aged
man carrying a
cardboard box.
But when Dominic
Cummings was
booted out of Downing Street just
over a year ago, in November 2020,
the prime minister’s famously scruffy
senior adviser bided his time, then
embarked on a revenge so prolonged,
so personal and so public that even by
political standards it’s spectacular.
“The intensity and consistency
of it is quite astonishing,” says one
Westminster insider. “He’s embittered
that he was forced out and he’s an
obsessional character. It’s been clear
for quite a while that he wants to bring
down Boris Johnson. He apparently
believed throughout that he wasn’t fit
to be PM.”
“He’s utterly ruthless and he doesn’t
want to be liked,” adds another, who
has watched Cummings’s career over
the years. “He’s got a very happy
family, plenty of money and nothing
to lose, so he’s the most dangerous
enemy to have. He won’t stop until
he’s got rid of Boris.”
This week the drip drip of
toxic revelations continued, with
Cummings’s claim that the prime
minister lied to parliament about
a Downing Street party during the
first lockdown. Yesterday a weary
looking prime minister denied
Cummings’s claim.
“Nobody told me that what we were
doing was against the rules,” Johnson
told reporters, “that the event in
question was not a work event. As I
told the House of Commons when I
went out into that garden, I thought
that I was attending a work event.”
Lying to parliament is a breach of
the ministerial code and thereforeALAMYI
know the BBC has a lot on its
plate right now (hi, Nadine!) but
could it spare a minute to assist
the Duke of York? Play School,
as you’ll know, has not been
broadcast since 1988, and I’m
thinking it would be a kind
gesture if it let Prince Andrew
have the famous old Play School
cuddly toys to take home and keep.
Shall we start with Big Ted, Little Ted
and Humpty?
Because now we know the
mind-blowing news that Andrew, 61,
sleeps with not one, not two, but five
plush toys on his bed, which is more
than the average eight-year-old girl.
I’m going to stick my neck out and
say things aren’t looking good. If
Windsor’s King Joffrey needs two
teddy bears, a stuffed panther and
two squashy hippos to cope with a
cosseted life in which footmen open
his curtains every morning (reports
claim he greets them with a bellowed
“f*** off!”) how would he deal with
Virginia Giuffre’s razor-like lawyers
cross-examining him and even asking
impertinent questions about his own
“little Ted”? Send for more soft toys
immediately. Hello, is that Hamleys?
I think we’re going to need the full
Huggables set.
I’d like to say the news gets better
but it really doesn’t. According to
Andrew’s former protection officer
Paul Page, the prince had dozens more
teddies in his private apartment and
had a sort of angry OCD over where
some of them sat. So much did he
“shout and scream” if a servant dared
to rearrange certain teddies or place
them in the wrong spot on his
Buckingham Palace bed (one hippo
had to be placed in the middle of his
green blankie), that staff laminated
a diagram illustrating exactly where
to put them to avoid Joffrey’s wrath.
I’m sorry to conjure this image, but
I keep thinking of the Little Britain
comedy character still breastfeeding
at 35 and calling it “bitty”.
Maybe it’s just a posh version of
single adult men who still have a
Manchester United duvet cover. If
we were being kind we could blame
boarding school and say it harks
back to young Andrew missing home.A bum
deal on
your
insurance
I assumed it was
celebrity myth that
Tom Jones had insured
his chest hair for
£3.5 million, Gene
Simmons from Kiss
had insured his
freakishly long tongue
for £725,000 and Kylie
Minogue had insured
her teeny tiny buttocks
for £3.5 million. What
against — theft? If
anyone wants to try
pinching my buttocks,
feel free. (Sorry. Please
don’t cancel me.)
But Heidi Klum says
her legs really were
insured for $2 million,
one being more
expensive than the
other due to having
a scar. Eh? When it
comes to modelling
don’t legs kind of come
as a pair? Dolly Parton
insured her famous
breasts for $600,000,
but since most women
have one bigger than
the other surely it
follows that you can
negotiate a more
competitive deal on
the smaller one?
If any insurance
salesmen are reading,
I know a lot of
middle-aged mothers
who’d hear you out on
breast insurance. On
the condition that it
covers for wear and
tear and significant
structural damage.Take my
mother-
in-law...
really are more likely
to have friction with
their partner’s mother
than their own
(although the ultimate
authority on this is
obviously Professor
Les Dawson).
But long may it
continue because we
need the laughs.
Where would Dawson,
Bob Monkhouse and
Ken Dodd — who said,
“I haven’t spoken tomy mother-in-law for
18 months; I don’t like
to interrupt her” —
have been without it?
Imagine a world in
which Dawson hadn’t
taken his wife’s mother
to Madame Tussauds’
Chamber of Horrors
and they hadn’t said
to him: “Keep her
moving please, sir,
we’re stocktaking.”
How much poorer
would we be withoutthe American joke:
“I bought my mother-
in-law a nice chair for
her birthday. Now they
won’t let me plug it in.”
Actually, that
probably counts as
hate speak now. Safer
to stick with: “Ever
since it started raining
my mother-in-law has
stood sadly looking
through the window.
If it gets any heavier,
I’ll have to let her in.”I never met my mother-
in-law (sadly she died
years before I married
her son), so I can add
no fuel to Arizona State
University’s study,
which finds that peopleBut come on. Andrew was about 40
when Page saw the laminated teddy
plan, which included instructions on
where to place three novelty cushions
reading “Prince”, “Daddy” and
“Ducks”. A psychotherapist’s dream, is
it not? I now imagine him sucking his
thumb whenever “Good News Gary”
relays the news that he has been
stripped of another title. We’re all
allowed to be sentimental, especially
for things bought by children. But
perhaps no one has ever had the balls
to say to the royal Man-Baby: “You’re
61, mate. This is a bit weird. Where
do you keep your pens — in a fluffy
pencil case?” Even Sebastian Flyte
in Brideshead Revisited only had one
Aloysius. Maybe when they divorced,
the Duchess of York told him: “I feel
there are 53 of us in this marriage.”
Lawyers in America must be reading
these details with their jaws on the
table. You can imagine them reading
aloud to each other. “It says here that
‘Teddy holding heart’ must be placed
on the left-hand side of the bed’s
headboard,” says one. “It makes
Trump look evolved,” says another.
It’s unlikely that if the court case goes
ahead Andy’s bed teddies will come
up, but we live in hope. Meanwhile,
please show your support for your
prince. Send all the pencil gonks and
Build-a-Bears you can afford to the
usual address.Carol Midgley
Quick, Hamleys, send
Prince Andrew more
teddies. He’s only 61
Dom and
his box of
party
secrets!
Will Boris Johnson’s
former right-hand
man succeed in
bringing him down?
Hilary Rose reports