Dominic Cummings must fall on his sword, say Tory MPs as Boris Johnson faces outrage from his own side

Dominic Cummings was today urged to “fall on his sword” amid anger among Tory MPs and the public over his apparent breach of lockdown rules.

Conservative MP Craig Whittaker said Boris Johnson’s most senior aide had to “take responsibility” after sparking “outrage” with a 260-mile trip from London to a cottage on his parents’ farm estate in County Durham after his wife contracted suspected Covid-19.

Mr Cummings insists he did not break the rules and was doing what was best for his four-year-old son because his sister and niece would be able to support him with childcare if necessary.

But Mr Whittaker told BBC Radio 5 Live: “Compared to everyone else, he seems to have found this loophole which suits his purpose.

“There is genuine anger and outrage about this. For me he has to take responsibility and fall on his sword."

About 35 Tory MPs have called on Mr Cummings to resign or for him to be sacked. The Prime Minister was due to be questioned on the storm this afternoon when giving evidence to the Commons liaison committee.

There were no signs that Mr Johnson was planning to axe his top aide. One MP suggested that the Conservatives could not win the next election or deliver Brexit without Mr Cummings.

There also did not seem to be an organised campaign among MPs to force Mr Johnson’s hand.

However, Sir Bob Neill, chairman of the Commons justice committee, warned of the impact on the battle against Covid-19 in clinging onto Mr Cummings and undermining the public health rules.

“There comes a point this becomes a distraction from the real message,” he said. “If that causes people to ridicule or to take the really important message about behaving responsibly, listening to the advice, it causes people to take that less seriously, that is doing harm. It’s not just doing harm to the Government...but it’s also doing harm to the public interest.”

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick defended Mr Cummings this morning and said other parents could also drive hundreds of miles if necessary, a comment which could lead to more people with coronavirus travelling around the country and potentially spreading the disease.

He said: “If there are no other options, if you don’t have ready access to childcare, then you can do as Dominic Cummings chose to do.

“The guidelines say that you must do your best, but they appreciate that family life poses particular challenges and in order to protect children you are able to exercise a degree of personal judgement.”

After recovering from coronavirus, Mr Cummings drove about 30 miles on Easter Sunday, his wife’s birthday, and back from the beauty spot of Barnard Castle, a trip he said was to test his eyesight so he was sure he could safely drive back to London to return to work.

A number of Tory MPs believe this was a worse breach of the rules.

Under the government guidelines, families are supposed to stay at home for 14 days if they have the disease unless there were extreme circumstances.

Mr Jenrick said it is time to “move on” from the row over the trip to Durham. Asked if Mr Cummings should resign, Mr Jenrick told the BBC’s Breakfast programme: “No, he shouldn’t. He has given his explanation to the Prime Minister, who listened and concluded that he’d acted reasonably and legally.”

Mr Jenrick also said this morning that there would not be a “formal review” of fines issued to other families who travelled for childcare purposes during the lockdown, despite Health Secretary Matt Hancock appearing to suggest this when replying to a question from a vicar at the No10 press conference yesterday.

The Communities Secretary said: “This is matter for the police ... We are not going to interfere with the police’s decision-making here.”

Reverend Martin Poole, from Brighton, accepted the Government decision but said it could strengthen the view that the political elite were not being asked to follow the same rules as the wider public. He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “Sadly, I think that message reinforces the feeling that we are all operating under slightly different sets of values.

“I would hope ... and one of the reasons for asking the question, was hoping that our leaders and advisers would be held to the same sets of values and regulations that the rest of us are. That appears to be not quite the case.”

A survey for Mumsnet found more than 80 per cent of parents did not and would not have travelled for emergency childcare during the lockdown, with nine in 10 saying they believed Mr Cummings broke the rules.

However, the SavantaGroup/SavantaComRes Covid-19 tracker showed net approval of the Government recovering to 12 per cent, having plunged to minus two per cent, with net approval of Mr Johnson at seven per cent, having plummeted to minus one per cent.

The Prime Minister’s sister Rachel Johnson said that if she were Mr Cummings, she would admit she had “messed up”.

She told Good Morning Britain: “He’s been the architect of so many of the winning messages for the Vote Leave campaign, for the Tory party in 2019, and therefore his approach to this is now being seen to have been in some way hypocritical. He’s been a rule-maker but not a rule-taker, and it’s essentially very problematic.”

The latest figures available from the National Police Chiefs’ Council show a total of 14,244 fixed penalty notices were recorded by forces in England between March 27 and May 11 for breaches of the Health Protection Regulations. It is not known how many, if any, fines have been handed to families travelling for childcare purposes.

At the end of April, Hampshire Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen said the “vast majority” had been handed to people out in public spaces.

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