“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” That’s a drill invented by Charles E. Weller for training typists back in the days when there was no Shift-X. Come to the aid of the party. That’s what the ‘good men and women’ of the Government have been doing today. They have circled the wagons and taken to Twitter to defend one Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s Special Advisor, who broke the lockdown restrictions that have kept us all in our homes for the last eternity to travel, while suspecting he may be infected with COVID-19, to his parents’ house in Durham because, he says, he needed help with childcare. It was just a coincidence, I am sure, that this happened around the time of his Mother’s birthday.

If that were all that had become clear today; if the revelation that yet another high-profile figure had felt that the rules that bind the rest of us didn’t apply to them; I would raise a cynical eyebrow and mutter “Quell surprise!” Hypocrisy has ceased to surprise me and that could be the worst admission I’ve made to myself for a while. The notion that there’s one set of rules for the powerful and another set for the rest of us is scarcely new - it’s as ancient and as primitive as the Code of Hammurabi.

If that were all that happened today then I could shrug my shoulders cynically and like a meme on Facebook. What happened today was worse than that. Much, much worse. Today, it seems, was the time for ‘all good men (and women) to come to the aid of the party’. Within hours of the story breaking Cabinet Ministers - Raab, Gove (and to be fair neither of those surprised me), Sunak, Hancock (OK, I’d held out a little hope for them) had taken to Twitter to defend Cumming’s actions. What was clear from reading their tweets was that they were all working from the same script. They all spoke in pretty much the same terms - any half decent source critic would conclude they were working from the same document. They came to the aid of The Party.

Again, if that were all there was to it I’d lift my glass and toast the doom of decency and accept that the world’s going to hell in a handcart. Even the fact that they seemed to be rewriting the rules of lockdown on the hoof - erasing and retyping them as easily as hitting Shift-X - comes as no surprise to anyone who has read “1984”. No. That didn’t make me angry. Maybe it should have done, but it didn’t. That’s another admission I once, when I was younger and more naïve, hoped I’d never make.

What has made me angry is a sentence that one of those Cabinet Ministers used when he came to the aid of The Party. “He did what any caring parent would have done.” That was paraphrased across a dozen other tweets. 

There have been parents that have been unable to attend their child’s funeral because they were told to follow the rules.

There have been parents who have not been able to hold their child’s hand as they suffered through this virus because they were told to follow the rules.

There have been people who have watched their loved ones’ funerals on laptops because they were told to follow the rules.

There have been people who haven’t seen their kids for weeks because they are self-isolating and are following the rules.

Now, it seems, they have been stupid enough not to understand that they could have re-interpreted the rules and claim that their circumstances were ‘exceptional’. Or maybe they just didn’t care enough. Maybe they weren’t “loving fathers” or mothers or children. Isn’t that what the argument, “he did what any loving parent would do” implies?

Have I grown weary and cynical enough to accept that; for it not to make me angry? Nope. And know what? I’m glad. No one should. No one with any self-respect or sense that there is something beyond Party loyalty. No one who thinks that there are values we should stand by and preserve. No one who thinks that truth matters, that honesty matters, that everyone matters as much as the likes of Dominic Cummings and his Party helpmates.

No one who thinks that their country matters. Nations rot. They become corrupt. That starts when all those things I mentioned - truth, honesty, ordinary people - cease to matter. So here’s  a challenge to all those who actually still care: Weller’s drill has another form - “Now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of the country”. When our body politic rots our country rots. Now is the time for all of us to come to its aid.