By saving Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson has boldly gambled that his special advisor will long be forgotten when voters next enter the polling booth.
Students of electoral history can point to similar high profile scandals involving seemingly irreplaceable operators – from Cecil Parkinson to Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell to, more recently, Andy Coulson – who did not impact their party’s chances of re-election. One caveat is that those figures mentioned resigned to save their master. Johnson is calculating that he can break another political ‘iron law’, as he did last December, and prove the commentators wrong about the Cummings saga.
