DOMINIC Cummings savage attack on the Prime Minister and the Government’s handling of the pandemic dominated the comment sections of the newspapers.

The Daily Mail

Andrew Pierce said Cummings exit from Downing Street had ended with a convivial chat between Boris Johnson and his former aide.

“Within 48 hours that bonhomie had evaporated,” he said. “Cummings was on the phone in a fury after reading hostile reports in Sunday newspapers about his time at the heart of government.”

Cummings blamed Carrie Symonds for the leak, he said, but criticism of his fiancee was one thing the Prime Minister wouldn’t take.

“Cummings discovered very quickly after that call that Boris, always something of a loner with very few close friends, had already moved on. They hardly ever spoke again,” he said. “Cummings, famously described as a ‘career psychopath’ by David Cameron, has form in taking people down. One has to wonder just how much more Cummings has in his arsenal?”

The Daily Express

Paul Baldwin said the list of allegations by Cummings was jaw dropping.

“The Prime Minister said he would rather see dead bodies “piled high in their thousands” than order a third lockdown, Matt Hancock lied and lied, a quicker lockdown would have saved “tens of thousands of lives”, the elderly were sent to near certain death in care homes, Cummings seemed to be implying nothing short of some sort Government genocide by omission,” he said. “But this is Dom Cummings and there are, as my old news editor would say, more holes in his story than a Swiss cheese.”

He said Covid-19 was’ nasty, brutal and messy’ and there were few clear cut 100 percent right answers.

He said the Government’s handling of the crisis should be examined but ‘not on the testimony of a bloke who sloped off to Barnard Castle while telling everyone else to stay in their homes.’

The Guardian

Owen Jones said much of Cummings’ testimony already existed in the public domain.

“He has merely placed it in the context of a Tory psychodrama, allowing him to execute drive-by shootings against favoured targets – not least Matt Hancock,” he said.

“Much of the public has concluded that the government was handed a bad set of cards – that sure, they made mistakes, but who wouldn’t in their shoes? – and that Labour would have done little different anyway.

““Hopefully this is a case study of how to not to handle something like this,” said Cummings; it is also a case study in what happens when national institutions fail in their most basic function of holding the government to account. A healthy democracy is a question of life and death. What a lesson to have to learn at such an unbearable cost.”