Cummings and goings at Number 10
Last weekend I witnessed the final moments of a mouse’s life at the hands of my cat. Before I could reach the defenceless creature, the cat which had no doubt stalked, pounced and played with little Mickey, had already inflicted the fatal bite.
One mouse down, I came in to watch the Dominic Cummings interview.
Dominic Cummings, a man few of us could pick from an identity parade a couple of weeks ago, was now front and centre of the kind of political PR storms that come around every few months. He’s a man that divides opinion; some see him as a master of the dark arts of PR, a man of immense intuition and insight into the minds of the UK public. To others, an arrogant misleading truth-twister. Either way, he was at the centre of the political storm and had the press in front of him, baying for blood in the Number 10 garden.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about crisis communications, about how it is important to act quickly, to be honest and to apologise. You can add to that, keep it brief, keep it factual.
Having kept the press and viewers waiting 30 minutes (punctuality is politeness; to keep somebody waiting is exercising power and control), he proceeded to give his version of events. Perhaps the delay was in the hope that viewers would get bored and return to their gardens on a balmy May Bank Holiday.
Over the next hour, we heard no apology, to my mind a lack of honesty and empathy, and the ‘act quickly’ boat had long since sailed. The basics of crisis communications were ignored. The fact that the speech will have been drafted, re-drafted and rehearsed, and the word ‘sorry’ omitted, beggars belief.
And these are high stakes, it’s not just Dominic Cummings’ job at risk, opinion polls of the Prime Minister have tanked over the furore.
The very great majority of the UK and further afield have been abiding by stiflingly strict stay at home rules, parting families in even the most terrible circumstances. For a man who will have been front and centre of these messages and whose stock-in-trade is reading the pulse of the nation, the lack of empathy and humility was hard to fathom. Trying to win small battles on some press inaccuracies whilst losing the war was a serious miscalculation. The media is not your adversary, it is the conduit to your audience, you have to work with them to get your message across.
Currently, Cummings remains in post and he and the Prime Minister will be hoping that the media will tire of asking the same questions and covering the same story. And they will eventually, as the public lose interest and click-through rates fall away. There will be other prey for the Fleet Street cats to get their teeth stuck into.
But what damage in the meantime. The ‘genius strategist’ (currently) has his work cut out for him.