Polecat Barnard Castle Fib UNRAVELS

For around ten days, chief Downing Street polecat Dominic Cummings has failed to shape the story, because the story has been about him, and is out of his hands. This result, which demonstrates what happens when a weak leader dependent on the likes of Polecat Dom fails to take action against him, means that an attempt by today’s Mail on Sunday to rubbish one eyewitness’ testimony has had no effect; it has failed to dampen the flames.

Worse, Cummings’ claim regarding his lockdown-busting jolly to Barnard Castle is now under scrutiny. Remember, he had asserted “We walked about 10 to 15 metres from the car to the river bank nearby. We sat there for about 15 minutes. We had no interactions with anybody. I felt better. We returned to the car” at his presser last week.

And there has already been pushback from the likes of local resident Lisa Westcott Wilkins: “I live in Barnard Castle. He was here. The whole town knows it. He parked on our street and was seen at leisure right where we walk our dogs. Infected, he touched the gates we all have to touch to move through that area. People have died here from the virus”. So there’s already doubt over the “10 to 15 metres from the river bank” claim.

Now, the Sunday Times has done its own digging. Jim Pickard of the FT has read the story and concluded “New witnesses in Barnard Castle contradict the Cummings account”. And indeed they do: apart from Robin Lees, who has been aggressively doorstepped by the Mail on Sunday in an effort to discredit his account, there are two other witnesses.

“Rosalind Evans … says she spotted Cummings in Market Place - a partially cobbled street of shops and Barnard Castle’s main thoroughfare. She claims he was with ‘a group of people’” … "Alan Gowland … claims to have walked past Cummings on a narrow path that runs alongside the Tees, known as Scar Top walkway, in the early afternoon”. Lees claims to have seen him on The Sills, which runs parallel to the Tees.

Adding the annual event which Cummings’ wife would have been celebrating in her own way that day, Geoff Wilton observed sceptically “Man accidentally drives to beauty spot on wife’s birthday to test eyesight, and accidentally then strolls round said beauty spot further testing eyesight. It’s entirely plausible”. The Polecat has lost all credibility.

But he is gaining notoriety, and as a result, more people are becoming emboldened to put their claims of sightings and further lockdown breaches out there on social media platforms, one of these being Facebook, where one North London resident has told “It is apparently well known among certain people that he had people over during lockdown, and even more importantly that a lady (who some people think is either his mother or mother-in-law) was with him and travelled in the car up to Durham”. There is more.

“This absolutely negates all his defence re childcare. Why has this not been covered by the media?” Well, maybe it will be now: while the likes of the MoS deploy their resources to aggressively intimidating witnesses, yet more media outlets will now be following up leads. And so the Flight of the Polecat remains where Cummings and his boss, alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, don’t want it: high up the news agenda.

For such a master media manipulator, Cummings is really pretty crap. Sad, really.

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