WHAT do you think of the whole Cummings carry on?” I shouted across the street to one of my neighbours this morning as I walked to the shops for the papers. “Absolute w****r!” came back the reply.

The neighbour is a soft Tory voter, a unionist – he thinks Nicola Sturgeon has been sent as a demon from hell to destroy Scotland. He’s not got a lot of time for the niceties of political correctness.

At the shop, another acquaintance was the necessary six feet ahead of me in the queue. “Cummings, eh?” I said.

“Utter a******e,” she replied. She’s a super-nat. She’d run into a hail of grenades for Nicola Sturgeon. She’s as woke as a caffeinated insomniac.

READ MORE: Opinion: Andrew McKie: Johnson has picked the wrong ally and the wrong war

My walk back home was more uplifting than usual. There was a wee spring in my step. What a joy to see a bit of unity for once, I thought – just a shame it took the antics of the Gollum of Downing Street to bring us together.

Left and right, Yes and No, Remainer and Leaver, the Daily Mail and the Guardian for goodness sake, even bishops and scientists – the entire country, bar a very few, have come together in a spirit of national disgust not seen since that woman threw a cat into a wheelie bin back in 2010.

Only liars and the terminally hypocritical – Tory types who’d clamber over their granny for a sniff of power’s underpants – had the gall to brass a defence of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson. Even then they did so at the cost of their soul spontaneously combusting inside them. Respect, where it’s due, to the Tories who had the courage to condemn this scandal outright.

Cummings won’t go, he won’t quit. A nuclear blast wouldn’t shift him – and Johnson, so far, won’t sack him. Cummings reminds me of vomit stains on my clothes when my children were babies. Something revolting that won’t go away no matter how much soap and water is used.

And Johnson … good grief. You’d be forgiven for imagining Cummings has got something on him. Quite honestly, if I was Prime Minister only being blackmailed by the most dreadful sex tape could make me act the way Johnson has acted in defence of Cummings and the indefensible.

You can use the Cummings scandal as a barometer of decency. It’s not that you have to be a good person to see how despicable Cummings and Johnson have behaved – even the morally marginal are aware of that. But if someone is capable of defending Cummings then there’s only two possible reasons: one, they’re mad and so shouldn’t be judged for what they’ve said; or two, they’re Tories so craven, cowardly and grotesquely ambitious that truth and shame are alien concepts.

Still, for those of us who clocked Cummings as a dangerous critter from the get-go, there’s some delight in watching Conservatives who’ve been part of the rah-rah brigade for Johnson – the most useless Prime Minister we’ve ever had – twist in the wind. As the Cummings breach-of-lockdown scandal deepened, one Tory pundit, Tim Montgomerie, said: “I’m really embarrassed to have ever backed Boris Johnson for high office.”

The Boris apologists might be embarrassed. I’ve fetched the popcorn.

READ MORE: Dominic Cummings met with mixture of scorn and support from press 

Did it really take this scandal to work out just what a sackful of absolute nothing Johnson is as a politician and a person?

One of the great psychological buboes of recent times has been the belief (or cognitive dissonance is probably a better term) that people like Johnson and Cummings are anti-elitist. What utter garbage. Cummings is loaded, he’s married to a baronet’s daughter; and Johnson wasn’t just born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he swallowed the whole canteen of cutlery.

They are the elite – they sneer at people like you and me – only now they’re finally showing you just how the elite behaves. It’s not merely about ‘one rule for you and one rule for me’. It’s the utter immorality, the swaggering, dangerous, screw-you arrogance of the pair.

Cummings actively doesn’t care what anyone thinks. And Johnson is so sociopathically narcissistic that the idea that the rest of us have feelings or needs or moral beliefs doesn’t penetrate his painstakingly disarranged hair-do.

Your mother might be dying in a care home, your son might be languishing in a bedsit alone, you might be desperate to see them but to hell with you, what do you matter? You’re not Dom, you’re not Boris.

Why should Dom and Boris follow the same rules as you? You’re you, they’re them. You’re not equal. Rules are for little guys. Shut up, sit down … let the idiots in Downing Street do the thinking.

And if the peasants revolt and start copying their masters – breaking lockdown, driving about the country, journeying to relatives while sweating and coughing up virus – well, there’s laws for people like that. And maybe a bit of herd immunity will sort them out into the bargain.

Cummings can flout rules which were written to keep people alive, and then sneer at the public and the press for having the temerity to question him.

What’s truly disgusting about the whole affair and Johnson’s defence of his charismatically-challenged Asda Price Rasputin, is the use of the Cummings’ child. Every single one of us has fretted over our children these last few months. Many of us have cried for our children.

With Coronavirus affecting his wife and then him, Cummings says he needed childcare for his son. Downing Street thought dragging the child into the public spotlight as an excuse would keep the peasants quiet. His lordship’s child needed love and attention - surely, the oiks would understand that, even if their own brats were mewling at home.

“The kid is the trump card,” one Downing Street source said of the Defend Dom strategy.

Well, that backfired. To paraphrase the PM, Johnson has spaffed his premiership up the wall. There’s no coming – forgive the terrible pun – back from this. When you tell the British people it’s okay if they pine and suffer, but not okay for one of the gang, then even in this divided, dysfunctional country, you’ve got nowhere to go but into the pages of history as Britain’s greatest political failure.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.