The Prime Minister’s chief aide Dominic Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, tried to cover up travelling over 250 miles in direct contravention of the lockdown rules in late March in two articles for the Spectator magazine.
In a piece published by the Spectator on 25 April about how the magazine’s authors were spending lockdown, Cummings was careful not to mention his trip north when he wrote that “at the end of March and for the first two weeks of April I was ill, so we were both shut in together.”
Meanwhile, in a Spectator article published on 24 April, Cumming’s wife Mary Wakefield wrote about her experiences suffering from coronavirus, where she dreamed of being looked after by Cummings but within 24 hours of her symptoms starting “he said ‘I feel weird’ and collapsed”. She went on to explain that for the next 10 days “Dom couldn’t get out of bed. Day in, day out for ten days he lay doggo with a high fever and spasms that made the muscles lump and twitch in his legs.”
At some point within those 10 days, Cummings drove over 250 miles to his parent’s property near Durham in direct contravention of the UK-wide lockdown regulations that had come into force a week earlier. Wakefield never mentions this trip.
Later in the article, Wakefield talks of “[emerging]from quarantine into the almost comical uncertainty of London lockdown”, carefully avoiding any mention that this emergence involved driving half the length of the country and that their previous experience of lockdown was from a picturesque country farmhouse.
Neither article mentions needing to travel north to find help with childcare or how the family put numerous people at risk, including Cummings own elderly parents. The only location Wakefield mentions in her article is London, implying that is where the family stayed for the duration of their isolation, when in reality they had left London and driven 260 miles north to stay in a country farmhouse in direct contravention of government policy.
