My thoughts are, and have been since the start, that hindsight is a wonderful thing. I started a thread yesterday about the new German lockdown, and there were comments then about how earlier we all thought Germany, France, Italy... had got it right when we'd gone to shit, but now maybe not.
The decision was taken not to go into lockdown earlier to try to protect the economy from even deeper ravages. Because cases soared, that's now seen as the wrong decision. But if they'd done lockdown instead, and more businesses had gone under, then there would have been a lot of people saying that the government was sacrificing jobs, not thinking about the economic impact of lockdown on ordinary people's lives. So I don't think it makes Dominic Cummings suddenly some sort of knight in shining armour.
Many people were criticising this government for the mistakes they made right from the beginning, and they did make mistakes. I carry no torch for Boris. But I can't convince myself that any other leader, from any party, would have had the objectively right solutions. Their mistakes might well have been different ones, but there would still have been mistakes. The evidence globally is that only the most totalitarian countries, those prepared to nail people into their homes, have had much success at containing the virus. And nobody in the west would have countenanced that, politicians or public.