Trade Union advice for Mr Cummings

I spent most of my working life, about thirty years, as a union representative. Over those years I represented workers at many hundreds of disciplinary hearings.

Obviously (I hope!) it is the role of a union representative in those circumstances to represent the worker/union member who is being disciplined, and to put forward their explanation.

It is also a very important part of the role to give people good advice – rather than the advice they might want to hear. Sometimes a union member will want to advance an explanation which is so implausible that it you know it will do more harm than good.

In those circumstances, you sometimes need to be quite tough with someone to talk them out of trying to mount a “defence” which flies in the face of the evidence, or which is simply absurd.

I would never have allowed someone who drove his wife and child on a thirty-mile round trip, contravening public health advice which he himself had had a hand in drawing up, to claim that he did so to test his eyesight.

No disciplinary panel would have accepted such an utterly ridiculous proposition, and they would then have been less likely to believe anything else which was said by the person who had spun them this yarn.

How fortunate it is for Dominic Cummings that his boss doesn’t appear to take any responsibility for managing his conduct, regardless of the consequences for others.