Dominic Cummings must be held to account – not made the star of the show

T he stage is set, the props laid out, the audience whipped into a frenzy of anticipation. He may by his own account have struggled to get the prime minister to listen to him, but Dominic Cummings has half the country hanging on his every word in the run-up to Wednesday’s select committee hearing.

The tantalising dance of the seven veils he performed last week over a mystery Covid document he claims to be holding – should he auction it off for charity, or just plain old vanilla give it to MPs? – and the noisy headlines he keeps generating about a supposed secret herd immunity strategy or the woeful failure to shut Britain’s borders are all ways of ramping up the drama. Pass the popcorn, feel the hype and maybe in the process even learn something about why so very many people died.

What should have been a process of holding power to account – for Cummings was the prime minister’s most senior adviser through the crucial stages of the pandemic, not some hapless bystander – is in danger of morphing into a vehicle for its star witness and his timeless theme that almost everyone but him is an idiot. In all the excitement about what dirty secrets he might reveal, it’s easy to forget that Cummings is not a wholly disinterested witness and nor, judging by his performance when finally forced to account for his trip to Barnard Castle, necessarily an untarnished one.

He may well have been an early advocate for lockdown; a better judge of the data than Boris Johnson, or quicker to grasp the flaws in a pandemic plan originally designed for handling flu not a coronavirus. But those who have worked closely with Cummings say that while he is indeed brilliant, an original thinker capable of producing the solution that nobody else would have considered, like many original thinkers some of his ideas are frankly for the birds. There will have been misses as well as hits, which are unlikely to feature prominently so long as he is in charge of telling the story. His inquisitors this Wednesday must not allow themselves to be hijacked, either for the settling of old scores or in the creation of a personal myth.

They may well want to explore last week’s contested allegations that Johnson skipped Cobra meetings during the earliest stages of the outbreak in order to finish a book on Shakespeare that he hoped would fund his divorce – a rumour reporters have tried and failed to stand up previously. They will surely also want to know whether, after being forced into a second lockdown, the prime minister really did shout that he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than have a third.

But if even half the stories now doing the rounds are true, they must also examine whether Johnson’s most senior aides reacted appropriately to behaviour that should by rights have disturbed them. As the prime minister’s all-powerful adviser, Cummings bore significant responsibility for knocking a dysfunctional Downing Street operation into shape. If he concluded that was impossible, then he had the option of resigning and going public with his concerns much earlier. He could even have sought, with the cooperation of the cabinet and senior backbenchers on the 1922 committee, to engineer a face-saving handover of power to a caretaker leader, perhaps on medical grounds given the prime minister’s brush with death from Covid last spring. Yet Cummings waited until his own services were dispensed with to blow the whistle, and the committee should not be afraid to ask why.

Sources of confidential information close to power have traditionally been repaid with the lightest of scrutiny. Reporters receiving juicy leaks have a hefty incentive to keep the scoops coming by writing them up in a way that makes their source look good, and so long as they’re juicy enough, nobody wants to look too closely into the gift horse’s mouth.

The genius of the long accusatory threads Cummings has recently taken to posting on Twitter, in which he dangles information but strictly on his own terms, is that they’re now drawing half the country into the same faintly compromising game. The puppeteer pulls the string, and a nation jerks accordingly. Until there is a formal public inquiry in which all sides of the story can be aired, he remains the single most authoritative source on what happened inside government during one of this country’s darkest moments. It’s just that bitter experience suggests such access all too often comes at a price.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist