Boris Johnson under severe pressure to sack his chief aide

London

PRESSURE is building on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to fire his chief aide, Dominic Cummings, with polls showing voters think he broke lockdown rules and members of Parliament calling for him to go.

In March, the aide drove his family 400 kilometres to his parents' farm after his wife started to develop virus symptoms so that they could isolate there. Government lockdown rules forbade people going to second homes to self-isolate, but Mr Cummings argued that he and his wife feared that if they were both sick, no one in London would be able to care for their son. He said this was permitted under the rules.

But voters weary after months of lockdown in which they have been unable to visit family have responded with fury.

A JL Partners poll in Wednesday's Daily Mail found 80 per cent thought that Cummings had broken lockdown rules and 66 per cent thought he should resign. A YouGov survey for The Times found the Conservative lead over the opposition Labour Party had fallen by 9 per cent in a week.

"I can't imagine it can drag on for too much longer," said Jim O'Neill, a former Treasury minister who is reported to be in talks to lead the government's efforts to "level up" disadvantaged parts of the country.

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"They have either got to somehow get attention focused on issues which are far more important or deal with it differently," Mr O'Neill said in an interview with Bloomberg TV's Francine Lacqua.

Tuesday began with the resignation of a junior minister and then saw Conservative MP after Conservative MP criticising Mr Cummings. Nearly 40 had done so by the end of the day. Privately, more of their colleagues, including government ministers, agreed.

"I have received more emails on this than on any other issue since being elected - many hundreds of messages from concerned constituents - and I join them in that view," Elliot Colburn, a Tory MP, wrote in an open letter to Mr Johnson. "I feel it necessary to stress the importance of continued public trust and engagement with the measures being taken to overcome this crisis."

Mr Cummings isn't helped by his history of making enemies even on his own side. While he and the Liaison Committee Chairman Bernard Jenkin both supported Brexit, they fell out badly in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. Mr Cummings was openly contemptuous of most of the MPs on his side, referring to them as "flying monkeys". He was initially equally dismissive of the story about his lockdown trip. But ,unlike many political stories, this one has cut through. The Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper that almost never puts politics on its front page, put a cut-out "do whatever the hell you want" Cummings mask on its front page on Wednesday. Its lead story also mocked the aide.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, answering questions at the government's daily press conference on Tuesday evening, said he understood public anger but believed "what Mr Cummings did was within the guidelines." But he quickly experienced the difficulty of holding the line that while Mr Cummings's behaviour had been fine, it was "incredibly important that people follow the guidelines", and it was people's "civic duty" to isolate themselves if they had an infection.

"You end up in a situation where the elite can behave one way, and the public have to behave another," Ian Blackford, leader of the Scottish National Party in Parliament, told The BBC. "This is a shambles".

A British minister said on Wednesday that it was time to "move on". Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told The BBC"I think there is a lot more that we need to focus on now, like the virus and the economy." BLOOMBERG, REUTERS