Jon Ronson of The Pyschopath Test fame has also written a book called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.
 
It’s a book about shame as a tool and how people respond to it. It’s also very much about the “cruelty of social media”.
 
Ronson catalogues scandals, smears and cancellations and says that after a 180-year hiatus since public punishment was formally phased out in the UK, social media has prompted a “great renaissance” of the practice.
 
I was reminded of the book and the powers of public shaming yesterday when Dominic Cummings issued his latest government critique in a 7,000 word essay published just ahead of PMQs.
 
In it, he expanded on the issues of pandemic testing and PPE that’d he brought up previously, but the main target of this specific tirade was health secretary Matt Hancock.
 
Cummings published screenshots of private whatsapps from the prime minister describing Hancock’s work as “totally f**king hopeless”, and others which showed them contemplating replacing him with Michael Gove.
 
They were particularly brutal messages that set fire to the claim that Downing Street has had full confidence in the health secretary.
 
Add this to his testimony the former adviser gave to MPs that Hancock should have been sacked 15-20 times and you start to get the impression that Cummings is in it for more than just transparency.
 
Whoever you are, and however poorly you’ve performed, it’s a particularly ruthless display of public HR. Nobody wants to be criticised by their boss or lead the 10 o’clock news being asked if they think they are hopeless. That said, Matt Hancock will have to answer for his failings throughout this pandemic and justify his decisions.
 
Unsurprisingly Downing Street refused to engage with queries on the screenshots but the real question that arises for Boris Johnson is why he left someone he thought was hopeless at the helm of a ship in very stormy waters. Were the other options worse? On that, the public deserves answers.  
 
Ronson said writing his book took him on a journey from “keen shamer” to someone “unsettled by the new zeal to judge and condemn”.
 
This isn’t the last we’ll hear of Dominic Cummings, for the man has stories to share and subscriptions to sell, but a public inquiry would undoubtedly be the best forum for this to continue.