Person of the week
... was Dominic Cummings. A point about Mr. Cummings is that no one much seems to like him, and this applies to some members of the government and the Conservative Party as it does to the media, and to the media regardless of political sympathies. He therefore had it coming, so to speak. The story arguably was too much the product of a Westminster media bubble, but there was no denying that there was a great deal of public anger that owed nothing to this. Advisers aren't there to be the news. He had become the news, and however much Boris Johnson tried to play this news down, Cummings had affected the government's credibility.
Three cheers ...
For the gradual re-emergence of culture, with the Balearic Symphony Orchestra to the fore. The orchestra started a summer-long series of small-format concerts, the first of which was in Campanet on Friday. During the confinement, culture has played an important role in keeping up spirits, be this simply having been singers taking to balconies to serenade neighbourhoods or virtual activities, including concerts. These gestures, provided for free, have been a reminder of the centrality of culture, and the orchestra is an outstanding example of this. It is an institution of which Majorca is rightly very proud.
A big boo ...
For the Trump Twitter row. It was astonishing, truly astonishing. A US president who has governed by Twitter now found himself being subject to a fact-checking link by this very platform. The response was as swift as it was predictable (for Trump): an executive order aimed at removing some of the legal protections given to social media platforms. Then Twitter hid one of the president's tweets, saying that this violated its rules about glorifying violence. At the heart of this row is the unfortunately mistaken interpretation of freedom of speech. That freedom, greatly fought for by so many, does nevertheless come with its own set of rules.