THIS week, like most MPs, I have been inundated with emails from constituents complaining about the behaviour of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson’s failure to sack him. Ian Blackford convened a meeting of opposition leaders on Tuesday night and they were right to identify that the main problem has been the undermining of trust and confidence in public health advice. However, serious questions also arise about this UK Government’s respect for the rule of law.

It’s a fundamental principle of the rule of law, that the law should apply equally to all. In England, this principle can be traced back to the Magna Carta, a 13th-century charter of rights that occupies much the same position of reverence in England as the Declaration of Arbroath does in Scotland.

Equality before the law is basically about fairness, and this explains why so many people are so angry. They feel that what has happened is not fair because the law has not been applied to Cummings in the same way as to the rest of us.

The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 and their counterparts in the other UK jurisdictions, introduced to give legal effect to the lockdown, severely restrict civil liberties.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, has described them as “the most significant and blanket interference with individual liberty in modern times”. Yet people have largely been prepared to obey them and stay at home because they thought these draconian regulations were necessary as a joint enterprise to protect the NHS and save lives. They thought this because their Government, backed up by “the science”, repeatedly told them that this was the case.

Regulation 6 says you cannot leave your home without a reasonable excuse. It contains a non-exhaustive lists of reasonable excuses that can be advanced for breaching the prohibition. The accompanying guidance makes it clear that anyone with Covid-19 symptoms should not leave their home for seven days from when the symptoms started and others in their home should not do so for 14 days. The law is legally binding, whereas the guidance is not.

It is now pretty clear that when he left his home, Cummings was not within any of the non-exhaustive list of reasonable excuses. There are major question marks over whether he had some other reasonable excuse.

Kirsty Brimelow QC, who has assisted people wrongfully convicted under the regulations, has pointed out that unlike all those people prosecuted to date in England, the Cummings household actually did have Covid-19 and the whole point of the regulations is to prevent the spread of infection. Jo Maugham QC tweeted that to say “I believe I behaved reasonably in all the circumstances” is not a defence to a criminal prosecution and it is not a justification for ignoring the guidance.

Yet over the past few days, we have been treated to orchestrated tweets from UK cabinet ministers urging us to accept Cummings’s exploits as reasonable. Nothing to see here. Move along plebs. This reached a nadir when the Attorney General Suella Braverman, England’s most senior law officer, weighed in to give her support. She is responsible for the appropriate enforcement of the criminal law and for the oversight of the prosecution system in England. As the Government’s chief legal adviser, she should refrain from doing anything which undermines the independence of her office.

READ MORE: Raging civil servant hits out Tories over defence of Dominic Cummings

THE Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in England hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory during the pandemic. A review of the first 200 cases prosecuted under both the regulations and the coronavirus act found that a significant number of prosecutions were wrongly charged.

The policing of regulations in England was zealous in the initial stages, employing drones and roadblocks.

Some 16,184 Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) were issued by police in England between March 27 and May 11. Of this total, 62% of FPNs were for breaches of Regulation 6.

It would be interesting to know whether any of the people issued with these notices tried to employ the same sort of excuses as Cummings.

However, we will never know. Why? Because there is no right of appeal or review against the FPNs, and most people will probably be unwilling to risk a criminal conviction by refusing to accept an FPN.

How many of us think that an ordinary member of the public would have been met with a sympathetic response if they had been stopped by the police during the 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle and tendered the explanation which Cummings expects us to accept?

Durham police are now investigating matters. They have interviewed the Barnard Castle eyewitness and are apparently accessing software to track the movements of Cummings’s vehicle.

This brings us back to the Attorney General. She is supposed to discharge her functions and advise on the law without fear or favour, free from political considerations or influence.

Yet she has prejudged the matter for political reasons and potentially prejudiced the police investigation.

Boris Johnson doesn’t want to sack Cummings because he cannot manage without him. And why is Cummings so indispensable? Because in the cabinet Johnson has, with a few honourable exceptions, surrounded himself with numpties. Their antics are making a mockery of Britain at home and abroad. The Attorney General, like her boss, thinks she and her colleagues are above the law. They are seriously undermining democracy and the rule of law.

The British state continues to fail, the end of the Brexit transition period is looming without a future relationship agreement in place and Johnson’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been a shambles.

No wonder the stability and positive change that independence can bring is fast becoming attractive to the majority of Scots.