Should you follow your instinct or follow the rules and guidance set in place by the government? That is the assessment we were invited to make by the PM at the daily press conference on Sunday in the case of Dominic Cummings and his trip to Durham with his family.

Our lockdown has been comparatively relaxed compared to those imposed in France, Spain and Italy. We have been able to exercise once a day and we do not need papers to leave our houses. By contrast, the slogans have been highly aggressive: stay home and save lives; or to put it another way, leave home and risk lives.

We have been invited, again and again, to follow the rules and the guidance and to ignore conclusions derived from common sense, both before the legal lockdown was instituted and throughout its most intense period. For some of us, thankfully, those dilemmas have presented in trivial ways; for others, those dilemmas have been deeply, deeply painful.

Common sense has a great place in the history of ideas. It is the guiding spirit of the Enlightenment and the animating force of the most significant liberal ideals. The maxim We hold these truths to be self-evident cannot make any sense to men who do not share in reason. But we were asked by the UK government to put our common sense aside for several months. Indeed, that it was in our best interests to do so.

We were invited to take part in a national effort, to protect the NHS and save lives. We were asked to direct all our behaviours in light of that effort our contact with family, friends and loved ones, our exercise habits, even the number of times we shop and what we buy in the supermarket.

This was a project that the vast majority of the British public participated in, however grudgingly. If a fundamental question of politics is who has the right to tell me what to do? in normal times; then in a national crisis, this question has a far more potent and urgent set of associations: Who do I trust with my freedoms? Who do I trust to take care of my security?.

And while the public may have held with the government on these questions in the first phase of this crisis, the Cummings argument sets the scene for the next act mass unemployment on a scale that many have not seen in their working lifetimes, a destitute hospitality sector and the potential for a deflationary death spiral.

It is vital for the survival of his administration that Boris Johnson comes up with a far more assured response to this central question: Who has the right to tell me what to do? He may find that in future he has far fewer voters prepared to give him a fair hearing.

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Boris is taking the public for fools - Reaction - Reaction