Boris is in trouble. What would Maggie Thatcher have done?

If Maggie Thatcher had had a Dominic Cummings I reckon she would have fought tooth and nail to keep him and would have told all Tory MPs who were pontificating aboout his coronavirus rule-breaking drive to Durham, 260 miles from London, to stop being disloyal and basically shut up. In this interminable Dominic Cummings saga which will just not go away, you would expect the political Opposition to cause an outcry because it has given them a wonderful chance to knock Boris and his whole government and accuse them all of hyprocrisy. But the growing list of Tory MPs who are also in outcry mode is like kicking your own boss in the nether parts. Most of these MPs probably wouldn't be MPs at all if it wasn't for Boris winning an 80-seat majority in the last election. So I think Boris would be in his right to tell them all to pipe down. But all he did when he was confronted by many of them today in a video meeting was to ask them quite nicely to move on so that he could continue to run the country through its worst health crisis since 1918. Maggie "the lady's not for turning" Thatcher would have been much more headmistressy and by the time she had dealt with the disloyal MPS they would have felt they had all been delivered a very painful kick in the whatsists. The trouble is Dominic Cummings is not noted for being a jolly good sort of chap, the type you can have a quiet drink with in the gentleman's club. He's a bruiser, a shouter, a scary guy who never holds back when he thinks he is confronted by an idiot. And, by the sound of it, he thinks most people who turn up at Downing Street for whatever reason are idiots. So for any of these Tory MPs now calling for Cummings to be sacked, this is revenge time, a great chance to get back at the man who was nasty to them the last time they tried to see the prime minister. Sweet revenge is an opportunity not to be missed. But if Boris is not going to be permanently weakened by this whole sorry mess, he needs to strike back and remind the members of his party that he is the boss and he has made his decision to keep his chief adviser and it's time they showed their support and stopped wallowing in self-righteousness about the Cummings family taking action to protect their four-year-old son. Maggie would have seen them off by now.