Chatting to my brother yesterday, I heard an interesting theory: when the government decided on the 'lockdown' it based its forecasts on various assumptions about how closely people would follow the rules. And those assumptions were that a lot more people would break the rules, than actually did. This meant the economy closed down more than intended, and the budget for support, etc, was going to be exceeded. So some 'nudging' went on, to 'encourage' more people to break the rules. So, ambiguous and contradictory advice, guidelines that implied you could do more than the police were saying, and so-on.
I'm still sceptical, but it does fit the modus operandi. The argument then goes that when people still stayed home, the Cummings Stunt was deployed to stir things up a bit. I'm less convinced about this, because a fair amount of work went into obscuring the trail, and if it had been intended as a disruptor, ways would have been found to have it discovered rather sooner, I suspect. But the wider point is that nobody is surprised anymore by stories of this Machiavellian nature.
