Shortly after 6pm on Sunday night, Dominic Cummings left Downing Street with the beginnings of a smile on his face.
Along with the nation, the 48-year-old advisor had just listened to his boss, Boris Johnson, defend him as a man of integrity who had merely followed the “instincts of every father”.
Just a few short hours earlier, Mr Cummings had emerged from his own front door besieged by media who demanded to know why he had apparently breached lockdown rules not once, but three times.
It marked the start of an extraordinary day in which he faced calls to resign from Tory MPs and was accused of dragging the Government into a “Domnishambles”.
At one point the police turned up outside his north London home and knocked on the door in an apparent attempt to speak with him.
In fact, Mr Cummings was by that time four miles away in Downing Street, masterminding his own political survival.
Overnight, newspapers had accused Mr Cummings of repeatedly breaching lockdown rules, and issuing a misleading and contradictory account of his movements.
Witnesses claimed Mr Cummings had been spotted twice travelling 270 miles from London to his parents’ farm in County Durham with his sick wife and young son, as well as later taking a day trip to look at bluebells.
The news prompted calls on Sunday for Mr Cummings’ resignation from Labour MPs, Nicola Sturgeon and many of Mr Cummings’ political foes from the Brexit campaign, who perhaps scented blood.
Of deeper concern for Downing Street, however, was the level of anger among Tory MPs, many of whom complained that they – and the nation – appeared to have been misled.
Some MPs shared messages from their constituents on the Tory WhatsApp group, including one from a woman who asked if she could now return to babysitting her grandchildren, as Cummings’ parents had done. One Whitehall source branded the saga a “complete Domnishambles”.
“If it was any other adviser or even minister they would have gone by now, but Cummings seems to operate on another planet,” said one MP.
“MPs are contacting the whips and saying he has to go. I’m sure the chief whip will have fed that back to No 10.
“No one can understand why he hasn’t gone. He doesn’t like the Conservative Party and he doesn’t seem to like MPs very much, so why is he even in Government?”
Others were prepared to go public. Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister, was the first Tory MP to come out and to call for Mr Cummings to go.
Mr Cummings’ career had always ‘created an awful lot of collateral damage’, including the Brexit campaign, Mr Baker told Sky News, adding: “He is not always right and he certainly isn’t indispensable.”
While Mr Baker’s animosity towards Mr Cummings dates back to their Vote Leave battles, others who have no history with him were soon to follow, including former whip Craig Whitaker.
By lunchtime, nine Tory MPs had tweeted calls for him to go, but there was silence from Cabinet ministers following further revelations about Cummings’ movements.
On March 30, Downing Street confirmed Mr Cummings was suffering from coronavirus symptoms and was self-isolating “ at home”.
The following day, Durham police were “made aware of reports that an individual had travelled from London to Durham and was present at an address in the city”. The force said officers “made contact with the owners of that address who confirmed that the individual in question was present and was self-isolating in part of the house”.
Mr Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield later wrote in the Spectator magazine on April 25 of the family’s battle with coronavirus during that time, but made no mention of the trip to Durham.
“In a chaotic and unpredictable environment, there’s nothing more comforting than having total control over your own tiny world,” she wrote.
After news of the trip emerged on Friday, Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, claimed during the Downing Street briefing the next day that Mr Cummings had ‘stayed put’ for two weeks once he arrived at his parents’ property.
But this narrative appeared to unravel when a witness told the Sunday Mirror and Observer that he had sighted Mr Cummings at a town 30 miles away from his parents’ home.
Robert Lees, a retired chemistry teacher, said he saw the aide and his family walking in Barnard Castle, Teesdale, on April 12.
“I went home and told my wife, we thought he must be in London,” he said.
“I searched up the number plate later that day and my computer search history shows that.”
Another neighbour alleged to have seen Mr Cummings back in Durham on April 19, five days after he was first pictured back in Number 10, apparently admiring the “lovely” bluebells in woodland near his parents’ farm.
On Sunday morning, Mr Cummings left his house with his wife and son shortly after 11am, and was greeted on his doorstep by a pack of journalists. One asked: “Are you the Special One, Mr Cummings?”
He paused only to tell a photographer to mind her fingers in his car door, before travelling to Downing Street.
Shortly after his departure, the campaign group Led By Donkeys parked a van-mounted 11m2 screen outside his house, and played video messages from coronavirus patients, cut with the Prime Minister’s lockdown statement.
One neighbour alleged they had seen Mr Cummings returning with his family from Durham in “the middle of the night” on April 14.
“I woke up in the middle of the night between 3am-4am,” the neighbour told the Telegraph.
“I heard Dominic and his family getting out of a car. It could only have been them as I recognised his voice and accent, which I have heard regularly over the past year. I heard him getting out of a car with a small child conversing to get things out of the car like families do when returning from a trip.
“I immediately thought, that’s strange. Why would he be travelling in the middle of the night? He must be wanting to return home without people knowing he has been away.”
At around 3pm on Sunday, two police officers arrived at the house, and knocked on the door. Scotland Yard said in a statement that officers had received a complaint about a “large group of people” outside the address, but refused to disclose who had made it.
Mr Shapps had been chosen to bat for Mr Cummings during a round of morning television interviews.
Under repeated questioning, Mr Shapps declaimed the Government had “never told people where they have to specifically locate themselves”, appearing to contradict government guidance issued on March 22 ordering the public to stay in their “primary residence”.
The claims that Mr Cummings had returned to Durham after April 12 were untrue, he said. Asked directly if Mr Cummings would resign, Mr Shapps said: ‘No.’
But by lunchtime, support from the Cabinet had “largely drained away”. Many had been asked to tweet out messages of support on Saturday, before further revelations emerged later that evening.
One Cabinet source said: “There is definitely unhappiness about being asked to tweet support on Saturday when presumably No 10 knew there was more to come out.
“There is a feeling among some Cabinet ministers that they have been lied to.
“Dominic didn’t have a huge amount of support within Cabinet to begin with – he has turned people over, he has sacked people’s advisers, so it feels as though it’s just the Prime Minister and maybe Michael Gove who are still backing him.
“There is genuine anger in the Cabinet about the damage being done to the lockdown message by all of this. Just how much water is the PM willing to take on board to save Dom?”
Some senior ministers, however, were conspicuously absent from the Twitter tributes, including Priti Patel, the Home Secretary. Whitehall sources claimed Ms Patel was unhappy with Cummings’ behaviour, and concerned that it would make the job of police impossible because people might use it as an excuse to ignore the rules.
Other cabinet ministers who have fallen foul of Cummings in the past are understood to have phoned each other expressing hope that he would finally be forced to quit.
Despite the deepening row, Mr Cummings’ future was secured after discussions with the Prime Minister – at least for now.
At a hastily rearranged press conference, Mr Johnson said he could “not mark down” Mr Cummings for the way he acted.
“I have had extensive face-to-face conversations with Dominic Cummings and I have concluded that in travelling to find the right kind of childcare, at the moment when both he and his wife were about to be incapacitated by coronavirus – and when he had no alternative – I think he followed the instincts of every father and every parent.”