LONDON, U.K. -- Let’s call it the lockdown blues, and it’s spreading as fast as the pandemic that caused it.

People want out. They want it to be over. And they’re angry.

Instead of clapping in support of NHS workers, as we have been doing every Thursday night for weeks, there is a new movement taking shape—to stand at our windows and shout boos at Boris Johnson.

“Boos for Boris.”

What a long way down for a prime minister who reached the pinnacle of his popularity—and sympathy—after becoming infected and almost dying of COVID-19.

I will repeat the phrase his father used at the time, because it seemed so inappropriately flippant: “Boris almost took one for the team.”

A good many on his team are now in a state of deep dismay, and bitterly so.

This is a story about living under lockdown for nine excruciating weeks, unable to visit aging parents, unable to bury loved ones, unable to hug or even touch friends.

And it worked. People followed the rules because they believed in the rules. Believed staying at home would save lives, just as Boris said it would.

Ask the British today what they think, and you will hear a very different story, a livid and furious story. It goes like this: why should we follow the rules when you don’t.

The you in question is Dominic Cummings, sometimes referred to as Downing Street’s Rasputin. He is Boris Johnson’s senior adviser, the most powerful man in Britain after the prime minister—unelected, intimidating, and widely loathed.

He once invited “weirdos and misfits” to apply for government jobs.

With millions of people locked down at home, Cummings drove five hours north to his parents’ farm in Country Durham. His wife had been ill. He was worried about childcare for their son, in case he came down with COVID-19, like his boss. Which he did.

Just a concerned dad, looking after his family.

The British are simply not buying it. A man who helped write the lockdown guidelines, broke the guidelines. He did not offer regrets. He did not admit any wrongdoing. And he has not been fired.

A political fury has been unleashed.

Try this quote from a former chief of staff to Tony Blair: “Sixty-five million of us have been locked up for weeks, and this guy has the cheek to break the rules…and then tell us he acted reasonably.”

It adds up to a potential disaster for Boris Johnson, who likes to be liked, and the polls show he isn’t right now—down 20 points in just a few days.

He’s even lost the support of the Daily Mail, which ran a dozen blistering pages on Cummings’ pandemic road show, under the headline, “No Apology, No Regrets.”

In the same scathing tone, a Guardian columnist today summed up Johnson’s dilemma: “Man with no ideas is too terrified to sack his ideas man.”

Dominic Cummings may end up taking one for the team.