Tories have closed ranks against the PM’s aide. But privately, many know the party is living in fear of further bombshells

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After more than two and a half hours of extraordinary testimony from Dominic Cummings to a Commons committee last Wednesday morning, Greg Clark, the former cabinet minister who had chaired the explosive morning session, called a short lunch break. He and his co-chair – the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt – had, like the other 20 MPs who were due to ask questions, been left stunned, appalled and riveted in equal measure by what they had just heard.

Expectations had been set high in advance of the appearance of the highly combustible Cummings. The ex-adviser had been forced out of Downing Street last November in a power struggle that had involved the prime minister’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds. Downing Street was on edge because Cummings had been firing off ominous preparatory salvoes on Twitter for days. But after a morning in the witness chair he had already exceeded his billing, unleashing accusations of such gravity that at times the MPs (and presumably much of the public watching on TV) found it all but impossible to keep up.