Dominic Cummings: a grilling and a reckoning

What does Dominic Cummings believe in? We all know by now what he hates: the Prime Minister, the Whitehall system, most of the elected politicians he has come across, particularly on his own side. Everything which constitutes “the Establishment” in resisting his radicalism, whether they be in the media, politics or bureaucracy, comes under his withering gaze. Yet at the end of his first full-length television interview (with Laura Kuenssberg) last night, we were given a glimpse into the world view which backs up his riotous career, a set of values which might help us explain the last half decade of British national life in which he has unmistakably played a principal part. 

The aim, Cummings claimed, was to create “different kinds of networked power” that would replace the various “morons” and “duffers” who dominated the two-party system in this country and to “disrupt that power” of the Establishment in all its forms. And that is essentially what Cummings views himself as: a lone soldier, disrupting the troops of armies which make up the political hierarchy, all dressed up in their smart uniforms, while he goes around, dishevelled as always, trying to engineer the next pincer movement to break them apart. 

At least this latest interview certainly confirmed his intentions in a new war of attrition with the Prime Minister and his tiring government. Many of his claims were not new — the burst of Cummings’ vitriol is becoming something of a regular fixture in our political life. Unlike before, however, Matt Hancock featured only lightly, and it was instead Boris Johnson firmly thrown into the dock to face the numerous charges: of putting the views of a newspaper he used to work for in front of the nation’s interest, of dismissing the lethal threat of Covid to the elderly as irrelevant and measures to lessen it as “politically disastrous” (Cummings’ words), and of generally resting the gravest threats to the nation merely as humorous or transient problems which could only be useful in shoring up his own hold on power.

As I and many others have said before, such accusations from such a formerly senior figure would often be fatal wounds to a political leader’s armoury. Not so Boris Johnson, whose shield seems able to repel each new charge with increasing ease, a man for whom every new condemnation as a woeful braggart and bumptious charlatan makes little difference, given that most of his voters always knew them to be the case. Some of them even voted him in just because of them.

What was most intriguing about this interview were the revelations of just how long Cummings has seen Johnson to be simply unfit for the job on which he has such an apparently unassailable hold. We must remember the history: Cummings was Michael Gove’s deeply trusted special adviser at the Department of Education, when he clashed so ferociously with David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It was he who famously led the Vote Leave campaign which employed Gove and Johnson as its two main public figureheads, and it was he again, we heard confirmed last night, who negotiated between the two a political settlement in which his former boss would be Chancellor under Johnson’s premiership. It was he who, we can readily assume, was influential in making Gove’s mind up that, in fact, Johnson was not fit to lead the country, after the referendum victory he had been so crucial in winning in 2016. And on that, Cummings’ mind, if not Gove’s, has not changed since. 

And that is perhaps the most perplexing point in the whole Cummings saga, which has enveloped the running of this country to such an extraordinary extent: that the man who supposedly orchestrated the victory of Brexit and then its eventual implementation, who backed Boris Johnson as a campaigner and then as a leader, was, throughout all this, convinced that the man on whom he had placed his political bets and who was his best chance of carrying out his strategy, was not actually up to the ultimate responsibility with which he eventually found himself. Johnson was a necessary means to the political ends. He was, for Cummings at least, a “puppet”, “stooge”, “minion” — whatever you may want to call it. What the ex-adviser is trying to reconcile himself to is the fact that that same man is now in full and long-term command of all the powers he tried to reform, and that he, the instigator, is just as firmly exiled from them. 

What anyone who watches Cummings explaining himself will find is that, perhaps to their surprise and contrary to caricature, he is a human. He possesses all the same kinds of anger and self-deprecation expected from most operatives trying to set out the justice in his actions. He grinned when the various deceptions and deceits of the Vote Leave campaign were read out to him, a smile which seemed to show he really knew where the truth lay. When pressed, he said most people in government thought he was “mainly a nightmare”, an assessment as supported by testimony as it is unsurprising. He acknowledged that he had not been straight with the public, when the awful storm over his sojourns to County Durham launched his name into national infamy. He cowed away from the suggestion that he was the secretive figure who had moved all of the levers of political power, and admitted to the reality that his plan to create a wholly new system of governance had palpably failed: it seems that Carrie Johnson holds much more influence over the fate of the nation than the ideals of Clausewitz or Dostoevsky. 

Dominic Cummings has also failed most evidently in the hallowed courts of public opinion, his image tarnished by the brash and accusatory style he brought to the already acidic discourse of Westminster politics. He shows little sign of ever trying to neutralise it, and maybe his role as scourge of Johnson and all he likes to stand for will one day endear him to the forgiving masses as a kind of peculiar national treasure. Until then, he will keep on his role as that solitudinous soldier, raging against the battalions of the Establishment that go on leading its troops to defeat. 

To go back to one of Cummings’ Russian heroes, a scene of Tolstoy’s might seem apt. In War and Peace, when Andrei Bolkonsky is injured on the field of Austerlitz, he sees the figure of his hero Napoleon standing above him. But the victorious leader seems to him then “a small insignificant creature” compared to the passing of the “lofty infinite sky” above. Cummings is equally unimpressed by the sight of the great and powerful, and for him a thirst for the eternal revolution is the constant he sticks by, as surely as the passing of the clouds. 

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