My job application for Number 10

I have applied to be one of Dominic Cummings’ weirdos and misfits. I qualify: I really do wind people up. And I know he likes maths, so I’ve submitted my CV in the form of a quantum wave function, the amplitude of which tracks my career highlights from high to low. Hopefully that gets his attention. Obviously, as in all CVs, there remain some inaccuracies.

It’s not surprising that Mr Cummings has developed a fondness for weirdos — he worked closely with Michael Gove — and it’s a laudable aim (if it is his aim) to dismantle the reactionary structures of the UK civil service. Mr Cummings (if you check his blog) also likes his science, and he knows that the best way to make progress against a settled consensus is to inject a bit of chaos. Hence his dress sense, an ostentatious refutation of the “way things have to be done”.

Which brings us to the reshuffle. Politically astute or dog’s breakfast?

I’m going to make two assumptions in what follows: that Cummings was a shaper of it, and that the most important thing about the next nine months is the negotiation with the EU.

The two prominent casualties last week were Julian Smith, the (now former) Northern Ireland Secretary, and Sajid Javid. It’s said that Smith was dismissed because he had crossed Johnson in the past, and that this was a Sopranos-style opportunity for Johnson to be vindictive. I suspect that this analysis is Westminster-bubble-soap-opera-simplistic.

Smith, we are told, had done well in reinvigorating the Northern Ireland Assembly (aka the Paisley-Blair-McGuinness vanity project). But Smith did this by offering to the IRA Army Council (via Sinn Fein) assurances that the UK government would investigate “atrocities” committed by the British Army during the Troubles. Johnson was blindsided. Smith therefore deserved to go, and if it was ruthless to sack him then ruthlessness was what was required.

And now to the case of Mr Javid, and the curse of the special adviser culture, the form of government that seems to be the comfort blanket of the people we thought we’d elected to make the tough calls. Javid, we are told, could not countenance losing his coterie, preferring instead to resign. A crisis of confidence ensued which lasted, outside SW1, for nearly half an hour. The markets, incidentally, were not troubled. Was this a power grab? I hope so. There are subtle arguments which advocate that the relationship between Number 10 and Number 11 is, at its best, one of constructive tension. But I’m old enough to remember Phillip Hammond.

Was Javid constructively dismissed or did he honourably resign? Part of a Cummings master plan, or an accidental consequence of the contingencies that are generated when you are sacking people of considerable self-regard?

I don’t know. Neither do you. It’s possible that neither Cummings nor Johnson do, either. What’s good about that is that the EU doesn’t know the extent to which the chaos of the reshuffle is an affectation. I want the EU nomenklatura to believe that the PM is vindictive; I want them to believe he is impulsive; I want them to believe that he takes things personally and has a low forgiveness threshold. I want them to believe that he is calculating but capable of miscalculation.

At a time of maximum UK vulnerability (and we are, vulnerable due to the elephant traps contained in the Withdrawal Agreement), I don’t want a PM or his advisers to be readable. Or decent. Or nice. I want a Prime Minister who has shown he is capable of at least as much duplicity as his negotiating opponents. The genius of the reshuffle is that we don’t know whether it was mistake or conspiracy. Or a bit of both.

In the end we can always get rid of Boris Johnson. Not so Michel Barnier.

If the reshuffle was incompetently managed (and if he was the architect) then Cummings is allowed a few mistakes; if conspiracy, then maybe he really is a genius. That said, he could perhaps learn that to wind up everybody around him is at best a necessary, rather than sufficient, condition of effective change.

My application is in the post. Cummings cannot be a boring boss. Of that much I am certain.