The legacy of Dominic Cummings: has anything really changed?

For someone who so despised the Westminster clique of which he was a conspicuous part, it’s always rather comical to see the different reactions to Dominic Cummings from around that same bubble. Not to mention the voracious appetite for his face in the headlines. For those few in the Tory party whom he didn’t insult as being “thick as mince” and “vain as Narcissus”, he was the intellectual genius behind every aspect of the Brexit vote and the 2019 landslide. Every blunder during his time in No 10 was always brushed aside: it was all a part of some dark, secret masterplan, the contents or motives of which were not visible to the “gloomsters” on the Left, who denounced his influence at every turn.

Indeed, for many Remainers, in particular, he remains the ultimate devil in human form — the scapegoat for all the woes of Brexit and the malevolent force who threatened to tear up the cosy establishment of which they had become rather too enamoured. When he finally came into full public view last year, it was little surprise that emotions ran so very high.

Both impressions are, it does bear saying, fanciful if not preposterous. Cummings is not the modernising political colossus his acolytes saw him to be, nor the Miltonian Satan of his enemies, single-handedly responsible for the moral degradation of society through his deceitful methods. Alluring as these mantles are at first sight, his time in power was brief, chaotic, and mostly unmemorable. Unlike the fictional minister Hugh Abbot, he won’t end up being “a minor footnote in British political history”, but he certainly isn’t deserving of a full chapter, let alone volume.

Long before he entered Boris Johnson’s administration almost two years ago, Cummings had undeniably grand plans for reform. He wanted to revolutionise Whitehall from the apparently stale, bureaucratic machine it had become, to be a new efficient engine which could carry out the wishes of its masters in double quick time — and to follow his own intellectual agenda. His ire — a large, persistent beast — was directed against the whole political spectrum, from the Tory MPs who ‘do not care about these poor people’ to the ‘mortal enemy’ of the BBC and the supposed liberal elite who ‘f****d it up even more’ in their failure to address the concerns of “red wall” voters in 2019. His scattergun references and eclectic blend of history and philosophy were meant to hail a great awakening in the intellectual character of the Whitehall mandarins.

Yet there is little to show for it. I don’t think many could really claim that today’s Cabinet is any more able, competent, or brainy than it has been for the last decade of Tory rule, and it doesn’t take long to find evidence to suggest that in fact the opposite holds true. The dream having a revitalised system and more centralised power swiftly translated into a Cabinet of sycophants and a civil service depleted of some of its most respected figures.

Having Gavin Williamson in charge of education is like making Morrissey the chair of the Booker Prize; the man is utterly unconscious of how to act and will, before too long, bring his office into a new form of disrepute, while experimenting with all the ministerial buttons under his control with the insurance that one of them might work once all the other options have been tried out. Robert Jenrick strikes me as a stale Tory MP if ever I met one; Michael Gove, Cummings’ former boss, is perhaps the only senior member who seems to embody his aspirations for the people in high office.

The central flaw in Cummings’ plan was that he wanted the brightest and most well-read to join his government, and that meant they should be independent-minded. But independent-minded people are not inclined to follow orders. So Johnson put in those who would.

Then there’s the efficacy of government. Now, some commentators seem to write their pieces on the inadequacy and inefficiency of today’s Government by just pressing F5 and filling in the details. The myriad flounderings, retractions and strategic failures of the last year do not look like the actions of a government under the control of effective leadership, whether from Johnson himself or the building itself from which all the power stemmed until a few months ago. Every turn in the pandemic seemed to surprise ministers as though they were having an ice bucket thrown over them; despite many warnings and clear signals, they were always one step behind and proceeded to spew out government resources in a manner which made the prophesied Cummings machine look as though it had never been dreamt up.

Then there was the great scandal of Dom’s drive up to County Durham and later to Castle Barnard. A country bored by the lockdown back in May faced a hot weekend with, it seemed, nothing better to do than scream outrage at a Downing Street adviser. Cummings should have resigned, if keeping up the credibility of the Government’s lockdown policies was his intention. Yet the barrage of press attention, and in some places barely concealed attacks, was not the media’s finest hour. Doorstepped for weeks, he was forced out of the shadows to make an ignominious statement in the Rose Garden to the assembled pack of journalists, each queuing up to express the most outrage. Cummings’s notional crimes (for which he was never prosecuted) and his unwillingness to pander to the vengeful public mood cost him his authority. For the first time, his disciples admitted defeat. But it was in no way his first miscalculation.

There were palpable sighs of relief at Cummings’s resignation late last year. Having ordered complete control of his team in No 10 and the unflinching loyalty of anyone who held a speck of power in Whitehall, his reign of terror was brief, and now we can only guess at what would have happened had it gone on for much longer. Certainly, though, things look much calmer in government than they did. Rishi Sunak is unlikely to follow his predecessor Sajid Javid in resigning because of Cummings’ insistence on controlling every inch of power, and the vaccination programme, against the legacies of mass testing, exams, and school meals, offers a kind of hope that the country can be salvaged from its self-inflicted torpor. National vaccination is based on the efficiency of the central NHS, a system Cummings naturally abhorred . Many now will hope to get back to a time when PPE was just the academic course where future cabinet ministers learnt to try and run the country, in a way which Dominic Cummings despised, but in the end did little to change.

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