What, exactly, is going on with Dominic Cummings?

I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Being There in which Peter Sellers plays Chauncey Gardner, a simpleton who is mistaken for a genius, and who becomes a special adviser to the most powerful politician in the land? No? I’m worried that Boris Johnson hasn’t seen it either. It’s fair to say that if Dominic Cummings is really a strategic maestro then this is not the impression we are getting at this point in Being Brexit.

Rather than contest the passage of the Benn Bill from Commons self-indulgence into actual law, Cummings-Johnson have conceded the bill and are proposing to test it now that it actually is law. If it’s fine to test it once it is law then it was similarly fine to test its constitutional viability before it gained Royal Assent. And there are good reasons for thinking that Johnson could have scuppered it by withholding Queens Assent at its Third Reading. The legislation is one part of a strategy on the part of the legislature to trespass against the proper responsibilities of the Crown. The PM had a duty to push back.

Why didn’t he? Is he in the grip of this new guru who seems not to understand that you can be creative within the rules and that this is sometimes as effective as creatively aggressing against the rules?

Cummings seems to have spotted that if it’s persuasive (though false) to claim that it would be economically catastrophic to crash out of the EU without a deal then it might be equally persuasive (if equally contentious) to claim that it would be politically catastrophic to crash out of the referendum result without a general election. On this reading, the Benn Bill was conceded to make Corbyn look ridiculous for not, now, agreeing to an election in October.

But that work has already been done. It’s part of the point of being Jeremy Corbyn that you spend your working day looking ridiculous. He was always willing to look like he’d renege on any assumed “deal” and then carry on anyway in his St Augustine version of doing the right thing: “Lord, I will call an election, but not yet”.

We do of course need an election. Our Parliament is a crucible of ever-inflammatory insanity, the primary accelerant of which is the entertainingly ludicrous Speaker. Bercow likes to think he sounds like a character from a Jane Austen novel when in fact he sounds like a guy who swallowed the A-Level study guide. These are people who are not to be trusted with the decisions they are now charged to make. They do not, if we put it kindly, see themselves quite as we see them.

But Johnson is wrong here if he has used the sacrifice of prerogative powers to embarrass the opposition into agreeing an election. The forces ranged against him, this hideous Remain insurgency, are beyond embarrassment. The people he is trying to shame are shameless. These are people who actually have a straight face when they suggest that it would be undemocratic to hold an election.

This is my concern. Johnson had a perfectly good hand of constitutional poker when he threw in the cards and allowed the smooth passage of the Benn Bill. What’s more, he was being backed by people to whom he owed an obligation to not throw in the hand. Why didn’t he play it out?

 Maybe this: that he is impressed – as we all are – with the intellectual credentials of Dominic Cummings and in his willingness to offend people who need to be offended. Cummings is a catalyst of chaos, appropriately brought to intimidate the lazy consensus in any situation, but -possibly- not the sort of person you want to console your 6-year-old immediately prior to a tooth extraction.

If this is all part of the well-intentioned counsel of Mr Cummings then the PM might want to take a look at the former’s website in which he discusses, with approval, the works of the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel’s.

Gödel’s argued that it was logically impossible to reduce arithmetic to logic. The reduction would always leave stuff out. It was Gödel’s way of saying this: that if you attempt to formalise anything then you will go wrong.

Come to think of it, maybe Mr Cummings could take that lesson too?