Gerard O’Regan: Having PM and his sidekick on the back foot will be helpful as Brexit battles loom

‘WE’RE looking for weirdos and misfits,’’ Dominic Cummings famously exclaimed. He was seeking out top talent for the Downing Street bunker. But he was less than keen on traditional Oxbridge types anxious to land a high-level civil service job.

They were dismissed as all too often over-qualified in ‘essay writing’. It was claimed most of them are programmed to behave between strictly defined lines. Cummings wants people who can ‘think outside the box’.

The man determined to reinvent British politics has a liking for mavericks. And so one chap who made it to the new Downing Street thinktank was a certain Andrew Sabisky. He hailed himself ‘a super forecaster’.

A reputation for being able to see around corners is a talent much prized by the powerful in politics.

There is nothing like having an ‘expert’ who says they can stay ahead of the posse. Somebody who can smell trouble in the wind – and when it arrives deal with it – is a sought-after asset. However, it soon became clear some of Sabisky’s ideas were pushing things a bit far. Even the hardest hard chaws near to Boris Johnson got nervous. It emerged the new guru had once proposed giving certain children a drug to improve their intelligence.

When it was pointed out there were serious health risks involved, he was nonplussed. Sabisky insisted the overall benefits “are probably worth a dead kid once a year”.

He eventually had to resign when some of his other views became public. He favoured long-term permanent contraception to help prevent a “permanent underclass”. He also suggested black people are less intelligent than their white counterparts.

And he dismissed women’s sport as comparable to the Paralympics.

But the fact the Johnson government flirted with such a character is a sign of how the Cummings era is chasing the unorthodox, and sometimes unthinkable. No wonder the prime minister’s senior fixer gave a V sign to Covid-19 travel restrictions. Why should he go along with the accepted wisdom on this pandemic?

The Cummings approach has so far worked a treat for Johnson. It got him elected Tory party leader, paving his pathway to the top job. And it ‘got Brexit done’. But both men are realising power is not without its limits. They have been forced to fight a rearguard action all week, although it was never on the cards that the PM would ditch his political soulmate.

Being in the same tight corner may have even bound them closer together for future forays.

Cummings would have seen the Covid restrictions as something simply not for him. Was this not the hated ‘nanny state’ at its most intrusive? No wonder, when he and his wife developed Covid-19 symptoms, he dismissed instructions to stay at home, lest he infect other people.

He suited himself and drove hundreds of miles to a country cottage. He later travelled to a local beauty spot on his wife’s birthday. His actions were in conflict with everything the general populace had been told.

Despite avoiding an all-out crisis, Johnson has emerged wounded by raging passions roused during a time of national unease. His response, and that of senior Tories, to the Cummings’s double standard was based on evasion, double speak and a touch of the smart alec.

For Cummings, a man who likes to strut his sense of superiority and certainty, the experience has been

especially humiliating. Craven explanations, and convoluted justification, of how a roundabout car journey was necessary to test his eyesight made him a figure of ridicule.

The prime minister and his sidekick are slowly realising getting your own way is sometimes impossible. The coronavirus has put a halt to their gallop at least for now. Johnson was personally ensnared in its clutches, spending time seriously ill in hospital. And despite a thick skin, the intensity of personal abuse and criticism levelled at Cummings must have been traumatic.

From an Irish perspective, having this duo on the back foot, even temporarily, has its compensations. Brexit battles loom once more. They will revert to some of their old ways – but as of now they are a chastened pair. Given their propensity to play fast and loose with their opponents, that’s no bad thing at all.

The Cummings approach has so far worked a treat. But both are realising power is not without its limits