Boris Johnson’s ‘brilliant maniac’
The British prime minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings is a divisive figure whose defiant nature may yet prove to be his downfall, writes Amy Jones.
On the night Britain finally left the European Union, Boris Johnson knew whom to thank.
As the clinking of champagne flutes rang out across the Downing St State Room, the prime minister placed his arm around the shoulder of the slightlybuilt, stooped, domeheaded man who stood beside him and hailed him ‘‘a genius’’. The man was Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s closest aide.
After almost three years of impasse following the EU referendum, the UK was finally leaving Brussels behind. Cummings – memorably described as a ‘‘career psychopath’’ by former Conservative prime minister David Cameron – had not only been instrumental in delivering Brexit in the first place through his stewardship of the Vote Leave campaign but had then rescued the project with his clarion call of ‘‘Get Brexit Done’’. Although in appearance, Cummings, 48, looks as if he has just been dragged through a hedge backwards, the reality is he has emerged as the sharpest, most astute political operator, perhaps in a generation, and certainly since Tony Blair and Gordon Brown invented New Labour. It’s no wonder that Johnson openly calls him a genius, although many of even Cummings’ most ardent admirers don’t stop there, adding ‘‘evil’’ to the epithet. One admirer described him as a ‘‘brilliant maniac’’.
Billed as the anti-Establishment figure (despite attending private school and Oxford), Cummings will argue his success has come on his own terms and without the usual deep network of political insiders and alliances.
His biggest supporter is Johnson himself, which explains why he has been so keen to cling on to him during a weekend of unrelenting flak over his decision to breach lockdown and travel the length of England with his wife and child.
Cummings has made a career of not caring about the court of opinion inside the ‘‘Westminster bubble’’ but instead gauging what really matters out in the rest of the country, especially outside London.
The ‘‘Red Wall’’ of formerly solid Labour seats that fell to Johnson during the December election, handing him a stonking majority, was targeted by Cummings, who understood the feeling of neglect and betrayal across a swath of England. It is ironic, to say the least, that he has been caught out staying in privileged conditions in a converted barn on his parents’ property when the rest of the nation abided by a stricter lockdown.
A former colleague said: ‘‘Dom’s real strength may well be his downfall. One thing that is brilliant about him is that he truly doesn’t care what people think about him.
‘‘It gives him a clarity of thinking, but I think it’s fair to say it is coupled somewhat with a lack of empathy. That is a problem now, reacting to this story with arrogance has done him no favours.’’
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rue to form, Cummings had all the disdain for the baying Fleet Street mob at his front door on Saturday of a lion surrounded by snapping jackals.
He told one inquisitor when asked whether driving his family 420 kilometres from London to Durham was a good look: ‘‘Who cares about good looks? It’s a question of doing the right thing. It’s not about what you guys think.’’
After the Brexit night No 10 party on January 31, Johnson unleashed Cummings on a daring project to shake up the very nature of the way Britain is governed, and reform the public service.
It was a revolution against a cadre Cummings is convinced are too cosy, well-remunerated and change-resistant, for which he had long prepared.
During his time working with the then education secretary Michael Gove he had referred to what he considered the educational establishment as the ‘‘the Blob’’. He considered himself at war with some officials, writing on his blog that one told him: ‘‘You’re a mutant virus, [and] I’m the immune system.’’
His trenchant thinking – much of it done out loud – has brought him a raft of enemies on the Left and Right, so much so that even Tory MPs have called him a ‘‘political anarchist’’, an ‘‘aggressive bully’’ and ‘‘an unelected foul-mouthed oaf’’.
He doesn’t care. He has taken the brickbats as a compliment.
A child of the northeast, Dominic Mckenzie Cummings was born in Durham in 1971 to Robert, an oil rig project manager, and Morag, a teacher and behavioural specialist.
He went to fee-paying Durham School before gaining a first in ancient and modern history from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1994, where one of his former professors described him as ‘‘something like a Robespierre – someone determined to bring down things that don’t work’’.
Cummings might rail against the elite, but his father-in-law Sir Edward Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield is a baronet and lives in the sprawling Chillingham Castle, in Northumberland.
After university, Cummings moved to post-Soviet Russia, where he worked for a group attempting to set up an airline connecting Samara in the south of the country to Vienna. Back in the UK, he honed his campaigning skills working on Business for Sterling, a group fighting against the UK joining the euro from 1999 to 2002.
That led to a job as director of strategy for then-Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, but Cummings left after eight months in frustration at the slow pace of modernisation.
He went on to write in an article for The Daily Telegraph that Duncan Smith was ‘‘incompetent, would be a worse prime minister than Tony Blair, and must be replaced’’.
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fter founding a think tank, he retreated to a ‘‘bunker’’ at his father’s farm near Durham, reading science and history and ‘‘trying to understand the world’’.
He returned to Westminster to work for Gove from 2007 to 2014. As the then education secretary’s chief of staff, he wrote an essay about transforming Britain into a ‘‘meritocratic technopolis’’.
He quickly ruffled feathers in Whitehall. Critics accused him of creating an ‘‘us-and-them aggressive, intimidating culture’’ while attempting to streamline the department.
Scandal hit when a leaked email from Cummings demonstrated a keenness to keep discussions with Gove and others to private email accounts only. The email told staffers that he would ‘‘only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who I know who they are’’.
After a somewhat bumpy three years by Gove’s side, he eventually left his role in government.
In 2015, he became campaign director and leading strategist of Vote Leave, and is credited with the ubiquitous ‘‘Take Back Control’’ slogan and the campaign’s eventual victory.
On the evening of the referendum result, Cummings was pictured in shaky iPhone footage standing on a table as he paid tribute to his team before punching a hole in the ceiling in the campaign’s HQ.
During Brexit he also forged a close allegiance with Johnson, who parachuted him into No 10 when he became prime minister in June 2019.
His tenure at No 10 has not been without its controversies. Cummings was widely believed to be behind the Government’s high-stakes gamble to prorogue Parliament in August last year in an attempt to help smooth the course for Brexit.
The move alienated vast swaths of the backbenches, with 21 Tory MPs losing the whip for failing to fall in line. The Supreme Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful a month later, and MPs were recalled.
Influential backbencher Steve Baker, a key member of Conservative MPs’ 1922 Committee, said Cummings was prone to creating ‘‘an awful lot of collateral damage’’. It is Cummings’ anarchic, rulebreaking streak that could now be his undoing.
Johnson riskily faced the TV cameras on Sunday and threw a lifebuoy to his loyal adviser.
Yet his aide’s blind spot – his lack of fostering political allegiances – means Tory backbenchers are openly calling for his head, while Cabinet members are sharpening their knives should more damning details over his trip emerge.
Johnson will not want to lose him, and will certainly not wish to sack him. The Establishment will hate the prospect of Cummings surviving this crisis – a situation, of course, which Cummings will relish. –