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.