Johnson isn’t the most important Brexiter
His adviser Dominic Cummings is hell-bent on pushing through a no-deal Brexit and ignoring parliament. His plan for what comes after is even more radical
In the highly entertaining Channel 4 drama about the 2016 referendum campaign Brexit: The Uncivil War, Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, is sometimes found crouched in the narrow pantry where he retreats to think. It’s not hard to picture the real Dominic Cummings doing just that.
Cummings is no mere political curiosity. Though unelected and without a seat at the cabinet table, he is UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most important adviser. A master of the focus group and the targeted digital ad, he will play a critical role in any early election or second referendum on Brexit.
The Johnson-Cummings pairing could be largely a matter of short-term expedience. Johnson wants a proven hand to carry out his “do-or-die” October 31 Brexit pledge and win an election. But it could also be about something beyond Brexit. At the heart of the new government are two ambitious men possessed by a sense of history, some would say grandiosity, and an appetite for taking big gambles.
For Cummings, Brexit is a means to a greater end: a complete overhaul of the machinery of government. This might have been started long ago, but Margaret Thatcher, that icon of the British right, didn’t go far enough in Cummings’s view. She shied away from reforming the civil service, whose inefficiencies Cummings finds maddening. He wants to finish the job he started with Vote Leave by using insights from the world of computing, physics, warfare and sport. If he stays beyond Brexit, Cummings will have to prove his ideas aren’t some utopian vision.
But there’s a paradox: The political upheaval caused by Brexit may have opened the door to change, but the chaos of a nodeal Brexit could make the very reforms he seeks impossible to implement.
No ordinary Brexiter
Cummings cannot be confused with your garden variety no-deal Brexiter. He notes in one of his many, lengthy blog posts that he is “not a Tory libertarian, ‘populist,’ or anything else.” That explains his deep disdain for the “narcissist-delusional” group of hardcore Brexiters in the party. For them, leaving the EU is an ideological necessity and a mark of tribal loyalty. He isn’t one of that tribe, or any tribe. He even went so far, in a twitter exchange in 2017, as to say the referendum may have been a mistake.
Most political advisers operate in the shadows, but Cummings is the subject of an endless stream of profiles; in a country that worships eccentricity, he is a journalistic gift that keeps on giving. He also invites inspection. His wide-ranging, occasionally breathless writings provide a dizzying tour of the innovators, historical figures, athletes and scientists who have informed his thinking. His political philosophy incorporates insights from Prussian Otto von Bismarck, interface design wizard Bret Victor, physicist and computer scientist Michael Nielsen,
T.S. Eliot and many more.
To imagine a Cummings-led takeover of the British state, visualise a room resembling a Nasa launch control centre in which Bismarck is huddled with, say, a crack team of designers and coders on loan from Apple. Bismarck, the “blood and iron” chancellor who distrusted democracy, is important.
Known for his brash style, Cummings doesn’t hold back on those he deems lesser beings, once referring to David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus.” (Davis didn’t make it into Johnson’s cabinet.) As reports filter out of special advisers being fired without warning, one wonders whether he’ll inspire enough loyalty to carry through his grander plans.
For now, though, it’s Johnson’s confidence that gives Cummings’s ideas wings. If he helps deliver Brexit and win an election that will no doubt secure him a sainthood among Brexiters. He reportedly postponed a surgery to join the government until the end of October, so who knows how long he’ll stick around. Cummings himself might find a short stay wholly unsatisfactory though. That would make him more like a skilled coder who follows his boss’ brief, or even just a hired gun, than the design revolutionary lionised in his writings.