An over-mighty No 10 is proving poorly suited to the coronavirus

Cummings’s centralising reforms have deprived ministers of much-needed flexibility in a time of crisis

When Boris Johnson ran for party leader, there was no talk about Dominic Cummings. Only after his campaign ended did he realise the problem: he had a Brexit deal to do, an election to fight and needed someone to run the machine for him, with a near-superhuman energy and focus. So he called up Mr Cummings – then abroad on holiday – and begged him to start immediately. It need not be for long, he said, just until Brexit.

They now operate as a partnership, which, for all the controversies, has brought extraordinary results. Last year’s Brexit deal, the 80-strong Tory majority: it’s easy to see why so few Tories turned on Mr Cummings after the fiasco of his trip to Durham. They might have been seething, but knew the attack on him was a well-aimed attempt to topple the Government.

They survived: just. But the drama focused minds. Since then, many have asked: how did it come to this? And can it be healthy for any government to rely so heavily on one adviser?

Mr Cummings never set out to acquire power. He’s unusually – some say freakishly – uninterested in status or money. Had he wanted either, he would have become a consultant after the Brexit campaign.

He has spent years writing about ways in which government can reform. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, he had a chance to put his ideas into action. He’s centralising power now to give it away later – or, at least, that’s the plan. But ministers are beginning to wonder if the second part of that plan will ever happen.

The Prime Minister has been unusually slow to build up close relationships with the men and women he picked for his Cabinet. Many of them feel that their advice is not valued, with everything eclipsed by the Dom factor. “The Kremlinology is getting tiring,” says one. “You need to find out what Dom’s mood is: if he favours this idea or that.” If word gets out that he’s against an idea, it is usually dropped. “I’m amazed at the extent that others just don’t debate or try to persuade,” says another minister.

A new triangle of power has been created: with No10, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office working far more closely together, all responding to orders from the top. Less discussion, more action.

But the Covid crisis has not been a great advert for all of this. Ministers feel things went so wrong, at least in part, because not enough of the lockdown response was debated and scrutinised in Cabinet. Dido Harding, a former FTSE 250 chief executive, was put in charge of Covid testing, but proved unable to save the NHS test-and-trace app.

Even before Covid, leaving the European Union was being described as the most complicated mission facing any modern British government. To this we can now add the sharpest economic collapse in centuries, a pandemic, then the net-zero decarbonisation plan – the most expensive in history – and the “levelling-up” agenda. Quite a list. Enough to overwhelm the most brilliant team of Downing Street experts.

A few months ago, Mr Cummings had hoped to build such a team – and have a squad of troubleshooters to help Government departments solve issues. Problems with reopening schools, Mr Williamson? Call the A-team: they’ll nip over from Downing Street and sort things out. Aircraft carrier running over budget, Mr Wallace? No10’s band of experts will get costs back under control. And where would Mr Cummings be in all of this new system? As he put it in January, “much less important – and within a year, largely redundant”. But six months on, he’s as important as any Cabinet member.

I should at this point declare a bias: I’m an admirer of Mr Cummings and know him to be the opposite of his caricature. In a Westminster rife with self-promoters, he stands out for his lack of interest in what others say about him. He is happy to absorb the poison darts that would otherwise be directed at his boss. He is mission-driven, and sees his mission as a short-term one: to get Brexit done, reform Whitehall and hopefully improve the quality of decision-making. Then go and do something else.

If he were to decide not to come back after the summer – and go back into the seclusion that he famously enjoys – where would Mr Johnson be? There are no reports of rifts between the two: on the contrary, the Prime Minister has been teasing him in No10 meetings with jokes about eye tests and Barnard Castle. But it is now one of the most frequently asked questions in Westminster: could Boris function without Dom? Can the PM trust other ministers? And might this centralisation of power have created the biggest vulnerability in Government?

When asked, Mr Cummings says that this analysis is all wrong (and a media invention). Anyone who thinks he wants to centralise power, he says, has not been paying attention to his extensive writings about reforming Government. That his plan is to slim down the centre (“a hard rain is coming”, as he put it earlier this week) and individual Government departments will be more empowered. Which is exactly what is needed. The question is whether it can happen soon enough.

Covid’s effect on delayed hospital operations alone will create a backlog big enough to keep the NHS busy for years. Remedying the educational damage inflicted by lockdown, as Gavin Wiliamson must now do, will be as serious a job as any Education Secretary has faced. Unless Grant Shapps revives transport, will there be no proper economic recovery. To agree a decent post-brexit trade deal, especially with the US, Liz Truss will need a less restrictive remit than the one she has been given.

Each one of these Cabinet members has their own battle to fight – and they’d do it a lot faster if given more latitude and more support by No10. When it looked like Brexit would occupy Government, it made sense for that Government to be run by a strong and disciplined No10. But with Covid that has changed – and changed utterly. Now facing an emergency in almost every area of Government, the Prime Minister will have no choice but to let go. He really will need all the help he can get.