Has Dom lost the plot – in the hour of his greatest triumph?

Our columnist reveals why more and more at Westminster are asking . . .

LAST Thursday, I was having a drink in a secluded East London pub with a Government special adviser. The topic of our conversation was Dominic Cummings – Boris Johnson’s brilliant but increasingly controversial senior aide – and his edict Government special advisers should no longer drink with journalists.

‘What the hell is happening with him?’ I asked. My companion shrugged. ‘He’s basically just a narcissist,’ he replied. ‘When you go into his weekly meetings there’s this clique of junior SPADs [special advisers] all fighting to get a seat at the front to sit and stare up at him adoringly. And that’s what he wants. It’s all about him now.’

Over the past fortnight – as Cummings has turned a flamethrower on the Press, the Cabinet, MPs, the Civil Service, his colleagues, his opponents and just about everyone save Dilyn the Downing Street dog – all across Westminster, the same question is being asked. ‘Is Dom losing the plot? And, if so, why?’

Now, I’m a commentator, not a psychoanalyst. But I’ll have a crack at getting to the bottom of why the Prime Minister’s top adviser has decided to go to war with the whole world just a few weeks after his boss won a historic 80-seat majority, delivered Brexit and gave himself every chance of enjoying a decade in power.

There’s a thin line between genius and madness, and anyone who knows Cummings says he has always straddled it astride a pogo stick. ‘Creative destruction is Dom’s MO,’ says a Minister who has worked closely with him. ‘It’s how he operates. And now he’s operating within a Government machine that is designed to deaden talents like his. It’s like a blanket, and he’s getting frustrated. But to get anything done in Westminster you have to compromise. Creative destruction just doesn’t work.’

IT MAY not. But that doesn’t matter to Cummings, because to him creative destruction isn’t a means to an end, but an end in itself. Where some merely talk about ‘ smashing the Establishment’, he walks the walk. With steel-capped DMs.

He genuinely seems to hate MPs and Parliament. He genuinely seems to hate Whitehall and its senior mandarins. He despises the Press, whom he regards as illinformed dilettantes.

It’s not entirely clear where this frothing fury at Britain’s elites emanates from – he was educated at Durham School and Oxford, so possibly it’s some form of perennial youthful rebellion. But those who say, as one senior adviser did to me, ‘this is getting stupid now. He’s just picking fights for the sake of it. It’s causing us problems we don’t need to have’, are missing the point.

He’s not tearing into everyone as part of some grand masterplan. He’s tearing into them because he can.

He’s also doing it because it’s a very good way of getting noticed. There’s an image of Cummings as some form of mysterious Svengali who lurks in the shadows. But that’s because he’s spent a lot of time cultivating it.

‘ If you look at Dom, he’s been very careful about his public image,’ says someone who worked closely with him on the Vote Leave campaign. ‘He’s had his blog, which has made sure he maintains his profile. He doesn’t completely shut journalists out, but whenever he talks to them for articles or books he always insists on being cited as a “friend of Dom” or “a Dom ally”. It’s deliberately designed to create this mystique around him.’

But that aura of mystery no longer appears to be enough. ‘It’s all gone to his head,’ says another former Vote Leave colleague. ‘When he was at Vote Leave he was in charge, but there were people around him who could put the brakes on. But there isn’t anyone to do that now. There’s no one in there to save him from himself.’

To be fair, there is some method in his madness. As one former adviser to Theresa May acknowledges: ‘ We didn’t have the numbers to lay down the law. But if you’ve got a majority of 80, then you’re well within your rights to try to exercise control.’

Which would be fine. But the problem, many believe, is that Cummings is rapidly spiralling out of control. He is completely dominating the Westminster agenda and narrative, while the Prime Minister and the Government he is supposed to be promoting are relegated further and further to the margins.

‘ The thing that gets me is the hypocrisy,’ says one Minister. ‘I’m being told by Cummings I’m supposed to be showing discipline. Then I wake up every morning to another one of his crazy plans or another clip of him sounding off at some journo in the street.’

Cummings still has his supporters within Government. But there’s no doubt their numbers are dwindling. Last August, when I first wrote a profile of him, I was struck by the loyalty of those who had worked with him, especially on the Brexit campaign.

But last week, it was noticeable how many of his former colleagues were now prepared to speak out.

‘He’s become a second-tier bully,’ said one. ‘That’s why he’s started picking on the junior Ministers in the Cabinet and the SPADs. He’s like the kid at school who’s too scared to take on the rugby club, so he starts beating up the nerds.’

Which may be true. But I think there are other reasons for his apparent implosion. One of which is that the person who knows better than anyone the extent of the widening gap between the Dom Mystique and the Dom Reality is Dom Cummings himself.

FOR all the talk of his omnipotence, the truth is most of the battles Cummings has been fighting since entering No 10 have been lost. He fought the Brexit Surrender Bill. Parliament won. He fought for prorogation. The High Court won. He fought to cow the EU with the threat of a No Deal Brexit. The EU stood firm.

Yes, the Election was a triumph. But as everyone in Westminster knows, that campaign wasn’t run by Cummings, but by a low-profile Lynton Crosby protege called Isaac Levido.

And since the Election? Dom’s fought HS2. And lost. He’s fought to wrest control from the Treasury and centralise it in No 10. He’s lost. He’s fought for a Nasa-style nerve centre inside D owning Street.

And lost. He’s fought to get Sajid Javid demoted. And lost. He’s fought to get Liz Truss axed from the Cabinet. And lost.

But there is one other reason Dom Cummings is raging against the world. It’s because deep down he knows the world is beginning to turn without him.

His glorious achievement – the one that will rightly see his name carved into the cliff-face of British history, is Brexit.

And Boris has taken the decision to finally leave Brexit behind. That’s why he left the Parliament Square knees-up to Nigel Farage. And why the word Brexit never passed his lips during Monday’s national address in Greenwich’s Painted Hall.

And try as he might, Cummings can’t move on from Brexit. How could he? Expecting him to do so would be like expecting Alf Ramsay to ‘ move on’ from the 1966 World Cup win. Or Paul McCartney to ‘move on’ from The Beatles.

Which means things can only end one way now. One Westminster insider framed it like this: ‘Dom’s a student of Machiavelli. Well there’s this story of how the Prince wants to occupy a town. So he sends in his most brutal captain to pacify it.

‘But now the remaining townsfolk hate the Prince for what he’s done. So his first act on entering the town is to put the captain to death. And now all the townsfolk love the Prince.’

Dom Cummings is intent on slaying everyone and everything in his path. If he refuses to be reined in, Boris can’t afford to stay his own hand much longer.