Man on a mission: a portrait of Dominic Cummings
The Prime Minister’s controversial chief adviser is admired and loathed in equal measure – but having got Brexit “done”, he is now hell-bent on shaking up the Whitehall machine. George Parker reports
When Boris Johnson walked through the front door of No. 10 on 26 July 2019, the British political system was in a state of Brexit-induced paralysis. But in a small room upstairs, arguably the second most powerful man in Britain was already issuing new instructions to demoralised staffers: “Don’t be shit,” he told them.
A dishevelled figure with a soft voice and the appearance of an eccentric scientist, Dominic Cummings explained to his political team – largely inherited from a broken Theresa May – that from now on, No. 10 would be run like Nasa, with him at Mission Control. There was one single objective: delivering Brexit. It was an “astonishing meeting”, noted the adviser Jason Stein, who was there. “He says the last government made a total mess of this and we won’t mess it up again. He says unlike in the last government, decisions are going to be rapid and final. It’s absolute Darwinism in there. Titles don’t matter.” At times, in what one person called a 90-minute diatribe, Cummings waved his pen around so frantically, some feared he would deface the oil painting behind him. “The overriding sense was that we had wasted the last three years,” recalls another witness. “He said bad performance wouldn’t be tolerated. Then he invited everyone for drinks – it was so different to the old regime. It was quite inspiring.”
Six months later, Cummings is still in Downing Street, presiding over the new political landscape that he helped shape. The man who directed the 2016 campaign to take Britain out of the EU is chief adviser to Johnson, a PM whose promise to “Get Brexit Done” secured an 80-strong majority. This week, Britain formally left the EU – but the challenge of agreeing a trade deal with the bloc is just beginning. Cummings, the man who gave us Brexit, is leaving the tricky details of delivery to others. The 48-year-old is moving on to a new agenda – hoping to remake the civil service, invest in “left-behind” regions, and put the country at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, robotics and climate science. Last month, he published a blog post that went viral, inviting “weirdos and misfits” to join him at the heart of government.
Those who see him in No. 10 meetings with Johnson detect no deference towards the Prime Minister. “He sits there, leaning back in his chair – as though they are equals,” says one insider. For now, Johnson embraces Cummings, who friends call a “Renaissance man” with skills spanning campaigning, policy, communications and project delivery. To his enemies, he is vicious and unscrupulous – an intellectual showboater riding for a fall. For all his election success, the pressure is now on to deliver his ambitious agenda. One government insider says: “He’s allpowerful and he’s running the country. But nobody ever dies in a ditch for an adviser. Of course he’s expendable.”
For his part, Cummings tells people he will quit before he is fired – that he could walk away at any time and return to his “bunker” at his parents’ farm in County Durham. On this, he has form. When he joined Vote Leave in 2015, he insisted he would only be the “acting” campaign director, but went on to lead it to victory. Similarly, he predicted in November 2019 that he would soon quit No. 10: “As you know, I strongly dislike Westminster,” he told colleagues. But Cummings did come back after Johnson’s victory in December, and soon announced plans to create his dream Downing Street operation – inhabited by data scientists, policy experts, project managers and people with “odd skills”.
Even Cummings’ appearance is seen by some as an outward sign of his contempt for Whitehall tradition. Although he insists he has “always been a scruffy bastard”, his style has grown more idiosyncratic over the years. His “low-riding”, loose-fitting trousers are usually accompanied by threadbare shirts, often open to the chest, covered in biro marks and set off with a bulldog clip attached to the front. Freddy Gray, deputy editor of The Spectator and a friend of Cummings and his wife Mary Wakefield, another senior journalist on the magazine, says: “On occasions, Dom has come into the office with two pairs of tracksuit bottoms on, and Mary’s looked up and thought that he was one of the homeless people she helps to look after.”
Cummings was born in Durham in 1971. His father was a construction manager on oil rigs and his mother a special needs teacher. Although he grew up far from the gilded world of Eton-educated Johnson and David Cameron, Cummings attended Durham School, a prestigious private school, and Exeter College, Oxford. In spite of railing in this month’s unorthodox Downing Street job ad against “Oxbridge humanities graduates”, he studied ancient and modern history. Robin Lane Fox, his ancient history tutor, says: “He got a very good First in both parts in three years,” adding that he was “a whole class better” than Johnson, who had earlier studied classics at Oxford. Critics argue that Cummings is a poseur, name-dropping Thucydides to claim intellectual superiority. But Lane Fox disagrees: “Dominic is not a pseud.”
“Cummings is all-powerful and he’s running the country. But nobody ever dies in a ditch for an adviser. Of course he’s expendable”
At the encouragement of the late Norman Stone, his Oxford modern history tutor, Cummings travelled to Moscow in 1994 to witness the new world being created behind the old iron curtain. “He was intense, very clever, socially a little bit awkward,” recalls the journalist Liam Halligan, who offered him somewhere to stay. Initially jobless, Cummings later helped set up an airline flying from Samara, on the Volga, to Vienna. It was unsuccessful. “It once took off forgetting its only passenger,” he later recalled.
Back in the UK in the late 1990s, Cummings entered the world of rightwing pressure groups, becoming campaign director for Business for Sterling, which argued against joining the euro. Cummings believed the EU was a lumbering behemoth, but he has never been a member of the Conservative Party. In 2004, his instinctive view that politicians are squanderers of public cash and his dislike of bureaucracies were fused in the referendum campaign that made his name – on Tony Blair’s plan to create a regional assembly for northeast England. Blair had reckoned without Cummings, who helped the “No” campaign to a 78:22 victory with a giant inflatable white elephant and the slogan: “Politicians talk, we pay”.
Later, he retreated to the ramshackle outhouse at his parents’ farm near Durham, where he spent two years reading about history and science, which he regarded as the keys to solving public policy problems. He also immersed himself in the art of campaigning: among his heroes are Blair’s polling guru, the late Philip Gould; and Bill Clinton’s adviser James Carville (whose three-word campaign slogan, “The economy, stupid”, was echoed by Cummings’ later calls to “Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done”).
In 2007, Cummings caught the eye of Tory shadow minister Michael Gove, who made him his special adviser and later brought him into Cameron’s new coalition government to overhaul England’s education system and take on “the blob” – the teaching establishment, which he blamed for low standards. By now, Cummings had started writing down his thoughts, expounding in sprawling online tracts how a more rigorous education system could help to save the country’s ills. “We need what Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of the quark, calls ‘an Odyssean education’ that integrates knowledge from maths and science, the humanities and social sciences,” he wrote in 2014.
In 2011, he married Mary Wakefield. They have one son; friends say Cummings is a doting father. Wakefield’s father owns Chillingham castle in Northumberland but the couple, who own a house in Islington, do not enjoy a lavish lifestyle. “Typically English – asset rich, cash poor,” says one friend. Cummings, who has railed against officials earning six-figure salaries, earns just under £100,000, less than other senior No. 10 staff. The couple’s relationship was depicted in a Channel 4 film on the Brexit referendum, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. “Because of the film, people see Mary as the sweet one,” says Gray. “She hates that. If either of them is Machiavellian, it’s her.”
Cameron blocked Cummings from entering government for fear that he was too confrontational – and though he later relented, allowing Cummings to join Gove, that snub cemented the couple’s “deep dislike of Dave and the gang”, Gray recalls. “I remember thinking the day after the referendum, ‘Well, that’s what happens if you f*** with Mary and Dom.’” David Laws, a former Lib Dem minister who worked with Cummings at the Department for Education, witnessed his abrasive style. “I think he’s genuinely interested in serious policy issues,” he says – but “he can be unnecessarily rude, hectoring and create a climate of fear.” By 2014, Cameron was tiring of the fact that his education reforms had become “toxic” with voters, partly thanks to Cummings’ war with the teaching profession. Cummings jumped first in 2014 – Cameron later labelled him a “career psychopath” – and returned to his bunker, while Gove was shuffled out of Education. Two years later, Cummings would return as the PM’s nemesis, working with Johnson and Gove to deliver Brexit in the 2016 referendum by campaigning on EU “waste”, and exploiting immigration fears with a false claim that Turkey was about to join the EU. “What he is brilliant at doing is creating a kind of guerrilla warfare against the establishment,” says Craig Oliver, who helped run the Remain campaign. “He found the weak spots and probed them relentlessly.”
Cummings and Johnson have now carried their partnership into No. 10. Nominally Johnson’s “assistant”, Cummings acts as his chief adviser and enforcer. He hires and fires staff and sets the tone, focusing on delivering Brexit and the three things he says people actually care about: the NHS, crime and ending austerity. To some, he can be ruthless (critics cite his sacking of a young Treasury adviser, Sonia Khan, who was marched off the premises by police) – but to others, he inspires loyalty. Sir Mark Sedwill, Britain’s top civil servant, has put off a plan to become Britain’s ambassador to Washington to help deliver his reforms.
Cummings’ strategy of closing down Parliament last October to force through a no-deal Brexit was blocked by the Supreme Court, and could have been disastrous for Johnson had the Lib Dems and the SNP not obliged by agreeing to a snap election. “He’s not a soothsayer,” says one insider. “He spent ages telling us we’d be toast if we didn’t deliver Brexit on 31 October. In fact, he was completely wrong: the Get Brexit Done message won the election.” Although he advises Johnson across all aspects of government, insiders say it is important to strip away the “myth” and recognise that in some areas, he is less influential than others. After losing a recent battle with Chancellor Sajid Javid, Cummings has taken a lower profile on the economy, and he is increasingly letting others sort out the details of Brexit.
His new focus is on putting science at the heart of government and ensuring politicians deliver what they promise. His inspiration is the US government’s Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb. He wants to set up a civilian version of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (formerly known as Arpa), pursuing “high-risk, high-return projects that markets won’t fund”. His WhatsApp account profile says: “Get Brexit done, then Arpa.”
Cummings recognises that his relentless style has a time limit. He suffers from a much-discussed mystery ailment that causes abdominal pain; he has suggested he might quit after a year. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, wishes Cummings well in his efforts to overhaul the state but fears he is on course for a crash. “On the basis of my experience, the sensible thing for an unelected official in No. 10 to do is keep a low profile,” he says. “I give him 12 months max. If you try to be in the papers every day, your political life expectancy is short – and like Rasputin, you end up on the bottom of the River Neva in chains.”
“He isn’t a soothsayer. He spent ages telling us we’d be toast if we didn’t deliver Brexit on 31 October. He was completely wrong”