Super-guru gets his revenge on the Blob
BY all accounts Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s super-guru, is a strange fellow. He sprang to earlier fame, and passingly, as campaign director of Vote Leave during the run-up to the referendum. He is credited with being the cause of a vital extra two million voting Leave in that plebiscite.
These were not switchers but those who never cast a vote at all but for this one occasion came out and did so. Without them the Remainers would have won by a tiny margin and that would have been that – for a generation at least.
By this effort he accrued to himself a tidal wave of Remainer hatred that continues to this day.
That alone is a phenomenon – habitually the British accept the democratic vote and the losers shrug and get on with life. But not this time. I have never seen such vindictiveness as the diehard Remainers still nurture.This venom is concentrated in the Blob, which has been seeking his destruction ever since.And it is mutual. It looks as if he has won, with his forecast of “a hard rain” falling upon the lot of them. So what is the Blob?
IT IS a loose amalgam of four communities. Politicians – well, about half of them. The bureaucrats – about 99 per cent. The Quangocrats – that parallel unelected civil service such as the grotesquely useless Public Health England. And a core of so-called scientists whose predictions over Covid have proved to be right out of the realm of Mystic Meg. Note one thing about all four. On the public payroll and doing very nicely, thank you. To his credit the PM has always refused to abandon his loyalty to this Cabinetlevel maverick.
It was the Blob that orchestrated the campaign against him for speeding through the night, endangering nobody, to get his toddler son to his family in Durham. Days later thousands rioted cheek-byjowl in London, endangering everybody, and nothing said. Behind the arras of Whitehall secrecy the feuding went on.
The pinnacle of the Blob was Cabinet Secretary, Civil Service Chief and National Security
Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill , holder of three of the most powerful offices in the UK simultaneously and without precedence. Then last weekend a coup de théâtre. Sir Mark resigns.
Throughout the cloistered corridors the colleagues tremble.All that power and privilege. All those salaries, perks and pension pots at risk.The pillars crack.The clouds of hard rain loom and not a brolly in sight. A radical clear-out, advocated on this page weeks ago, threatens.
The mandarins fear their replacement, one by one, with get-it-done dynamos inducted from the private sector where failure means unavoidable dismissal – the antithesis of the Whitehall Code. The latter is simple; if it all went badly wrong, Cover It Up. Ironically it will not be the seemingly endless rigmarole to get us finally out of the EU, the mandarins’ charter, that will be the epitaph of the Blob.
It will be the now unstoppable litany of revelations that the Blob made a complete mess of advising Cabinet on how to handle Covid.
The utter trashing of our national economy with decades-long debt yet to come saved a small number of lives but cost many more.
When the BMP – the broad masses of the people – learn the details of that, and we will, the anger will surge. As the lady in the film suggested; fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
For the quiet schemer has won.