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Who is the real Dominic Cummings?
Camilla Tominey reveals all
‘HE BEHAVES LIKE A MAD SCIENTIST WHO’S FOUND THE SECRET OF LIFE AND HE WANTS OTHERS TO GET IT’
‘He’s loyal and kind, cruel and ruthless’
A latter-day Guy Fawkes, intent on metaphorically blowing up Parliament? Or a ‘career psychopath’, oblivious to the destruction he leaves in his wake? Whichever side you fall on, Westminster’s arch disruptor remains something of a mystery. Camilla Tominey reports
It was a very wet day during the summer of 1993 when Dominic Cummings was persuaded to take a trip to Alton Towers by a group of friends from Oxford. With the theme-park music – Peer Gynt Suite No 1 – ringing in their ears, the Exeter College chums travelled north for a day of thrillseeking. On arrival, however, the then 21-year-old Cummings got more of an adventure than he bargained for when the gang stumbled upon a squirrel that had become stuck in a dustbin. As his friends looked on, unsure of what to do, the man who would go on to ‘get Brexit done’ characteristically resolved to take control of the situation. He bravely reached into the litter basket in a valiant attempt to rescue the rodent. Unfortunately for him, he ended up being savaged as it made its panicked escape.
Cummings’ university friend Lebby Eyres, who was there that day, recalls, ‘It was one of those classic Dom moments. When the rest of us were just standing there, staring, he was willing to take bold action. Yet in doing so, he got quite badly hurt. That pretty much sums it up, really.’
Everyone has an opinion on Cummings, not least after the former Vote Leave Svengali’s latest ‘Domshell’ dropped, with his publication of texts purporting to be from Boris Johnson, describing the Health Secretary Matt Hancock as ‘totally f—king hopeless’. This followed on from last month’s unleashing at the Covid select committee hearing, when he claimed that Hancock should be sacked for ‘lying’ while insisting that it was ‘crackers’ that Johnson – the man he helped to get elected – was actually Prime Minister. During the extraordinary seven-hour grilling by MPS, the outspoken Durham-born father of one admitted he had made mistakes but suggested it was nothing compared to the ‘terrifyingly s—t’ Cabinet Office or ‘f—ked’ Whitehall.
In a performance intended to set the record straight on his own conduct at the height of the coronavirus crisis following widespread criticism of his lockdown trip to Barnard Castle, the 49-year-old political maverick once again emerged as part hero, part villain. While some continue to admire him as a latter-day Guy Fawkes, intent on metaphorically blowing up Parliament and the civil service ‘blob’ that goes with it, others view him in David Cameron’s words as a ‘career psychopath’, oblivious to the destruction he leaves in his wake. Yet despite the acres of newsprint generated by his outlandish remarks, angry Twitter threads and wordy blog posts, Dominic Cummings remains something of a mystery. Those who know him personally insist that the real Cummings is far from his Machiavellian public persona, and yet there is simultaneously a sense that when it comes to Westminster’s arch disruptor, what you see is very much what you get.
To understand what truly makes Cummings tick, it is helpful to go back to where his life began, on 25 November 1971. His father, Robert, had a varied career, primarily as an oil rig project manager for construction firm Laing. His mother, Morag, a university science graduate, was a teacher and behavioural specialist. It is thought both parents, but particularly Morag, who remains chair of governors at her alma mater, Durham High School, instilled a thirst for learning in Cummings and his younger sister Francesca.
Brought up in a five-bedroom Grade Ii-listed house in Durham city centre before his parents retired and moved to North Lodge on the outskirts in the late 1990s, the Cummings children enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. After attending state primary school, Dominic was privately educated at Durham School.
According to Eyres, when Cummings arrived at Oxford in 1991 to study ancient and modern history, he cut a rather lonely figure. ‘He really didn’t have any friends to begin
‘You know he’s forming some judgment about you. He makes you feel like a bit of an idiot’
with. He was one of those people who seemed as if they had been a bit of a loner at school. If he didn’t wear such eye-catching clothes, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him.’ Attracting attention in an ostentatiously shiny silver baseball jacket (despite later insisting he had ‘always been a scruffy bastard’), Cummings infiltrated Eyres’ friendship group through a mutual friend on his course.
‘My nose was slightly put out of joint because he doesn’t make you feel comfortable,’ Eyres admits. ‘You know he’s forming some judgment about you. He makes you feel like a bit of an idiot. He’d purposefully stir things up a bit by saying things to shock you.’ Although quietly spoken most of the time, he once apparently labelled a friend a ‘pacifist bitch’ for wearing a white poppy.
While the women at university ‘kept him at arm’s length’, his late-night quests for
whisky-fuelled chess matches soon endeared him to the college fraternity (and would later earn him legions of political ‘fanboys’; but more on that later). As Eyres puts it: ‘His qualities were quite attractive to men. His superpower is not that he’s an evil genius but that he encourages other people to bend the rules or push against the norms. Because he seems not to care, he encourages others not to care either.’
Whether Cummings actually cares what other people think of him remains a moot point among friends past and present. As one, who did not wish to be named, puts it, ‘He intensely cares about his image and the perception of his intellectual competence.’ Eyres agrees. ‘He won’t care that he’s p—sed off the whole of the Conservative Party but he does care what people he respects think of him. That committee appearance – that was fairly Dom-like, trying to protect his reputation.’
He is not, apparently, the intellectual snob he’s made out to be, however. ‘He wasn’t like a lot of students in that he wasn’t trying to show you how intelligent he was,’ Eyres insists. ‘There was no pretentiousness with him. He just had a thirst for knowledge – he was incredibly intellectually curious.’
Despite being well on the way to academic greatness, Cummings’ crew fell foul of the college dons, who nicknamed the group The Wastrels, even sending them a letter warning them to work harder. It perhaps didn’t help that during the holidays, Cummings collected money on the door of his uncle Phil’s nightclub, Klute in central Durham, famed for its ‘quaddies’ – quadruple shots. Voted the second-worst nightclub in Europe by FHM, revellers would joke about wiping their feet on the way out. But Cummings clearly retained a fondness for the establishment, setting up a private limited company called Klute Ltd in 2010 – although the company was never active.
Back in Oxford, while some students were being tapped up (possibly for MI5) by Professor Michael Hart, fellow in politics since 1982, Cummings fell under the spell of Norman Stone, Margaret Thatcher’s former adviser on Europe, then professor of modern history. According to Eyres, ‘Stone wasn’t at our college but Dom ended up doing tutorials with him and it was soon clear he had spotted something in him that the rest of us hadn’t. He really respected Dom’s mind and put him in the path of friends beyond Oxford.’
One of those contacts was fellow Oxford alumnus Liam Halligan, the economist and Sunday Telegraph columnist, who was instructed by Stone to take Cummings under his wing upon his arrival in Russia in 1994, after he had graduated with ‘a very good first’, according to his former tutor Robin Lane Fox. Stone clearly thought he’d be wasted on the corporate world, and Cummings shared his mentor’s desire to witness first hand the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Halligan, who was in Moscow working as a journalist, let the newcomer sleep on his couch for several months. ‘I got a fax from Norman Stone saying, “I’ve got a bright one here, he’s going to get a first. I don’t want him going to work for Goldmans. Show him the ropes,”’ Halligan reveals. ‘He was extremely intense and articulate. He didn’t know much about economics but he showed a lot of bottle to come to Russia, straight after graduating.’ Describing post-soviet Russia as ‘like history on speed’, Halligan recalls how Cummings was ‘astonishingly independent’ and keen to immerse himself in a ‘land of opportunity’. ‘I remember thinking at the time, whatever he’s going to do it isn’t going to be normal but it’s going to be interesting.’
Halligan, the son of an Irish builder, adds, ‘We were from very different backgrounds but one thing we had in common was that we went to a world-class university. And the other thing was that we both came from families where people hadn’t worked for anyone – they’d formed a business. There wasn’t a cheque coming from the government or an employer, they’d had to bob and weave. That made us both bootstraps business-focused; compassionate but don’t take the p—s, low tax, low regulation – we saw business pushing through the paving stones on the streets of Russia and it was inspiring.’ Halligan poo-poos any Twitter conspiracy theories about Cummings having pseudo socialist sympathies – as ‘bollocks’ – a view shared by another friend, who says Cummings is ‘more economically interventionist than free-market Conservatives but he’s certainly not a Leftie’.
After trying and failing to set up an airline flying from Samara on the Volga to Vienna, Cummings left Russia to join the Business for Sterling campaign against the Euro in 1999. Moving in with a friend in Islington, he stayed up drinking late and ‘became much more successful with women’, according to Eyres. ‘Particularly posh brunette women.’
Cummings’ own class was ‘difficult to pin down’. As Eyres explains: ‘There was the whole, Dom in the Durham club scene with Uncle Phil, being a bit of a geezer. Then you’ve got the prestigious uncle on the other side, Sir John Laws [his mother’s brother; the Lord Justice of Appeal’s presiding over the ‘metric martyrs’ case, when five market traders fought for the right to trade in pounds and ounces, is thought to have had a profound effect on Cummings’ growing sense of Euroscepticism]. He wasn’t a “boy done good” but he wasn’t a traditional public schoolboy-type either. That’s how he became a shadowy figure. No one could quite pin him down,’ Eyres adds. Money has never interested Cummings either, apparently, although several insiders pointed out the ‘convenience’ of being able to fall back on his asset-rich wife – and indeed the property portfolio of farmhouses on his parents’ land – when the going got tough.
Having helped to stop Britain joining the Euro, tried to stop the EU Constitution being enacted and helped to run the successful referendum campaign against a devolved North
‘He dresses like a scarecrow because he wants to be seen as the political version of Einstein’
East Regional Assembly in 2004, Cummings had established himself as a formidable political campaigner by the time he met Mary Wakefield at The Spectator in the mid-noughties. Wakefield, now 46, the daughter of Sir Humphrey Wakefield, a baronet and expert on antiques and architecture who owns Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, had been at the magazine for several years when Cummings joined to take charge of the website. It came after he had spent eight months as former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith’s director of strategy, and followed his leadership of the New Frontiers Foundation think tank, which argued against Britain having ‘ever-closer union’ with Brussels at the cost of defence links with the US.
According to one source close to the couple, Wakefield was initially wooed by his phenomenal tabletennis skills. ‘He’s extremely good at pingpong. There used to be a table-tennis table at The Spectator, when Boris Johnson was in charge but Andrew Neil got rid of it.’ Cummings left soon after, following the republishing on The Spectator’s website of a controversial cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
The couple’s London wedding in 2011 involved a ‘very good speech by Michael Gove’, whom Cummings went on to advise from 2007 to 2014, including during Gove’s time as Education Secretary. According to one close pal, Dom ‘went along’ with Wakefield’s desire to have the ceremony at St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Soho Square even though he is ‘not religious at all. In fact, he’s probably an atheist. ‘Mary’s priest, Father Alexander Sherbrooke, did the mass. I think Mary was anxious Dom wasn’t going to wear a suit, but from memory he did put a tie on. It was quite a big wedding and there was a party afterwards. I don’t remember Dom dancing. There was a DJ. Possibly even a band.’ Another commented on the fact that Wakefield’s father’s eccentricities made her husband seem ‘pretty straight by comparison’. They explain: ‘Sir Humphrey is like the guy out of The F—ing Fulfords. He’s prone to outbursts. Dom isn’t easy – but Mary’s used to that because of her dad.’ Wakefield would go on to document her troubles conceiving their only child, a son called Alexander Cedd, who was born in 2016.
Describing Cummings as a ‘very doting and affectionate father and a very good husband’, Wakefield’s Spectator colleague Freddy Gray says, ‘They’re very tight, loyal and a great team together.’ Pointing out they had had all manner of protesters outside their £1.6 million north London town house in the wake of the Barnard Castle debacle, he adds, ‘There was this mad period of time which was particularly hard on Mary and Ceddy.’
With then-prime Minister David Cameron having demoted Gove to chief whip in 2014 over his controversial education reforms, Cummings left Government only to return to the fray a year later in a move that would sow the seeds for Cameron’s political demise.
Much has been written about Cummings’ influence over the Brexit vote as campaign director of Vote Leave. The Uncivil War ,a Channel 4 drama with Benedict Cumberbatch cast as the Brexit Svengali, appeared to suggest he was the lynchpin of the entire operation. But others aren’t so sure. According to the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, ‘Cummings started out as a sceptic but was miles away from actually wanting to leave. He was talking about winning the referendum so we can negotiate and have another referendum. But he did in time become a genuine Brexiteer, which was great.’
Vote Leave represented the ‘acceptable’ face of the operation, having signed up the
likes of Gove and Johnson, while Farage and Arron Banks’s Leave.eu made the more difficult arguments over immigration and border control. ‘Really, Vote Leave was a Conservative campaign and Boris’s support was crucial,’ says Farage. Cummings was ‘vile’ throughout the campaign, according to Farage, who says he was ‘one of the most odd, strange, weirdos I’ve ever met. Could I send him into a working man’s club in the north of England? No. Does he understand focus groups and polling? Yes. He can claim what he likes but he joined the campaign at five minutes to midnight. Brexit only happened because of the Ukip revolution. Was he important? Yes. Was he the absolute lynchpin that made Brexit happen? No.’
Others are more forceful. Matthew Elliott, the former chief executive of Vote Leave who famously fell out with Cummings after he took control of the whole operation from under his nose, says, ‘If there’s one person who got us over the line, it’s not Dom, it’s not Farage, it’s Boris… Boris was the most popular politician in the UK. He’s the politician people most wanted to hear from. He gave swing voters permission to vote Leave without worrying they were voting for Ukip.’
As another political strategist who has worked at close quarters with Cummings puts it, ‘He’s not so much a megalomaniac as a monomaniac. If he played sport, he would not be a member of a team. He’d be the golfer. It would have to be a completely singular activity. Politics is almost the worst place for him because it’s about compromise.’ Or, as another former Cabinet Office colleague dryly observed, ‘He was fundamentally right. But would I go for a beer with him? No.’
But what of the dedicated fanboys or ‘Domvotees’ who looked on admiringly as Cummings punched the ceiling when the country voted 52/48 to leave?
‘At Vote Leave, he was leading very young, inexperienced people – they idolised him but older people weren’t taken in so easily,’ observes the political strategist.
‘I never felt it would work out well for him with the role he has in Downing Street and it proved to be self-destructive.
‘He takes life very seriously. The one word never used about him is flippant. He’s got complete tunnel vision. He latches on to an issue and won’t let it go. He talks a lot about science – he behaves like a mad scientist who’s found the secret of life and he wants others to get it but they don’t understand. He dresses like a scarecrow because he wants to be seen as the political version of Einstein.’
Such is Cummings’ dedication to reading obscure scientific research that the catastrophisation we have witnessed in recent weeks is nothing new either. Several sources pointed to him being ‘obsessed with pandemics’ long before SARS COV-2 made its appearance at the beginning of 2020. ‘He’s one of those guys who’s always been scared for the future of humanity,’ said one source. ‘You know, we are one asteroid away from annihilation.’
And yet Cummings is making plans. According to his new Substack website, where he offers access to ‘Inside No10’ posts for £100 a year, his services are readily available to anyone who needs them, while his consultancy firm Siwah Ltd, named after an Egyptian oasis, was incorporated in February with Cummings as the sole director.
The consensus in Westminster is that he will attempt to stage a comeback if/when Rishi Sunak becomes Prime Minister, which explains why the Chancellor was left untainted by Cummings’ select committee appearance. While No 10 insiders insist he will never ‘get near’ Downing Street again after his attempted takedown of the PM, others refuse to write him off – even the special advisers who were on the receiving end of his ‘don’t be s—t’ briefings and witnessed his hypocrisy over berating them for leaks, only to shoot his mouth off to his friends in the press.
As one former colleague explains, ‘I’ve seen him be incredibly loyal and kind and incredibly ruthless and cruel. His attitude is: if you’re not with me, you’re definitely against me. Yet if you asked Dom to write 100 words on Boris before he worked for him or then after working for him, they’d be the same 100 words. He gets close to the centre of power because he always has a plan. Boris came into office with the same problems as Theresa May, the same Parliament, the same EU Commission, the same civil service. Dom said, “I know what you do, let me sort it out.” In fairness, he did have a plan
‘He was fundamentally right. But would I go for a beer with him? No’
and it worked. In that first six months Dom delivered exactly what he said he’d deliver for Boris – a deal and an electoral majority. You remove Dom in your Jenga jigsaw and the whole lot comes crashing down.
‘I think he’ll go one of two ways. He might keep going at Boris for a while – but equally he’s always been interested in AI and tech and data and has a clear insight into how it’s been used on campaigns and in government – that’s massively useful. It was interesting how he took a machine gun to Matt Hancock, peppered No 10 with shots, but noticeably left Rishi out of it. Imagine Boris collapses, Sunak will initially say he’ll have nothing to do with Cummings. But then when his poll rate collapses, he’ll probably hire him. With Cummings the best way to understand him is to believe what he says. Whether he’s right or wrong is irrelevant.’