Why this bonkers, scruffy anarchist could save Brexit... and the Tories
IT’S the photo that could come to define Boris Johnson’s premiership. Or what some have already started calling the Dom Cummings premiership. The new PM has just entered No 10 for the first time. He is shaking hands with Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill. Aides are arrayed in an honour guard to his right. But to the left – clad in jeans and a scruffy light-blue T-shirt – a figure leans conspicuously against the wall. ‘Look at me, I’m different,’ Cummings appears to be saying with his body language.
‘I’ve seen this before,’ says an unimpressed Minister. ‘ David Cameron’s aide Steve Hilton used to walk around No 10 without any shoes or socks on. He thought it made him look cool, but it just made him look like a prat. The whole point about wearing a suit is that it shows you’re part of a team. Cummings doesn’t want that. He wants it to be about him.’
And he’s getting his way because, over the past week, the Westminster narrative has been about nothing but Boris’s most senior and controversial adviser. His threat to axe any ministerial aides who won’t do his bidding. His menacing on-air warning to Dominic Grieve. The taunting of MPs that they’ve missed their opportunity to stop a No Deal Brexit. His pledge to barricade the gates of Downing Street if they dare pass a no-confidence motion against the Government.
EVEN some of Johnson’s most senior allies have become alarmed. But before people prepare to toss Cummings on to the sacrificial pyre that eventually consumed Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson and Nick Timothy, they should take notice of one thing. Whatever nerves he has started jangling within Government, it’s nothing to the abject terror he is striking into the hearts of Boris’s opponents.
There is no doubt that the man has his flaws. One being that he’s stark staring bonkers. A perusal of his personal blog throws up 1,000-word ramblings on subjects such as ‘ de- extinction, machine intelligence, the search for extras ol ar l i f e, autonomous drone swarms bombing Parliament’ or ‘causality, hypotheticals, and robots with free will & capacity for evil’.
It’s also clear he has become seduced by his newly acquired status as a political celebrity.
Anonymous to t hose outside Westminster, he was recently played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the TV movie Brexit: The Uncivil War, which chronicled his triumphant management of the Vote Leave campaign, and his por
trayal by the Sherlock actor has turned his head.
Unusually for a senior Conservative adviser, he’s also a bit of an anarchist. Frustrated by his experiences battling the Whitehall bureaucracy during his time at the Department for Education, he has decided the best way to save the institutions of government is basically to blow them up.
‘Dom realised from day one that what Boris needs is a strong gatekeeper who can take decisions,’ an ally tells me. But Cummings doesn’t actually see his role as being that of gatekeeper. He sees his role as smashing the gate off its hinges, then taking an axe to it.
However, in the fortnight since he took up residence in Downing Street, it’s becoming clear there is more to Cummings than the unkempt, self-regarding Rasputin of caricature. Despite the narrative of him not being a team player, he inspires almost messianic devotion among those who have worked alongside him. ‘We would all have run through a wall for Dom,’ says a former Vote Leave colleague.
‘Dom brought everyone with him on that campaign and I can already see that with what he’s doing in Downing Street,’ says another.
After the drift, stagnation and ultimate implosion of the May premiership, someone needed to grab the No 10 operation by the neck. And even those who aren’t members of the Boris/Cummings inner circle concede that’s precisely what is happening.
‘ May’s team were really nice,’ explains one veteran ministerial aide. ‘But they’d hold these meetings every couple of weeks where they’d stand there for 40 minutes and tell us what had just happened. With Dom, everything’s over in six or seven minutes. We’ve got clear instructions about what we need to do, and we feel we’re actually a part of the Government. It’s given everyone focus.’
There is another reason why Cummings has found himself at the centre of so much unfriendly fire over the past week. Dominic Grieve and his colleagues are starting to fear he is right. And that in a Downing Street operation that is prepared to fight constitutional fire with constitutional fire, they have finally met their match.
THE Dominic Grieve who has been berating Cummings across the airwaves for his casual disregard for parliamentary convention is the same Dominic Grieve who slipped into the Speaker’s chambers in January and successfully upended a century of Commons procedure over who controls the parliamentary timetable.
He and his fellow MPs then boasted that Parliament was now ‘in control’ of Brexit. And until last week, they were still boasting they would find a way of preventing No Deal come hell or high water.
But this morning it is finally dawning on them that the hellraiser Dom Cummings is about to call their bluff. They can wail and they can whinge and they can plot and they can preen. But they know – just as he knows – that for all their lamentations, if Boris Johnson
opts to take Britain out of the EU on October 31 without a deal, there is very little they can do about it.
Yes, Cummings has made mistakes over the past week. Advisers need to operate in the shadows. By making himself the story – a story that cannot now be unwritten – he has set the clock ticking on his tenure in Downing Street. It will end for him in the same way it did for Campbell, Coulson and Timothy.
But if, in the time available, he can deliver Brexit and a General Election victory, Boris Johnson will regard it as a job well done. And so will millions of Tory voters.