Dominic Cummings
description: a British political strategist best known for his role as adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his involvement in the Brexit campaign
47 results
Failed State: The Sunday Times Bestselling Investigation Into Why Britain Is Struggling
by Sam Freedman · 10 Jul 2024 · 368pp · 101,133 words
May’s team briefly set up an open-plan centre in the Cabinet Office, while she was campaigning for her Brexit deal around the country. Dominic Cummings had plans to do the same permanently, but Boris Johnson refused to countenance moving. None of these plans have stuck due to a curious mix
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into elected chambers, but a referendum on the first one in the north-east strongly rejected the idea. The ‘No’ campaign was run by one Dominic Cummings, during which he learned the lesson that channelling public dislike of politicians into your messaging always works wonders. That killed that idea. Then the regional
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from all the other ways that governments have tried to reduce the ability of MPs to scrutinize their actions. Boris Johnson and his senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, neither of whom had the slightest interest in the spirit of the rules, were just so aggressively blatant as to attract more attention than normal
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formed during Brexit and Covid has not been kicked. For instance, in 2020, a whole raft of new planning law was created via statutory instruments. Dominic Cummings, being uninterested in subtlety, told everyone that this was done specifically to avoid scrutiny in a tweet after leaving government: ‘important SECONDARY legislation changes pushed
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the civil service as any less of a restriction on their ability to achieve their goals. In recent years the most trenchant critic has been Dominic Cummings, who views the civil service as a major blocker to innovation and a more effective state (though, to be fair, he sees pretty much everyone
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politicized senior civil service like America’s. Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages released during the Covid Inquiry indicate his deep unhappiness with Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. In a lengthy exchange with Sedwill just before the latter quit Case wrote, ‘I’ve never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to
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were giving headteachers the power to issue ‘same-day detentions’ to unruly pupils, a power they already had, several times. A favourite repeat announcement of Dominic Cummings was giving Ofsted the ability to launch ‘dawn raids’ to catch out schools that were gaming inspections. This was despite the fact that schools were
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, with wild inaccuracy, on the EU. More recently he had been a highly paid columnist for the paper. Their view mattered to him a lot. Dominic Cummings confirmed that their anti-lockdown stance played heavily on Johnson’s mind, and that he even referred to the paper as ‘my real boss’, when
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is a beguiling alternative to the suggestions I have put forward, which is to centralize power even more. The leading proponent of that approach is Dominic Cummings, who would agree that our state is broken but thinks that a small team of brilliant individuals (who he has yet to identify but presumably
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“by the balls”, says former Tory adviser’, The Guardian, 19 November 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/19/cabinet-secretary-david-cameron-balls-dominic-cummings-jeremy-heywood 2 Quoted in Peter Hennessy, The Prime Ministers (Penguin, 2001), p. 64. 3 Quoted in Jack Brown, No. 10: The Geography of Power
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News, ‘Philip Rutnam: £340k payout to official after Priti Patel bullying claims’, 4 March 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56281781 11 Dominic Cummings, ‘Some thoughts on education and political priorities’, https://dominiccummings.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/20130825-some-thoughts-on-education-and-political-priorities-version-2-final
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.pdf 12 Dominic Cummings, ‘“Two hands are a lot” — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos . . .’ blogpost, 2 January 2020, https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01
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14 Interview with Gabriel Milland. 15 Daisy Stephens, ‘PM refers to Telegraph as his “real boss”, Dominic Cummings claims’, LBC News, 20 July 2021, https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/boris-johnson-refers-telegraph-real-boss-dominic-cummings-claims/ 16 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘“He wants to shape wider culture”: Why Paul Marshall is turning from
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-in-government.pdf 37 Esther Webber, ‘The perils of Boris Johnson’s government by WhatsApp’, 18 June 2021, Politico.eu, https://www.politico.eu/article/dominic-cummings-screenshots-reveal-boris-johnson-government-by-whatsapp/ 38 UK Covid-19 Inquiry, ‘Transcript of Module 2 Public Hearing on 3 October 2023’, 3 October 2023
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.g. Shelter, ‘Building for our future: A vision for social housing’, https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns/a_vision_for_social_housing 5 Dominic Cummings, ‘Temporary location for statement in response to Sunday Times story’, blogpost, 30 December 2023, https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/1-on-bismarck-the-ultimate-practical
Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
by Quinn Slobodian · 4 Apr 2023 · 360pp · 107,124 words
breaks. The other version of Singapore is that of the meticulous plan. This version has its fans too. The key strategist behind the Brexit campaign, Dominic Cummings, praises Singapore not for its small state but for its central control, meritocratic civil service, occasionally harsh law and order system, military preparedness, and application
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Partnerships,” Journal of Urban Affairs 43, no. 2 (2021): 283. 93. See series of seven posts beginning with Dominic Cummings, “High Performance Startup Government & Systems Politics: Some Notes on Lee Kuan Yew’s Book,” Dominic Cummings Substack, August 2, 2021, https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/high-performance-startup-government?s=r. 94. One academic
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, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 12. 100. Dominic Cummings, “How the Brexit Referendum Was Won,” Spectator, January 8, 2017, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-the-brexit-referendum-was-won. 101. Youyenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like (Singapore: Ethos
The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century
by Geert Mak · 27 Oct 2021 · 722pp · 223,701 words
and their capacity to unite. After extensive market research, the Leave campaign entered the fray with the slogan ‘Take Back Control’. According to campaign leader Dominic Cummings it was a killer argument that captured everything that had gone wrong over all those years – the influx of migrants, the financial crisis – as well
Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott · 18 Mar 2021 · 432pp · 143,491 words
our lives that really can be called an historic turning point, and this is it,’ he told his guests, who included Hancock, his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, trade secretary Liz Truss and the chancellor Sajid Javid. Turning to Cummings, he said: ‘It was he, I seem to remember, who came up with
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than as part of a vaccination programme. But herd immunity was a view that appears to have infected the government. As the weeks wore on, Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s most influential adviser, is said to have taken a strong interest in the herd immunity concept as a solution to the
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place in any normal workplace, he would have had a case for constructive dismissal. At the heart of it was an internal power struggle with Dominic Cummings, the man who many believed was really pulling the strings in Johnson’s regime and who would later be the key figure guiding the government
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process.’ Too much power, he argued, had gone to Cummings. ‘In February’s reshuffle we learnt that earning the disfavour of key prime ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings was fatal, even if you were Chancellor of the Exchequer. Everyone was dispensable. Except Dom.’ Montgomerie described how the No. 10 team under Cummings ‘often
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the same thing to her. Rumours quickly spread that week at the Conservative Party conference that the other woman was Mary Wakefield – the wife of Dominic Cummings. Wakefield issued a denial that she was the other woman at the table. Johnson also firmly denied groping Edwardes, but the allegation put Matt Hancock
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aiming for herd immunity.’ The pared-down minutes of the Sage committee meeting the week before – which was attended by the usual government figures plus Dominic Cummings – state simply that the committee had ‘agreed’ that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that banning very large gatherings would reduce transmission’. No reasoning was
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. Crucially, the modelling team’s death figures delivered that week had begun to spook the man regarded as the second most powerful figure in government. Dominic Cummings had initially favoured the government’s delay-and-mitigate approach, but he changed his mind. ‘Dominic himself had a conversion,’ a senior Tory said. The
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recommendations, this undermines trust in them which in turn can undermine the population’s adherence to their advice.’3 That afternoon Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings – who was directing coronavirus policy – was seen rushing out of No. 10 to attend to his wife, who was ill with the virus. He came
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he had been given by Symonds as a Christmas present. But, at least, he wasn’t being bombarded with calls from his workaholic chief adviser. Dominic Cummings had been hit hard by the virus. He woke up on his parents’ farm on the outskirts of Durham with a sore head and fever
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allowed to accompany him on foreign trips. It was now the turn of the GLA to determine whether Johnson’s conduct deserved censure. And third, Dominic Cummings was in the doghouse. On Friday 22 May a joint investigation by the Guardian and Mirror claimed that Durham police had spoken to Cummings about
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escape from London. I sympathise with him wanting to do that, but other people are not allowed to do that. It’s one rule for Dominic Cummings and one rule for the rest of us.’4 The next day, the Downing Street press office said Cummings had acted in the interests of
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functional desk and a red chair that had been positioned in front of the shrubbery. They waited for 30 minutes after the scheduled start until Dominic Cummings glided silently across the lawn and sat on the chair for his first public media interrogation since becoming the prime minister’s adviser. His voice
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to unite a nation in condemnation and indignation over your handling of Mr Cummings.’ He added: ‘Eighty per cent of the British public now think Dominic Cummings broke the rules; 63 per cent said you should sack him. But the most worrying thing, Prime Minister, is that 65 per cent say his
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prime minister’s decision would also be the beginning of the end for the most gossiped-about relationship in Downing Street. Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings had become a strong believer in the necessity of swift and decisive lockdowns during the first wave of the pandemic following his ‘Domoscene conversion’. Sources
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for restrictions to limit the spread of the virus, in opposition to some of his more hawkish cabinet colleagues. The prime minister’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings was also an advocate of firmer measures before his star waned. Both Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty did a difficult job with great dignity. They
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2020. 5: Holiday 1. The Andrew Marr Show, BBC One, 12 April 2020. 2. ‘Boris Johnson and his “chino chancellor”’, Politico, 13 February 2020. 3. ‘Dominic Cummings said to be “writing budget” for Sajid Javid’, The Sunday Times, 19 January 2020. 4. ‘Why I broke with Boris Johnson’, New Statesman, 10 June
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. 3. ‘“Complacent” UK draws global criticism for Covid-19 response’, Guardian, 6 May 2020. 4. ‘Pressure on Dominic Cummings to quit over lockdown breach’, Guardian, 22 May 2020. 5. ‘New witnesses cast doubt on Dominic Cummings’s lockdown claims’, Guardian, 23 May 2020. 6. ‘Chief nurse dropped from Downing Street coronavirus briefing “after refusing
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to back Dominic Cummings”’, Independent, 12 June 2020. 7. ‘Serious weaknesses in the UK’s current plans for suppressing covid-19 risk a second major outbreak’, BMJ, 5 June
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) Betty Grove with husband Alan. She died after being sent home from hospital with pneumonia and a collapsed lung. (© Donna Grove) Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings in the 10 Downing Street Rose Garden, fending off questions during the media inquisition into his 528-mile round trip to Durham while suffering Covid
Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan · 2 Jan 2020 · 388pp · 111,099 words
, routed through a secretive Scottish group linked to a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence. The Vote Leave campaign – led by its ruthless chief strategist Dominic Cummings – broke electoral laws on overspending when it bought highly targeted Facebook adverts with a Canadian digital company that almost nobody had heard of. Arron Banks
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of this organisation? I am very confident it would be well spent in the final crucial 5 days. Obviously it would be entirely legal.1 DOMINIC CUMMINGS, email to Vote Leave donor, 11 June 2016 In late August 2019, Boris Johnson wrote a memo to the Westminster cabinet committee tasked with preparing
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to “act immediately” to share all user data from their departmental websites. The government wanted to create a platform for gathering “targeted and personalised information”. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief advisor, emailed senior officials telling them that the data collection was a “TOP PRIORITY”.2 A few years earlier, a
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Facebook data from tens of millions of users. But there was another reason the story of the prime minister’s memo made waves. It had ‘Dominic Cummings’ and ‘data’ in the same headline. Cummings has been the closest contemporary British politics has to a Machiavelli. Like the author of The Prince, he
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during a television debate. Dark money-funded pro-Johnson ads flooded social media. Conservative Party sources routinely lied to journalists. Many saw the spirit of Dominic Cummings behind the onslaught of disinformation. Having vowed to “deliver Brexit” in government, Cummings was credited with instigating Boris Johnson’s controversial decision to suspend Parliament
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EU. (The Supreme Court later ruled the prorogation unlawful.) Twenty-one Tory MPs who voted to block a no-deal Brexit had the whip removed. “Dominic Cummings has been hired by Boris to lay waste,” complained Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames. “He is doing the job he was asked to do
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. More than anything else, the result was a vindication of the much derided official ‘out’ campaign, Vote Leave, and particularly its bosses Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings. Few had given them a chance. Vote Leave was both the product of decades of Eurosceptic agitation and rhetoric and, not unusually in British politics
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into a full-throated demand to leave the EU itself. Business for Britain morphed into Vote Leave. Then Elliott made his boldest move: he hired Dominic Cummings, once a pugilistic special advisor to education secretary Michael Gove, to run the Leave campaign. It was a decision that would come to define Vote
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team, who spoke on condition of anonymity, had a rather different experience. “Matthew Elliott barely spoke to junior people, just the board and the funders. Dominic Cummings was hands-on. He was the one who was there for you.” Politically, however, the two men had much in common. Like Elliott, Cummings’s
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million pounds to a pair of students and let them do whatever.”33 As well as spending £625,000 with AggregateIQ on BeLeave’s behalf, Dominic Cummings also brokered other donations for the youth campaign. In early June 2016, Cummings emailed a potential donor, hedge fund millionaire Anthony Clake, saying that Vote
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of everything from hiring prostitutes to bribing opposition politicians to coordinating voter suppression campaigns, the question of who the people behind AIQ were – and how Dominic Cummings found a firm so small that its Twitter followers in early 2016 would have fitted into the back of a London black taxi – suddenly became
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had failed to properly protect the data it had misused during the EU referendum.58 Immediately after the Brexit vote, AIQ put a quote from Dominic Cummings on its homepage: “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t
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messages”, he said. But Collins’s inquiry had very limited powers to delve deeper into Vote Leave. Witnesses were not compelled to give evidence. When Dominic Cummings refused to attend the inquiry, he was found in contempt of Parliament. That sounds very serious, but it was no impediment to becoming the prime
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dubious claims and disinformation, anonymous adverts on social media and incessant lying. Journalists who asked awkward questions were sidelined. On the morning after the vote, Dominic Cummings stood smiling outside Number 10 Downing Street. Asked if he should take any credit for the emphatic win, Johnson’s special advisor said “no, not
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expected referendum on joining the European currency – in the end, it never materialised. Business for Sterling was in some ways a prototype for Vote Leave. Dominic Cummings was the campaign director, and below him were many of the same staff and supporters. The anti-euro campaign, however, also took pains to say
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manifesto was written by Rachel Wolf, who co-founded the lobbying firm Public First with her husband, James Frayne, formerly of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Dominic Cummings’s path-breaking campaign against a North East Assembly in 2004. What many of Britain’s lobbyists are doing is very hard to work out
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Vote Leave and its affiliates, the Democratic Unionist Party and Veterans for Britain, as simply “digital media spend”. Fortunately for posterity and the factual record, Dominic Cummings has been a bit more expansive about what he called “the first campaign in the UK to put almost all our money into digital communication
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tack completely. Out went Jim Messina and his fine-grained data targeting of swing voters on Facebook. In came Vote Leave’s online operation and Dominic Cummings’s ruthless will to win. Former senior Vote Leave staff played key roles. Lee Cain, who had worked with Boris Johnson since the referendum, moved
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still got out. Surreally, the Tories posted a 71-minute YouTube video of Boris Johnson sitting on a train. In a post-election blog post, Dominic Cummings noted how “the world of digital advertising has changed very fast since I was last involved in 2016.” While “so many journalists wrongly looked at
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-the-record interviews almost completely ceased. In their place, a rash of stories appeared citing only anonymous government sources, widely assumed to be senior advisor Dominic Cummings: Downing Street was investigating pro-Remain MPs for “collusion” with foreign governments; on a private phone call, German chancellor Angela Merkel had accused the prime
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anti-Semite or something equally appalling, and everyone runs off to cover that,” said Lane Scheppele. “It’s the same tactics that Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings use in Britain.” Ahead of the 2018 general election, Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube was reportedly involved in a campaign to discredit Hungarian NGOs
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Veterans for Britain’, The Electoral Commission, July 2018. 2 Alex Spence, ‘Boris Johnson Secretly Asked For A Massive Amount Of User Data To Be Tracked. Dominic Cummings Said It’s “TOP PRIORITY”’, Buzzfeed, September 2019. 3 William Norton, White Elephant: How the North East Said No (London, 2008), p. 200. 4
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the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science – Vote Leave’s ‘Voter Intention Collection System’ (VICS) now available for all’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, October 2016. See also https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-
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), pp. 39–40. 19 Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London, 2017), p. 28. 20 Ibid., p. 37. 21 Oliver Wright, ‘Dominic Cummings aims a wrecking ball at Whitehall’, The Times, August 2019. 22 Jonny Ball, ‘John Prescott: the Northern Powerhouse is “not devolution, really”’, New Statesman, February
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2019. 23 Johnny McDevitt, ‘Dominic Cummings honed strategy in 2004 vote, video reveals’, Guardian, November 2019. 24 William Norton, White Elephant: How the North East Said No, (London, 2008), p. 70
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Crown Prosecution Service’, BBC, November 2019. 44 James Cusick and Adam Ramsay, ‘Police still not investigating Leave campaigns, citing “political sensitivities”’, openDemocracy, October 2018. 45 Dominic Cummings, ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, January 2017. 46 Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London, 2017), pp. 415–416
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ads, the mystery “letter” – and Brexit’s online guru’, Guardian, November 2017. 48 ‘Vote Leave launches £50m Euro 2016 football contest’, BBC, May 2016. 49 Dominic Cummings, ‘On the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science – Vote Leave’s ‘Voter Intention Collection System’ (VICS) now available for all
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’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, October 2016. See also https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-
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2018. 52 Anoosh Chakelian, ‘Facebook releases Brexit campaign ads for the fake news inquiry – but what’s wrong with them?’, New Statesman, July 2018. 53 Dominic Cummings, ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, January 2017. 54 Carole Cadwalladr and Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: the ties that bound Vote Leave’s data firm
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the Digital Age (London, 2018), p. 127. 35 David Taylor, ‘Tories knew they would win election three weeks before vote’, The Times, May 2015. 36 Dominic Cummings, ‘On the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science – Vote Leave’s “Voter Intention Collection System” (VICS) now available for all
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’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, October 2016. See also https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-
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also https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2019/12/11/lies-191211/content.html; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 45 Dominic Cummings, ‘“Two hands are a lot” – we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, January 2020. See also https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot
Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson · 15 Jan 2019 · 502pp · 128,126 words
’s ‘Scream’ Cabinet of 2016 – the worst ever Cabinet? Figure 7.2: The Bullingdon Boys – who have never used a Co-op! Figure 7.3: Dominic Cummings in ‘awe at his own strategic brilliance’ Figure 7.4: Matthew Elliott – chief executive of Vote Leave 2015–2017 Figure 8.1: Deprivation levels by
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others. The repercussions of the outcome were as unexpected as the result itself. No one, especially Vote Leave campaign director and all-round political strategist Dominic Cummings – of whom we say more in the chapters that follow – had the ability to foretell the future in early 2016. Immediately after the event, most
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men are, of course, delighted with the Leave vote, especially those who played a large part in bringing about the result. One of those is Dominic Cummings, the so-called mastermind of the Brexit campaign, set to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a Channel 4 television drama about the referendum to
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Vote Leave mastermind Cummings in Brexit TV drama’, The Times, 16 May, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/benedict-cumberbatch-to-play-vote-leave-mastermind-dominic-cummings-in-brexit-tv-drama-b297ckpv8 29 Goodwin, M. (2017) ‘Brexit Britain: The Causes and Consequences of the Leave Vote’, public lecture, text available here: http
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, played a key role in Brexit. Leading Brexiteer MPs Boris Johnson (Balliol), Jacob Rees-Mogg (Trinity) and Michael Gove (Lady Margaret Hall) were educated there. Dominic Cummings, ‘brain of Brexit’, went to one of the university’s least socially diverse colleges, Exeter. Privately educated Dominic would have fitted in well at Exeter
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germs of his ideas, still seemed to be held by leading Brexiteers in the debate about the future of Britain. Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, in particular, mention or allude to their pet theories about IQ and the inheritance of ability, and genetic potential. They and so many others of
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want to find the modern-day equivalent of Karl Pearson, then look up the theories and background of one of the leading Brexit campaigners, Dominic Cummings.53 Dominic Cummings believes he is very intelligent, and that intelligence is distributed along a bell curve with a few people like him at the top end of
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of teaching, while simultaneously damning the quality of teachers.55 Later on in this book, we will look more closely at the mysterious figure of Dominic Cummings. Dominic is often presented as a Professor Moriarty-like genius, or as one commenter put it, ‘a man in a constant state of awe at
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is either mad, bad or brilliant – and probably a bit of all three.’ See: Wintour, P. (2013) ‘Dominic Cummings: genius or menace?’, The Guardian, 11 October, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/11/dominic-cummings-genius-menace-michael-gove 54 Wilby, P. (2014) ‘Psychologist on a mission to give every child a Learning
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/genetics-teaching-gove-adviser 56 Elledge, J. (2018) ‘If only we could all be as clever as Dominic Cummings’, New Statesman, 24 May, https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/05/if-only-we-could-all-be-clever-dominic-cummings 57 Labour Party (2015) Rule Book, Section 1, Chapter 1, London: Labour Party. 58 As our
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Brexiteers of his ilk did not get their way.76 FIGURE 7.3: DOMINIC CUMMINGS IN ‘AWE AT HIS OWN STRATEGIC BRILLIANCE’ Quotation about Dominic Cummings’s brilliance courtesy of: Elledge, J. (2018) ‘If only we could all be as clever as Dominic Cummings’, New Statesman, 24 May.77 A second influential figure in the Vote
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backs Michael Gove but suggests former aide was a “career psychopath”’, The Guardian, 1 July, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/18/david-cameron-dominic-cummings-career-psychopath 76 As reported in: Barnett, A. (2018) ‘How to win the Brexit Civil War. An open letter to my fellow Remainers’, Open Democracy
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, long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, it was revealed in May 2017 how the Leave campaign devoted most of its resources: ‘Vote Leave sent, Dominic Cummings wrote, “nearly a billion targeted digital adverts” and spent approximately 98% of their money on digital campaigning.’31) But the good news is that it
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Network News, 9 June, https://www.forces.net/news/meet-mps-military-careers 43 Quoted in Dean, A. (2017) ‘Peering over the cliff-edge: why Dominic Cummings fears Brexit will fail’, Prospect magazine, 11 October, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/peering-over-the-cliff-edge-why
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-dominic-cummings-fears-brexit-will-fail 44 Jones, C. (2017) ‘Bad news on Brexit will be better for businesses than no news at all’, The Times, 14
Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja · 15 Jan 2021 · 245pp · 71,886 words
for monitoring new variants, and health data, as well as ethics. There were observers from the Prime Minister’s office, usually Ben Warner or occasionally Dominic Cummings. Public Health England and the NHS were always represented. Adding in the chief scientists and other emissaries for various government departments, plus the devolved nations
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. There was an intrinsic conservatism and a disbelief that this could ever happen.’ Something must have percolated through, however. Number 10 advisers Ben Warner and Dominic Cummings showed signs of increasing unease at the SAGE meetings they attended. Patrick Vallance was becoming anxious, too. And then herd immunity stampeded on to the
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about this virus that the UK government did not? It was not just scientists nursing a sense of foreboding. In late February and early March, Dominic Cummings had begun to worry about the UK’s pandemic response: ‘There was no proper coordination in my opinion between SAGE, the Department of Health, the
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for the pandemic response. Boris Johnson as prime minister seemed more like an old-fashioned chairman than a chief executive and was being advised by Dominic Cummings and other figures in Number 10. It was unclear who was pulling the strings and who had the authority to ask, let alone compel, others
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thought this was the plan and there was no alternative” and the younger people thinking, “If the plan is chicken pox parties, we’re fucked”.’ Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to UK prime minister Boris Johnson. * A Lancet study published in March 2020 found that about 7 per cent of Wuhan citizens had
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be a disaster… That drawn-out, stressful period also saw two SAGE attendees embroiled in more personal dramas. On 27 March 2020, against lockdown rules, Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson, drove himself and his family to his in-laws in Durham while possibly infected. He has since told
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there could be 50,000 new cases and 200 deaths a day by November if nothing changed. Notably, there were no ministers at that briefing. Dominic Cummings has shed disturbing new light on the events in September 2020 and the efforts made to persuade Johnson that a circuit breaker was needed. By
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‘immunological dark matter’. It was an evidence-free assertion, as was the insistence by the Great Barringon supporters that there would be no second wave. Dominic Cummings claims he had wanted to run an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and to others opposed to blanket Covid-19
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but invisible, despite the best efforts of many superb civil servants. I tried to highlight this by emailing or WhatsApping Number 10 directly, often to Dominic Cummings or Ben Warner. In April 2020, I implored Number 10 to: move UKG from reactive, announcement drive responses to a strategy! ... I still don’t
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/content/aa53173b-eb39-4055-b112-0001c1f6de1b p.128 Cummings’s opinions on controversial scientific issues have raised eyebrows. ‘Dominic Cummings criticised over ‘designer babies’ post’ www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/19/sabisky-row-dominic-cummings-criticised-over-designer-babies-post p. 132 ‘If we needed yet another compelling reason to act, Report 9
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/piloted-in-may-ditched-in-june-the-failure-of-englands-Covid-19-app p. 148 ‘On 27 March 2020, against lockdown rules, Dominic Cummings’ Stephen Castle and Mark Landle, ‘Dominic Cummings Offers a Sorry-not-Sorry for UK Lockdown Breach’. New York Times, 25 May 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/world/europe
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/dominic-cummings-boris-johnson-coronavirus.html p. 149 ‘On 5 May 2020, it was revealed that Neil had broken lockdown rules.’ Anna Mikhailova et al., ‘Exclusive: Government
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the Royal United Hospitals in Bath. A long-time friend of Jeremy Farrar, who confided in him his suspicions of the origins of the virus. Dominic Cummings Political strategist who was special adviser to Michael Gove, then became Director of Vote Leave and chief adviser to Boris Johnson on the latter’s
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but Gove kept a low profile during the pandemic. Timothy Gowers British mathematician and Fields medallist, he was one of three outside scientists whose views Dominic Cummings sought during the Covid-19 crisis. He told Cummings in a series of emails that the best strategy was to go in hard and early
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sweeping powers, to the UK Parliament. On 27 March 2020, Hancock and Boris Johnson revealed they had tested positive for coronavirus; Hancock suffered mild symptoms. Dominic Cummings has, notoriously, been scathing about Hancock’s abilities. Baroness Diana ‘Dido’ Harding The former chair of NHS Improvement, Harding was appointed to chair NHS Test
Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie · 8 Oct 2019
susceptible to the winds of a bad economy and a British society that systemically ignores them. Vote Leave had been co-founded in 2015 by Dominic Cummings, one of Westminster’s most infamous political strategists, and Matthew Elliott, founder of several right-wing lobbying groups in the U.K. Some in the
Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)
by Chris Grey · 22 Jun 2021 · 334pp · 91,722 words
a deal. At the same time, a whole swathe of former members of the Vote Leave campaign were brought in as special advisers, most notably Dominic Cummings who, as Johnson’s closest adviser, was given an unprecedented degree of power whilst disdaining conventions of traditional political conduct. Cummings was to be a
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an MP, in tears, told him how such language linked directly with the death threats she and many others were receiving, he persisted. Shortly afterwards, Dominic Cummings all but condoned abuse and threats against MPs by saying they were ‘not surprising’ and resulted from the failure to ‘respect the result’ of the
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, there was no way that he was going to accept the Farage ‘offer’, for two reasons. One was the well-documented antagonism between Farage and Dominic Cummings. The other was that Johnson’s central challenge was – like David Cameron’s in calling the referendum – to remove Farage (whether as UKIP or Brexit
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important as the negotiations proceeded was the particular issue of state subsidies and competition policy. This seems to have been at least in part because Dominic Cummings reportedly had an obsession with the idea of using state funding to support high-tech firms, which EU state aid rules might preclude. Whatever the
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to renege on parts of it and so might, in principle, go even further in the future. It was also perhaps another example of the Dominic Cummings ‘disruptor’ strategy of doing the outrageous and unexpected. If so, like so many of Cummings’s ploys, it backfired spectacularly. Even many senior Conservative Brexiters
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in prospect emerged. This came with the scrapping of the internationally illegal clauses of the IMB. Whether this was a consequence of Biden’s election, Dominic Cummings’s resignation in November (for reasons unrelated to Brexit), the impending economic realities of what no deal would mean, or some combination of these may
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. The idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxbridge-educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Douglas Carswell, Nigel Lawson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Daniel Hannan, John Redwood and many other leading Brexiters – were anything other than a privileged elite was plainly
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that, when concluded, these would supersede the Withdrawal Agreement and especially the Northern Ireland Protocol. Indeed, according to Steve Baker, MPs were assured by both Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove that this was so.132 Or, again, at the same time but in a different way, some thought that if there were
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a toad”, says Vote Leave chief’ The Independent 18 July 2017 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-davis-thick-mince-lazy-toad-dominic-cummings-a7845911.html 94 Martin Kettle, ‘This is no normal transition of power. It’s a hard Brexit coup’ The Guardian 25 July 2019 https://www
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Jacobins on the march in Brexit revolution’ Politico 16 September 2018 https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-brexit-fantasy-explained-britain-perpetual-revolution/ 96 ‘Dominic Cummings: Anger at MPs “not surprising”, PM’s adviser says’ BBC News 27 September 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49847304 97 ‘Kwasi
This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones · 23 Sep 2020 · 387pp · 123,237 words
the left behind towns’ by unveiling a new agenda of investment, Milne was worried: ‘He’s stealing all of our lines.’ When the appointment of Dominic Cummings – widely perceived as the architect of Vote Leave’s triumph in the referendum – as Johnson’s chief special adviser was announced, the mood in the
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was more, Labour was up against a new formidable opponent. The old rules simply did not apply with Boris Johnson and his wily senior adviser Dominic Cummings. The rulebook didn’t suit them, so they just tore it up. That August, Corbyn’s former spokesperson Matt Zarb-Cousin received an email from
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laughed at by the audience on BBC Question Time was edited to show only applause; senior BBC broadcast journalists regurgitated lines fed to them by Dominic Cummings without scrutiny or interrogation.3 To make one mistake, to coin a phrase, may be regarded as a misfortune, to make a string of them
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Labour had no meaningful plan in place to deal with an outcome which could have been predicted for months, Johnson, along with his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, was able to define himself on his own terms. The second mistake, which arose from the collapse of the top team into acrimony, was a
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