Dominic Cummings

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

, Guardian, March 2018. 34 ‘Report of an investigation in respect of Vote Leave Limited, Mr Darren Grimes, BeLeave and Veterans for Britain concerning campaign funding and spending for the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU’, The Electoral Commission, July 2018. 35 Ibid. 36 Pamela Duncan and David Pegg, ‘City millionaire says Vote Leave directed his donation decision’, Guardian, December 2017. 37 Adam Ramsay and Peter Geoghegan, ‘Revealed: how loopholes allowed pro-Brexit campaign to spend “as much as necessary to win”’, openDemocracy, September 2017. 38 Sean Morrison, ‘Electoral Commission under fire from Remainers for launching probe into Leave campaign’s spending 18 months after Brexit’, Evening Standard, November 2017. 39 Carole Cadwalladr, Emma Graham-Harrison and Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: Brexit insider claims Vote Leave team may have breached spending limits’, Guardian, March 2018. 40 Dominic Casciani, ‘Lobby group admits unlawful whistleblower dismissal’, BBC, November 2018. 41 ‘Darren Grimes: Brexit campaigner wins appeal against £20,000 fine’, BBC, July 2019. 42 David Pegg, ‘Vote Leave drops appeal against fine for electoral offences’, Guardian, March 2019. 43 ‘Brexit: Police hand Vote Leave file to 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. 47 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote Leave donations: the dark 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’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, October 2016.

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1 ‘Investigation: Vote Leave Ltd, Mr Darren Grimes, BeLeave and 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 Dominic Cummings, ‘On 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-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 5 Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester, ‘Sir Nicholas Soames interview: “Johnson is nothing like Churchill and Jacob Rees-Mogg is an absolute fraud”’, The Times, September 2019. 6 Sam Knight, ‘The man who brought you Brexit’, Guardian, September 2016. 7 Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London, 2017), p. 27. 8 George Eaton, ‘Vote Leave head Matthew Elliott: “The Brexiteers won the battle but we could lose the war”’, New Statesman, September 2018. 9 Chloe Farand and Mat Hope, ‘Matthew and Sarah Elliott: How a UK Power Couple Links US Libertarians and Fossil Fuel Lobbyists to Brexit’, DeSmog UK, November 2018. 10 Robert Booth, ‘Who is behind the Taxpayers’ Alliance?’

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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 for a no-deal Brexit. The freshly minted prime minister had pledged to leave the European Union “do or die”. Now he told ministers 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 government plan to transfer masses of data would likely have gone largely unnoticed.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021

Sunday Times, 18 October 2020. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/test-and-waste-dido-harding-boss-of-12bn-tracing-scheme-says-it-was-never-a-silver-bullet-s5n66rnjc p. 146 ‘A related problem around that time was the NHSX app …’ Simon Murphy, Dan Sabbagh and Alex Hern, ‘Piloted in May, Ditched in June: The Failure of England’s Covid-19 App’. Guardian, 18 June 2020. www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/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/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 Scientist Neil Ferguson Resigns After Breaking Lockdown Rules to Meet his Married Lover’.

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George Parker et al., ‘Inside Westminster’s coronavirus blame game’. Financial Times, 16 July 2020. www.ft.com/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 fitted the bill.’ Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, ‘Behind the Virus Report that Jarred the UK and US to Action’. New York Times, 17 March 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/world/europe/coronavirus-imperial-college-johnson.html p. 134 ‘Instead, when Boris Johnson appeared on TV …’ ‘Coronavirus: PM Says Everyone Should Avoid Office, Pubs and Travelling’.

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NERVTAG is chaired by Peter Horby, with whom I worked in Vietnam on H5N1 and who, together with Martin Landray, has pioneered lifesaving studies into potential treatments for Covid-19 in the RECOVERY trial. There were also subgroups covering genomics, crucial 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, I would guess that SAGE has between 200 and 300 people to call on in total, although there were rarely more than 20 to 30 in attendance (plus others dialling in on often ropey lines).

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

If you 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 it.54 He also maintains that an individual child’s performance is mainly based on genetics rather than the quality 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 his own strategic brilliance’.56 The bell curve idea suggests some rationality in a process of originally labelling children as idiots and imbeciles at the lower end, and as gifted and highly able at the other end.

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He has been called a ‘career psychopath’ by none other than David Cameron.75 He had a great influence on the vote to leave the EU, being credited with the slogan ‘Take Back Control’. In late spring 2018 he was professing that there would be revolution and SW1 (Westminster) would become a ‘smoking ruin’ if the 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 Leave campaign – indeed, credited along with Cummings as being a major agent in their victory – is Matthew Elliott (Figure 7.4). Elliott was educated at the private Leeds Grammar School and then the London School of Economics, going on to work as a political secretary to MEP Timothy Kirkhope in 2001.

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According to The Guardian, this ‘250-page screed sprawls across a vast canvas about the future, education, Britain’s place in the world and disruptive forces ahead. Quite frankly, much will pass over the average reader’s head. It 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 Chip’, The Guardian, 18 February, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/feb/18/psychologist-robert-plomin-says-genes-crucial-education 55 Wintour, P. (2013) ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, The Guardian, 11 October, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/11/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 friend Carl Lee pointed out to us when commenting on a much earlier draft of this chapter.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

‘Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover’, Telegraph, 5 May 2020. 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 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 2020. 8.

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Outside, a neon clock was projected onto the building’s wall, counting down to 11 p.m. and the end of 47 years in the European Union. Johnson grabbed a gong and banged it with great gusto at 11 p.m. ‘There are very few moments in 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 the famous phrase that we should “take back control”. It was also Dom that came up with the other three-word epigram, that the policy of the government should be to “get Brexit done”.

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There has basically been a divide between scientists in Asia, who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of Sars, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in the US and UK, who saw this as flu.’ Whitty denies that he has ever been an advocate of herd immunity other 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 crisis, although this is something he too denies. The concept of herd immunity is toxic politically because it effectively means that the weakest in society – the ill and the elderly – are left to perish.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

For libertarians or revolutionary Marxists (enthusiastic Leave voters) this is a welcome outcome, and these intellectuals might be able to mount a coherent case for Brexit on that basis. If that were the only source of historic transformation, then it might be as much exciting as worrying. But what happens when an emergency hits in this context of crisis? This is what the intellectuals (such as Dominic Cummings) on the Leave side are completely ignoring. The justification for Brexit might just withstand the various costs that were predictable, such as a run on sterling and the loss of regional or science funding. But when an unpredictable shock occurs, we will discover what kind of political economy we are now living with and seeking security from.

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This still seems likely to me, which makes Theresa May’s surprisingly social democratic leadership platform another likely example of post-truth politics in action (there is no manifesto or other mechanism to hold her to any of her ideas, and it is difficult to see them surviving a recession). This achieves Liberalism in One Country by diving headlong into the past. The second is the Steve Hilton and Dominic Cummings fantasy in which Britain hurls itself into some technologically expansive, anarchic, cyber-utopian future. Britain becomes a kind of experiment in new fusions of technology, science, policy and regulation, driven by entrepreneurs whose main ambition is to destroy the status quo. It revels in a post-truth landscape, busting the cartel of established scientific and business centres.

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Such politicians rely on a new, less visible elite, who seek out patterns from vast data banks, but rarely make any public pronouncements, let alone publish any evidence. These data analysts are often physicists or mathematicians, whose skills are not developed for the study of society at all. But this is consistent with the worldview propagated by, for example, Dominic Cummings, who has argued that ‘physics, mathematics, and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting’. Few social findings arising from data analytics ever end up in the public domain. This means that it does very little to help anchor political narrative in any shared reality.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)
by Chris Grey
Published 22 Jun 2021

Otherwise, it would have been 1 June. 93 Jon Stone and Andrew Woodcock, ‘David Davis is “thick as mince” and “lazy as 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.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/25/power-brexit-boris-johnson-radical-conservative-party 95 Tom McTague, ‘British 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 Kwarteng criticised for “biased judges” comment’ BBC News 12 September 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49670901 98 Helene von Bismarck, ‘Shutting down parliament is worse than a coup.

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A ‘HARD BREXIT COUP’ It became immediately clear that Johnson was going to go down the second of these ‘Nixonian’ routes when he purged the Cabinet of almost all who did not support hard Brexit, and demanded that all support the position that the UK would leave the EU on 31 October, with or without 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 pivotal figure in the coming months. Widely supposed to have been described by David Cameron as a ‘career psychopath’, his abrasive and fanatical personality had served the Vote Leave campaign well.

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Repeatedly, he jabbed at what he insisted on calling the ‘Surrender Act’ – meaning the Benn Act on seeking extension if there was no deal – with its connotations of treachery and lack of patriotism, sneeringly dismissing objections and even pleas not to use this term. Even when 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 referendum and from MPs being disconnected from real people outside London.96 This was nonsense at every level given the ambiguity of what respecting the result meant (largely due to Cummings’s own tactics in the referendum campaign) and the fact that Brexiter MPs featured prominently in preventing May’s deal going through.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)
by Nick Clegg
Published 11 Oct 2017

Even after the UK Statistics Authority pointed out that the figure ‘was misleading and undermines trust in official statistics’,21 the pledge remained plastered to the bus’s side. The Leave campaign knew that they had a potent promise on their hands, but just how crucial was the £350m claim to the final referendum result? Dominic Cummings, a one-time government adviser to Mr Gove who was later employed as the strategic mastermind of the official Leave campaign, has said, ‘Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests No.’22 More than a year on, the NHS is yet to see any of Cummings’ Brexit bounty, nor will it ever do so.

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So they now have every right to withdraw their consent. A year on from the referendum, the politicians with the loudest voices during the Leave campaign – Gove, Johnson, Davis, et al. – are sitting comfortably around the Cabinet table, taking home six-figure ministerial salaries and getting away with their fibs to the British people. Even Dominic Cummings, who took such pride in his cynical pledge on the NHS, now describes the referendum as a ‘dumb idea’ and accepts there is a chance that ‘leaving will be an error’.29 Then there is the simple cost – to you and every family across the country – of Brexit. Far from being a sunny upland of milk and honey, Brexit Britain is turning out to be an increasingly expensive place.

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Even if you are a newspaper reader, always remember that for a significant – and growing – number of people, the Internet is the place to turn for news. More than 90 per cent of the UK’s social-media users have a Facebook account, with the BBC now the only news media organisation in the UK that reaches more people through online news.88 Little wonder that Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, put 98 per cent of its money into digital adverts.89 The young people who overwhelmingly voted to keep Britain in the UK are, as ever, ahead of the curve. A survey last year showed that 28 per cent of 18–24-year-olds state that social media is their main news source, compared with 24 per cent for television.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Potential 40–45 per cent or more of US Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, federal judges and Senators attended elite universities whose median standardized test scores are above ∼99th percentile for the overall US population: i.e. ∼1 per cent of the population make up ∼50 per cent of the elite group running the country … However, even within this 1 per cent there are huge differences between the brains and character of a Zuckerberg and an average senator. Dominic Cummings, advisor to Michael Gove, 201329 If greed is presented as normal, then you are being taught to be greedy. If a few children at the top are continually given the implicit message that they deserve the most, they will come to expect the most. In Britain the children of those at the top attend private schools, and each has more than three times as much spent on their education than the rest (see Figure 2.2).

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A remarkable number of those who rule us believe they do so because they are special. That is less surprising when you realise that most went to schools and universities where they were repeatedly told they were all special – although most are at least clever enough to realise that the majority outside their circle might not take kindly to being told this. Dominic Cummings is not like most of those who have got into the top echelons.47 He has a tendency to say what he believes. He wrote the words used at the start of this section in a thesis made widely available when he was advisor to the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove.48 In that thesis he also suggested that 70 per cent of a child’s attainment is determined by his or her genes.

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These are what psychologists call ‘individualistic traits’, rather than the norm of being more pro-social, with positive, helpful and friendly attitudes to other people, not grandiose or conceited. Steve Jones, emeritus professor of genetics at University College London, puts the case against the favoured few succinctly. In chastising Dominic Cummings, he noted: ‘For geneticists, the more we learn about DNA, the more important the environment appears. The lesson from the double helix is that we need more and better teachers, rather than wringing our hands about the unkindness of fate. A few lessons about elementary biology might be a good place to start.’58 We now worry about the extinction of rare species, and the loss of their genes, and see apparent genetic variation within our species as more and more important (see the illustration below).

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

The fourth section begins with the terrorist attack in 2015 on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical magazine – the first wave of a series of violent Islamist acts of terror in Europe’s major cities. It documents events leading up to the Brexit earthquake: Cameron’s fatal gamble on a referendum, the third of his premiership, and the destruction of the Lib Dem coalition. It also features pen portraits of key actors such as Dominic Cummings and Lynton Crosby as well as George Osborne and David Cameron, and the shock and aftermath of the Brexit referendum which damned Cameron and Osborne’s political careers. Looming large is the story of the sale of the Financial Times, which ended up improbably in Japanese (Nikkei) hands rather than those of the seeming favourite bidder, Axel Springer, the German publishing giant.

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MONDAY, 14 MARCH The Vote Leave campaign is coming to lunch, at last. They’ve been holding out, arguing there was no point talking to the Remain establishment over a fancy meal. I instruct Sebastian Payne, a new recruit from the Spectator magazine, to deliver a message: the FT is happy to serve shitty sandwiches from our canteen. That does the trick. Dominic Cummings arrives unshaven in a scruffy green pullover, dark chinos and sneakers. He takes his seat – my usual seat – at the top of the table. The Leave campaign’s head of strategy is accompanied by his clean-shaven, bespectacled partner Matthew Elliott, CEO of Vote Leave, and Paul Stephenson, communications head.

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HRH and his bride Meghan Markle, I hear reliably, are utterly disillusioned with public life in Britain and seriously contemplating leaving the country for a new life. I doubt this story will move sterling but it will certainly rock the British establishment. WEDNESDAY, 28 AUGUST Boris Johnson wants to prorogue Parliament for five weeks in order to curtail debate on the Brexit deal he hopes to strike with Brussels. Dominic Cummings is no doubt the architect of this plan to ram a deal through the House of Commons. It’s time to fight back with a stiffer than usual FT editorial, reminding the prime minister how representative government works. Knowing that Johnson is a student of history, I insert a passage which draws from John Stuart Mill on the role of MPs.fn3 ‘Their part is to indicate wants, to be an organ for popular demands, and a place of adverse discussion for all opinions relating to public matters … and to check by criticism, and eventually by withdrawing their support, those high public officers who really conduct the public business.’

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City
by Jack Brown
Published 14 Jul 2021

Possibilities Acknowledgements Notes Preface Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. Samuel Johnson, 17771 You guys should get out of London. Go and talk to people who are not rich remainers. Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the prime minister, 20192 The London ‘problem’ It is now approaching 200 years since William Cobbett, radical pamphleteer and advocate for rural England, famously described London as ‘the Great Wen’, an ever-expanding and ugly cyst sucking the lifeblood of its nation.

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I am also extremely grateful to Nick Bowes and Dave Hill for reading a draft of this book, and for their comments and feedback. This book is dedicated to Grandma, who loved to write. She would have strongly disagreed with its conclusions, but she would have been delighted that I have written it. Notes Preface 1.‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’, The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page. 2.‘Dominic Cummings: Stop talking to “rich Remainers”’, BBC, 10/9/19. 3.‘London draining life out of rest of country – Vince Cable’, BBC, 19/12/13; and David Maddox, ‘Alex Salmond: London is “dark star of the economy”’, The Scotsman, 4/3/14. 1. People and Place 1.S. Barrett & E. Belcher, ‘The London Intelligence Issue 9’, Centre for London, 25/7/19. 2.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

Of the leading campaigners in the ‘Out’ campaign, only Boris Johnson plays a role, as Foreign Secretary, in what form Brexit will take. Even his role is limited. The rest do not have to face the consequences of their campaigning swagger. Early in 2017 one of the architects of the victory in the Brexit referendum, Dominic Cummings, formerly an adviser to Gove, wrote a wittily provocative account of why his side had won. Cummings insisted, as part of his compelling exposition, that contrary to mythology, Gove and Johnson were relaxed and delighted on the day after the referendum. Perhaps the close ally and behind-the-scenes witness is best placed to make the definitive judgement.

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These are pivotal questions relating to where power lies and who exerts that power – questions that lie at the heart of the outsiders’ ascendancy and the crisis in mainstream parties. Donald Trump persistently asserted throughout his campaign that it was necessary for America to take back control. One of the leading strategists for the ‘Out’ campaign in the Brexit referendum, Dominic Cummings astutely recognized that this single phrase was a vote-winner. Who does not want to be more in control? Early in 2017 Cummings wrote a vivacious and historically rich account of how ‘Out’ had won the referendum during the previous summer.1 He did not argue that ‘deep forces were in play’ and that the result could easily have gone the other way.

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Bush: former US president Jeb Bush: Republican presidential candidate Jim Callaghan: former PM David Cameron: former PM Alastair Campbell: Tony Blair’s press secretary Gianroberto Casaleggio: co-founder of the Italian M5S party Mário Centeno: Portugal’s finance minister Jacques Chirac: former French president Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) Ken Clarke: former UK chancellor Nick Clegg: former deputy PM and Lib-Dem leader Bill Clinton: former US president Hillary Clinton: US presidential candidate Robin Cook: former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Corbyn: Labour leader António Costa: Portugal’s socialist leader and PM Jon Cruddas: Labour MP Ted Cruz: Republican presidential candidate Dominic Cummings: one of the architects of the victory in the Brexit referendum Danish People’s Party Alistair Darling: former UK chancellor David Davis: Brexit secretary Democratic Party (PD): Italy Democratic Party: US Bob Dole: US presidential candidate Bernard Donoughue: adviser to Jim Callaghan Iain Duncan Smith: former Conservative leader Recep Erdogan: president of Turkey Íñigo Errejón: Podemos’ political secretary Nigel Farage: former leader of UKIP Werner Faymann: former Austrian chancellor François Fillon: former French PM Five Star Movement (M5S): Italy Forza Italia party: Italy Norman Fowler: former Conservative minister Free Democratic Party: Germany Freedom Party (FPÖ): Austria Front National: France Colonel Gaddafi: former Libyan dictator Alexander Gauland: AfD politician Julia Gillard: former Australian PM Philip Gould: Labour adviser and guru Michael Gove: former Justice Secretary and leading ‘Out’ campaigner Green Party: Austria Beppe Grillo: founder of the Five Star Movement, Italy William Hague: former Conservative leader Joe Haines: press secretary for Harold Wilson Philip Hammond: UK chancellor Pauline Hanson: leader of the One Nation party in Australia Ted Heath: former PM Norbert Hofer: far-right-wing presidential candidate in Austria, Freedom Party François Hollande: French president Michael Howard: former Conservative leader and Home Secretary Tristram Hunt: former Labour MP Pablo Iglesias Turrión: leader of Podemos in Spain Diane James: briefly UKIP leader Roy Jenkins: former leader of the SDP Jobbik party: Hungary Boris Johnson: Foreign Secretary Lyndon B.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
Published 26 Jan 2021

Stafford, M., et al., ‘Inequalities and deaths involving COVID-19: What the links between inequalities tell us’, Health Foundation, 21 May 2020. ‘Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19’, Public Health England, Aug 2020. de Prudhoe, K., ‘My dad died alone because we played by the rules. Why is it different for Dominic Cummings?’, Huffington Post, 26 May 2020. Ellery, B., et al., ‘Loyalty to Dominic Cummings will cost lives, says scientist’, The Times, 25 May 2020. Fancourt, D., et al., ‘The Cummings effect: politics, trust, and behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Lancet, 6 August 2020. Canale, D. J., ‘Rudyard Kipling’s medical addresses’, Journal of Medical Biography, 11 March 2019.

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It is unclear what measures, precisely, the government has instituted to try and minimise these racial disparities. Kathryn de Prudhoe, still shell-shocked by grief, has joined 1800 other families to form the campaign group Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK. Her motivation – the ‘last straw’, as she told me – was the revelation in late May that the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, broke lockdown rules to travel 260 miles from London to Durham while infected with Covid, then took his family on a day out to a beauty spot during his recuperation. The news was met with an outpouring of anger from ordinary people who had conscientiously followed the rules. People not permitted to be there when their parents, children or partners died; or to attend funerals; or to visit elderly parents in care homes; or to greet newborn babies; or to be present at births.

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

In a dozen fora, which I did not visit – from think tanks in Westminster’s Tufton Street, to blogs and websites, and meetings with right-wing newspapers, and dining clubs in Parliament – new factions were coalescing around more uncompromising visions of Brexit. I picked up in brief exchanges with Kwasi Kwarteng, for example, that he was part of a group that saw Brexit as an opportunity for a more radical Reaganite economics. Dominic Cummings, the former aide to Michael Gove who had led the Vote Leave campaign, seemed in his blog posts to be inspiring a group which was thinking less in terms of Singaporean taxes or Victorian philanthropy and more in terms of Eisenhower’s United States – of matching its economic growth, its vast defence spending, its research and technology companies (they talked less about its inequality, and lack of welfare provision).

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Even I had ceased my attacks on Boris Johnson on the understanding that he would announce his opposition to no-deal. Eight colleagues were clearly intending to run for the leadership, but because Theresa May had not yet announced her resignation, our leadership war remained a phony one. I met Dominic Cummings, the central architect of the Brexit campaign, and the inventor of the slogan ‘take back control’, on Pall Mall. I had never met him before. I found a slight man with a permanent frown. In his T-shirt, jeans and sneakers he looked more like an advocate for Occupy Wall Street than a former aide to Conservative ministers.

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The Athenaeum Club, where I had proposed meeting, wouldn’t let him in in his jeans and sneakers, so we walked up Haymarket together in bright sun, passed the red and yellow bubbles of the M&M shop on Leicester Square and someone dressed as the Tin Man. The charcoal artist on the pavement seemed to be drawing caricatures that looked a lot like Dominic Cummings. I took him to Joy King Lau, just off Leicester Square. He had been gruff and opinionated on the walk, but to my surprise, he seemed happy for me to order in the restaurant. As he worked his way through prawn dumplings, he asked smart focused questions on the ten-prison project, and our use of checklists.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

If I have highlighted some of the extremes of their characters as they were experienced by others, I can only say my own contacts with them have almost always been positive. Both are dedicated public servants and – away from the stresses of office – charming company. If they did not always seem so to colleagues, it is worth remembering that all the best political operators I have known – Damian McBride, Dominic Cummings and Alastair Campbell among them – have been divisive figures. At HarperCollins I am deeply indebted to the incomparable Arabella Pike, whose image will adorn the next edition of the Illustrated Oxford Dictionary alongside the word ‘sangfroid’. I hope she persuades David Cameron to file quicker than I did.

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A change would have created a political storm and required powers of persuasion with the Eurosceptics that May had not proven she possessed. Yet May’s optimism that she could do a deal in two years was to prove false within six months. Ivan Rogers told MPs he had warned May she should delay if she wanted to ‘avoid being screwed’ by Brussels. Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Leave campaign, was to call the triggering of Article 50 before the government had finalised its blueprint for Brexit or its contingency work for a no-deal scenario a ‘historic, unforgivable blunder’ akin to ‘putting a gun in your mouth’ and pulling the trigger. ‘Kaboom,’ he added.

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The next Gove heard of the matter was when he was contacted the following day by a journalist from the Mail on Sunday who said he understood that Gove had reached out to Johnson. Gove reflected that if that was the level of discipline with which a second Johnson leadership campaign was to be conducted, he might be better off holding his fire. Yet he told a friend over dinner, ‘I suppose I’ll have to support him.’ Two other key players were in action that day. Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, who had disappeared from frontline politics since referendum day, saw his chance to reconstitute the Johnson–Gove team which had so spectacularly fallen apart a year earlier. At 5 p.m. on Friday, he called Steve Baker, a key ally from Vote Leave. A source present said, ‘Dom called up and said, “You need to back Boris.”

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

He has made clear, in his repeated conversations with dictators, that human rights are not a priority. At home, populists have generally ducked the challenge of reviving the Western state. There are certainly reformers in their midst. The White House contains a small group of deregulators who have cut the number of pages in the Federal Register from its record under Obama. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, sees the break with Europe as merely the first stage of bureaucracy-slaying that will eventually create a “meritocratic technopolis.” But these would-be reformers look outnumbered. For every Brexiteer who wants to build a Singapore-on-Thames, there are many more who want their newly independent state to protect them against globalization—and Johnson seems intent on building a bigger state for them.

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Johnson’s cabinet was a clique of partisans defined by their willingness to support Brexit “do or die” rather than any particular competence. Johnson refused to bring back Jeremy Hunt, the runner-up for his job who had run the health service for six years. (Hunt argued for testing and tracing from the beginning and constantly urged the government to learn from Asia.) By contrast, when Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s closest aide, broke the lockdown laws twice—by driving 270 miles from London to Durham and then driving 30 miles from his parents’ house to Barnard Castle “to test his eyesight”—he was forgiven. This stubborn loyalty did as much as anything to destroy trust in Johnson’s government and national solidarity.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

A left-leaning government might put more emphasis on government-set challenges, like the Green New Deal, and a right-leaning government might focus more on DARPA-style research and entrepreneurship. But the differences between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or John McDonnell, on the one hand, and Peter Thiel or Dominic Cummings, on the other, are smaller than the similarities. This would not have been the case a decade ago. But working out the approximate policy mix is not the most difficult challenge here. Executing these policies, and doing so effectively and at scale, requires a government to confront some important political questions and to challenge some vested interests.

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Countries that are fortunate not to have nearby angry neighbours, or are unfortunate in that they lack internal cohesion, have to try something else. One possible approach is to buy political capital elsewhere and then use it to increase state capacity for intangible investment. In late 2019, it was reported that Dominic Cummings, the UK government’s chief strategic adviser and one of the architects of Brexit, used “Get Brexit done, then ARPA” as his WhatsApp byline. Whatever its pros and cons, Brexit—combined with the UK 2019 general election, which the ruling Conservatives fought on a low-detail platform of “Getting Brexit Done”—delivered a big increase in power to the government (including the biggest parliamentary majority since 2005), giving Cummings the authority to set up a blue-sky funding agency modelled on DARPA.

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British readers will recognise something similar in the way that the Brexit referendum and British prime minister Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory have led to a rather technocratic-sounding drive to reform the civil service, to greatly increase public R&D investment, and to reform research funding bodies. These initiatives are backed by Dominic Cummings, who served as chief adviser to Boris Johnson and was associated both with the populist Vote Leave campaign and with a technocratic, technophilic desire to reform British institutions. (His WhatsApp description is “Get Brexit done, then ARPA.”) Donald Trump’s government paid little regard to technocracy, but the support he received from accelerationist technology investor Peter Thiel perhaps comes from the same place.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

In the Labour leader’s parliamentary office, Seumas Milne stared at rolling coverage of Johnson’s assumption of power, muttering ‘not good, not good’ repeatedly to himself. Glued to Johnson’s inaugural speech, in which he declared his commitment to ‘answering at last the plea of the forgotten people and 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 room darkened further. Usually calm, Milne was spooked. That July, as he took power, Johnson – untrustworthy, with a record of dishonesty and lies, and a history of racism, homophobia and bigotry – was polling as the most unpopular new prime minister since records began.

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‘It is quite difficult for an opposition to say: “This is an evil Tory government that should go as soon as possible – but we demand it stays!”’ as the chief whip, Nick Brown, tells me. What 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 Cummings, newly installed in Downing Street. Would Zarb-Cousin like to pop over to his house for a few beers? Whatever Cummings’s motive – trying to get an insight into the thinking of Corbyn’s team – this encounter was profoundly revealing as far as Zarb-Cousin was concerned.

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But nobody saw the images of Johnson – on the BBC at any rate – as the corporation substituted footage from the 2016 ceremony of, in Oborne’s words, ‘a much smarter Johnson placing a green wreath’. It was a mistake, said the BBC. Other slips followed: a clip of Johnson being 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 looks like carelessness – especially at a time when, in an election campaign, care badly needed to be taken. Inexcusably, however, Labour’s comms team often couldn’t get it together to rebut these mistakes.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

The many differences included the Labour Party’s role: in one Gordon Brown had been muscular; in the other Jeremy Corbyn was absent, more saboteur than saviour, dismissing remain as histrionic, myth-making and reliant on ‘prophecies of doom’. A Motley Crew Europe did for Cameron, then for Theresa May. But we are little the wiser about the anti-Europeans: were they really as incoherent and superficial as they appeared, while still able to pull off such a coup? In the sub-Nietzschean person of Dominic Cummings, the Svengali of leave, the exercise of will – exit – was the purpose. Columnists talked about Brexit as a cult, but it was baggy enough to embrace a motley crew of English nationalists, neo-fascists, small-staters and sentimentalists. The ‘lexiters’, with Corbyn in their ranks, were parochial (socialism in one country) but simultaneously super-internationalist.

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Parliament (which for practical purposes meant the House of Commons) consistently put party loyalty ahead of allegiance to the House as the ultimate authority in our system of government; few MPs had read any seventeenth-century history, and even fewer cared that they were treading over fundamental questions about the distribution of legitimate power and lawful rule. MPs seemed to practise odd indifference to their constitutional position. Dominic Cummings had cocked a snook at them, refusing to give evidence to a House of Commons committee; he was in contempt of parliament. It was later discovered that the Commons – ostensibly run by MPs – had unquestioningly issued him with a parliamentary pass. Confident parliamentarians, the MPs elected in 2015 might have declared the referendum vote a giant test of opinion, advisory only, and, moreover, one that offered no guidance about how or when leaving was to be effected.

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The most that could be said was that at last they were acknowledging the damage they had done. Gove’s Legacy In 2010 a government concerned about future prosperity could have built on sound foundations, while paying attention to vocational preparation. Instead, schools in England got Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. They attacked careers education, with inspectors finding four out of five schools were failing to provide it (though Eton maintains a large, well-staffed careers advisory department). Tory think tanks were heard to ponder whether teachers even need a professional qualification to teach. Gove abolished the General Teaching Council established under Labour.

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis
by Dr Dominic Pimenta
Published 2 Sep 2020

He described “some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion . . . I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.”2 Later, in conversations with the Italian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was on record as stating “herd immunity” as his goal.3 The position of his chief special advisor, Dominic Cummings, was reportedly summarized at a private function in identical terms: “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if some old-age pensioners die, so be it” – although the fact that he said this was subsequently denied. Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance described “herd immunity” as useful as late as 13 March,4 despite his own admission that it would require 60 per cent of the population – around 40 million people – to become infected.

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utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=france-has-ordered-almost-2-billion-masks-from-china; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52254745 6. https://www.gmc-uk.org/ethical-guidance/ethical-guidance-for-doctors/raising-and-acting-on-concerns 7. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/17/hospital-demanded-fingerprints-doctors-hunt-whistleblower-inquest Addendum After the events of this book, a singular life event happened that I suppose it would be remiss of me not to discuss. In May 2020, newspapers reported that Dominic Cummings, chief special advisor to Boris Johnson, had broken the lockdown rules at the peak of the first wave. As it later emerged, Cummings broke the guidelines on three separate occasions: not self-isolating when his wife became ill and returning to the heart of government probably infectious himself; driving 250 miles at an uncertain time point, when he was symptomatic, to self-isolate on his elderly parents’ farm; and finally, driving 30 miles on his wife’s birthday to a local beauty spot at Barnard Castle, to “test his eyesight”, going in and out of various areas before driving to London.

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The issue here was not the transgressions of a single wayward special advisor – it was the subsequent farcical circus of nearly the entire Cabinet and the Prime Minister lining up to defend him, to pretend there was no breach of the lockdown, even to rewrite the rules in retrospect, to tear up that social contract as if it wasn’t important. The only thing that can get us through this pandemic is trust and transparency, and in a single weekend the government burnt both to a crisp. On a Sunday afternoon at the end of May, coming back from a break on ICU, I tweeted an angry photo of myself in full PPE, stating that if Dominic Cummings didn’t resign, I would. Why did I do this? I suppose it’s a question I will likely be asked for the rest of my career, so here is the bluntest and most honest answer: I was bone-tired – in body, in spirit, in soul. For months, we had been trying to do anything and everything to contribute to the relief of the pandemic, at work, at home, through the charity and SHIELD.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics
by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce
Published 5 Jun 2018

When Gove, Johnson and others did refer to the Commonwealth directly, they tended to invoke a global tradition that Britain had abandoned in the 1970s when it made the fateful decision to enter the Common Market, a preference that flowed from the declinist sentiments which, they argued, prevailed in that decade. The Vote Leave campaign also sought to tap directly into popular anxieties about immigration by focusing on how membership of the EU prevented the UK from managing European migration flows, thereby yoking together the theme of popular sovereignty with that of border control. Dominic Cummings, adviser to Michael Gove and the main Vote Leave strategist, was clear about the centrality of immigration to the Brexit campaign: 15 years of immigration and, recently, a few years of the migration crisis from the East and Africa, dramatically portrayed on TV and social media, had a big effect.

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Notes 1  Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain's Political Class (London: William Collins, 2016). 2  Michael Gove, secretary of state for justice, Statement on the EU Referendum (20 February 2016), www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/statement_from_michael_gove_mp_secretary_of_state_for_justice_on_the_eu_referendum.html. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid. 5  David Davis, ‘Britain would be better off outside the EU – and here's why’, ConservativeHome, 4 February 2016, www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/02/david-davis-britain-would-be-better-off-out-of-the-eu-and-heres-why.html. 6  Dominic Cummings, On the Referendum #21: Branching Histories of the 2016 Referendum and ‘the Frogs before the Storm’ (9 January 2017), accessed at https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/. 7  ‘London mayor under fire for remark about “part-Kenyan” Barack Obama’, The Guardian, 22 April 2016, accessed at www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/22/boris-johnson-barack-obama-kenyan-eu-referendum. 8  Helen Baxendale and Ben Wellings, ‘Anglosphere cooperation given a surprise boost after Brexit vote’, LSE Policy and Politics blog, 26 July 2016, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/07/26/after-the-brexit-vote-a-formalised-anglosphere-alliance-remains-unlikely/. 9  David Abulafia, ‘Britain: apart from or part of Europe’, History Today, 11 May 2015, www.historytoday.com/david-abulafia/britain-apart-or-part-europe; and various authors, ‘Fog in channel, historians isolated’, History Today, 18 May 2015, www.historytoday.com/various-authors/fog-channel-historians-isolated. 10  Anthony Barnett, The Lure of Greatness: England's Brexit and America's Trump (London: Unbound, 2017). 11  John O’Sullivan, ‘Joseph Chamberlain, Theresa May's new lodestar’, The Spectator, 16 July 2016, www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/the-man-theresa-may-wants-to-be/. 12  Alan S.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

He acknowledges that the use by the official Leave campaign of Turkey’s allegedly imminent membership of the EU was ‘a little bit speculative’. But, he adds, it did not affect ‘a single vote, apart maybe from some Kurds’. He does not tell us how he knows this or whether he has explained to Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings how they wasted so much money and effort in appealing to a non-existent xenophobia. It is just as well that it does not exist. If it did, people might misunderstand the benign nature of Liddle’s questions about whether immigrants can have proper feelings for ‘the nation’: ‘If you are a fairly recent arrival in this country, does its long existence as a nation state matter very much to you?

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According to the London Times there was also ‘a substantial order placed for branded mugs and T-shirts’. And all of it is meant to shout: ‘GET READY! GET READ-Y!’ ‘NO DEAL IS COMING!’ Or, as the Westminster parliament put it instead: no it’s not. So while the Get-Ready Men – Gove, Boris Johnson and the prime minister Dominic Cummings – were bawling out their warnings through an incredibly expensive megaphone, a little bit of King Lear was playing out in the House of Commons. The play, after all, is about the collapse of political authority in Britain, caused by nothing more than a caprice. It shows the potentially terrible consequences of political self-indulgence.

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It proved that a willingness to embrace catastrophe could unleash great potential. And the cataclysm became a benchmark of English resilience. In March 2000, after a bus crash, a cheery Emmerdale character said, ‘Well, we have survived a plane crash. I am sure we can survive this’ – just as we now hear in the vox pops (and presumably in Dominic Cummings’s focus groups) ‘We survived the Blitz, I am sure we can survive a no-deal Brexit.’ The Emmerdale option is the choice of the hard Leavers: a purifying crash-and-burn as a prelude to a much more thrilling series of ‘our island story’. Crossroads, on the other hand, is the option for the diehard Remainers.

Routes to Rejoin
by Stay European
Published 3 Oct 2021

I think that that dishonesty, and the lack of clarity around these issues has contributed to a sense of anger in parts of our community.” On an Irish Sea border, Theresa May said “No UK prime 20 minister could ever agree to it.” But in the end Boris Johnson did agree to exactly that. He appears to have taken a similar position to his then-adviser Dominic Cummings, who allegedly once said that he doesn’t care if Northern Ireland “falls into the fucking sea”. Yet whatever the UK’s position, the EU – heavily aware of its obligations to member state Ireland and never cavalier with peace processes – is not so irresponsible. The Brexit deal includes a section known as the Northern Ireland Protocol that aims to create a framework to allow trade to continue between Britain and Northern Ireland, while also protecting the EU Single Market.

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

Barney, as it is known by the locals, is the sort of smart market town you get far more often in the North than those in the South realise: well-known chains cheek by jowl with independent cafés, Christian bookshops, charity shops, butchers, bakers and if not candlestick makers then plenty of candle sellers in the sort of boutiquey interiors shops which sell ‘Live, laugh, love’ coasters and exist solely for panicked dads to drag children into for last-minute Mother’s Day gifts. Dominic Cummings was panicking the day he arrived on the outskirts of town, but for different reasons. As the prime minister’s closest adviser, he had abandoned Downing Street for his family home in Durham on Friday, 27 March 2020, at the height of lockdown restrictions. His journalist wife, Mary Wakefield, had come down with Covid.

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Fast forward about half a millennium, and the booze was flowing on the same spot. On Friday, 16 April 2021 there were two leaving dos in Number 10: one for James Slack, the former Daily Mail journalist who had been director of communications since the departure of Lee Cain, who had left along with his ally Dominic Cummings five months earlier. The other leaving party was for one of Johnson’s personal photographers. At the time England was in Step Two of Covid rules on socialising, and gatherings of two or more people indoors were banned, as were groups of more than six outdoors, ‘subject to exceptions which included where a gathering was reasonably necessary . . . for work purposes’.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

Together, these right-wing anti-Establishmentarians painted a picture of a ruling group puffed up by ‘ethical self-justification’, waving trans-friendly progressive rainbow flags, and threatening to cart off any white, non-university-educated, middle-aged men into ‘diversity training’ from which they will never return.41 In universities, there is at least some evidence to suggest that they have a point, as the intensifying argument about the impact of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives in Higer Education shows.42 It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that a series of right-wing iconoclasts have emerged from Oxford University in a state of furious rebellion against this orthodoxy. They included the Conservative Party strategists Steve Hilton and Dominic Cummings, who studied there only a few years apart and shared a desire to smash things up. When he was working for the conventionally Establishment prime minister David Cameron, Hilton proposed slashing the size of the Civil Service by as much as 90 per cent because he believed it was part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against the people or, possibly, just him.43 Cummings, the director of the Leave campaign in 2016 and, for a time, Boris Johnson’s closest adviser, made his name attacking Whitehall, universities, law courts and any other institution that got in his way.

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He has held cabinet rank almost continuously for more than a dozen years, periodically earning admiration from all sides over efforts to cut prison sentences or the use of plastics, yet he still feels looked down upon by the likes of David Cameron and regards himself as anti-Establishment – ‘all my life, it’s a cast of mind’. His allies have included Steve Hilton and Dominic Cummings, while Gove himself has frequently enraged teachers, professors, pro-Europeans and civil servants. Most famously, during the Brexit campaign, he declared: ‘The people of this country have had enough of experts.’ When we go to see him, however, Gove mentions early on ‘a desire for greater civility in politics’.

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And nor was it making some giant pharmaceutical firm even richer because AstraZeneca had been persuaded to forgo any profits for the duration of the pandemic. This was a time when the fragility of the once seemingly immovable institutions of government in the face of an iconoclastic philosophy of moving fast and smashing things was being laid. Evidence to the public inquiry into their handling of Covid has shown that Dominic Cummings who was briefly the most powerful adviser in the land, dismissed the Cabinet as “largely irrelevant” and ‘not a place for serious discussion”. The Cabinet Office, which is supposed run government machinery was variously described as “a bomb site” and “a dumpster fire”, while a myriad of health bodies, local or devolved government was portrayed merely as obstacles to his will.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again
by Richard Horton
Published 31 May 2020

King’s argument for setting up a rival body to SAGE was that ensuring public trust in the scientific advice given to government demanded that those giving advice should not be dependent on the government.18 Too many members of the official SAGE were government employees. Astonishingly, the official SAGE allowed the participation of the architect of Brexit, Dominic Cummings, who had been appointed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as his chief political advisor. The official SAGE was impossibly compromised. This first meeting of an Independent SAGE set a new standard for science policymaking. The openness of the process, vigour of discussion, and identification of issues barely discussed by politicians injected much needed candour into public and political discussions about COVID-19.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

(He later refused to apologise, claiming that the utterance had been put ‘perfectly’.)39 And we saw it after Johnson’s rhetoric was put in the spotlight, too. In the days that followed, as numerous female MPs reported death and rape threats and escalating abuse, Johnson’s chief special adviser, Dominic Cummings, gave an interview saying that the anger directed at MPs was ‘not surprising’. He said ‘serious threats’ of violence should be taken seriously, but added that, if politicians did not respect the result of the Brexit referendum, ‘what do you expect to happen?’ Finally, he concluded that ‘the situation can only be resolved by parliament honouring its promise to respect the result’.

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, The Conversation, 14 November 2017 29 ‘Betsy DeVos Plans to Consult Men’s Rights Trolls About Campus Sexual Assault’, Slate, 11 July 2017 30 ‘The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012 31 ‘Steve Bannon: Five Things to Know’, ADL 32 ‘How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists’, Mother Jones, August 2016 33 ‘White Nationalists Rejoice Trump’s Appointment of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon’ Southern Poverty Law Center, 14 November 2016 34 ‘The horror, the horror’, Tortoise, 3 April 2019 35 ‘Only a proper Brexit can spare us from this toxic polarisation’, Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2019 36 ‘Steve Bannon: ‘We went back and forth’ on the themes of Johnson’s big speech’, The Guardian, 22 June 2019 37 ‘MPs’ fury at Boris Johnson’s “dangerous language”, BBC, 25 September 2019 38 ‘Man arrested outside office of Labour MP Jess Phillips’, The Guardian, 26 September 2019 39 ‘Trump defends response to Charlottesville violence, says he put it “perfectly” with “both sides” remark’, USA Today, 26 April 2019 40 ‘Dominic Cummings: Anger at MPs “not surprising”, PM’s adviser says’, BBC, 27 September 2019 41 ‘Labour MP calls for end to online anonymity after “600 rape threats” ’, The Guardian, 11 June 2018 42 ‘Ukip MEP candidate blamed feminists for rise in misogyny’, The Guardian, 22 April 2019 43 ‘Police investigate Ukip candidate over Jess Phillips rape comments’, The Guardian, 7 May 2019 44 ‘Under Siege For His Comments About Rape, UKIP’s Star Candidate Carl Benjamin Has Recruited Milo Yiannopoulos To Join His Campaign’, BuzzFeed, 8 May 2019 45 ‘Steve Bannon Targeted “Incels” Because They Are “Easy To Manipulate,” Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Says’, Newsweek, 29 October 2019 46 ‘Reddit’s TheRedPill, notorious for its misogyny, was founded by a New Hampshire state legislator’, Vox, 28 April 2017 47 ‘Red Pill Boss: All Feminists Want to Be Raped’, Daily Beast, 29 November 2017 48 ‘New Hampshire State Rep Who Created Reddit’s “Red Pill” Resigns’, Daily Beast, 22 May 2017 49 ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, New York Review of Books, 19 March 2019 50 ‘Op-Ed: Hate on Jordan Peterson all you want, but he’s tapping into frustration that feminists shouldn’t ignore’, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2018 51 ‘Jordan Peterson: “I don’t think that men can control crazy women” ’, The Varsity, 8 October 2018 52 ‘Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?’

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Indeed, it could be argued that he sometimes sounded less enthusiastic about Europe than had Margaret Thatcher, who was the newly installed Conservative party leader at the time of the 1975 vote. Others were much less reserved. The Leave campaign was to prove an astute but unscrupulous one. Directed by Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove’s former special advisor, it repeatedly made specific headline-grabbing (and often spurious) claims, while generally presenting the EU as the external source of many of the adverse influences that were making life harder for UK citizens. Its populist, anti-intellectualist approach, often grounded in rose-tinted English exceptionalist nostalgia, regularly spilled over into falsehoods, deceptions, prejudice and xenophobia, all of which were easily amplified by social media, and probably by the Russian secret service too.

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As it transpired, Javid was to be chancellor for only seven months – at the time the shortest occupancy of Number 11 Downing Street since Iain MacLeod’s one-month tenure in 1970. His period in office coincided with the chaotic final months of 2019, when ‘getting Brexit done’ overrode all other government business. He constantly had to push back against interference from his next-door neighbour and his cohorts, not least Dominic Cummings, who had been elevated from leading the Leave campaign to becoming Johnson’s chief advisor. Cummings’s interventions extended to suggestions that there should be a purge of senior officials and to renewed calls to develop another economics ministry as a counterbalance to a Treasury that supposedly remained staffed by orthodox thinkers and Remainers.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Every election is becoming datafied in this way – spread by a network of private contractors and data analysts who offer these techniques to political parties all over the world. Several months before Trump’s victory, for example, the group campaigning for the UK to leave the European Union took a very similar approach. A few months after the referendum, Vote Leave’s campaign director Dominic Cummings wrote a handful of long blogs explaining why they won. Although he rejects any single ‘why’, it’s clear that he thinks data was instrumental: One of our central ideas was that the campaign had to do things in the field of data that have never been done before. This included a) integrating data from social media, online advertising, websites, apps, canvassing, direct mail, polls, online fundraising, activist feedback and some new things we tried such as a new way to do polling . . . and b) having experts in physics and machine learning do proper data science in the way only they can – i.e. far beyond the normal skills applied in political campaigns.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

London is home to Britain’s financial services industry, including about 250 overseas banks, its most powerful cultural institutions, including the BBC, and its largest collection of universities (with Oxford and Cambridge only an hour away by train). It is also home to Britain’s highly centralized and intrusive government. Britain’s revolt against the EU was arguably just as much a revolt against London and the type of pro-globalization policies that the London-based elite has supported as it was a revolt against Brussels. Dominic Cummings, the architect of the Leave campaign, cut his teeth as a political organizer in the North, running campaigns against Britain joining the Euro and against establishing an elected regional assembly in the North-east. The Conservative Party’s pledge to ‘get Brexit done’ was key to its success in winning a swathe of Northern seats from Labour in the 2019 general election.

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Boris Johnson, the Conservative politician who did more than anyone to tip the balance in favour of Brexit, was a King’s Scholar at Eton and a Brackenbury Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics. Christened Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, he was born in New York City, brought up in Brussels and belongs to one of Britain’s most prominent political-cum-media clans. Dominic Cummings, who masterminded the Tories’ 2019 electoral victory and dominated Downing Street until he fell out with his boss in November 2019, is an intellectual elitist who read ancient and modern history at Oxford and worries that the British establishment is not meritocratic enough: it recruits too many generalists (trained in subjects like ancient and modern history!)

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Anti-individual behavioural theory came into vogue with the American Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner after World War Two. Back then it was straightforward Behaviorism. Now it’s Radical Behaviorism, and there are plenty of psychologists helping companies and political groups with their moral reasoning here. Steve Bannon in the USA and Dominic Cummings in the UK are disciples of the new-style Skinnerism that seeks to manipulate ‘individual’ behaviour. (Possible because such behaviour isn’t individual at all – it’s an amalgam of upbringing, bias, assumptions, and fear, reward being the flip-side of fear.) Nudging our behaviour towards desired outcomes, whether it’s what we buy or how we vote, has always been the standard fare of lobbying and advertising.

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe
by Andrew Adonis
Published 20 Jun 2018

For the public, the two most visible effects of the enlargement policy championed so vigorously by the British elite were something close to a tripling of the UK’s net contribution to EU coffers, and the huge influx of Eastern European labour to the UK, facilitated by the Blair government’s decision to open the UK labour market without the transitional periods permitted by the treaties. For much of the public, both those effects were major negatives, and arguments about them played a heavy, perhaps decisive, part in the decision to leave the EU in June 2016. Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings, said as much about the importance of the £350 million claim in getting over the line. When the UK’s pro-EU elites excoriate Cameron’s decision on the referendum, or his strategy to win it, they must also, I think, reflect on how they underestimated the real-world consequences of enlargement for the bulk of what David Goodhart has termed the ‘Somewhere Classes’.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

It was usually uttered sotto voce – you have to be a brave person to come out as an epistocrat in a democratic society – but it was unquestionably there. Behind their hands, very intelligent people muttered to each other that this is what you get if you ask a question that ordinary people don’t understand. Dominic Cummings, the author of the ‘Take Back Control’ slogan that helped win the referendum, found that his critics were not so shy about spelling it out to his face. Brexit happened, they told him, because the wicked people lied to the stupid people. So much for democracy. To say that democrats want to be ruled by the stupid and ignorant is unfair.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

The United Kingdom provides two striking examples. In May 2020, Neil Ferguson was forced to resign his government post after he was found to have broken his own social distancing rules by meeting up with his lover. An even bigger outpouring of public anger followed later that month, with the revelation that Boris Johnson’s top advisor Dominic Cummings had flouted stay-at-home orders by driving hundreds of miles across England to visit family, while his wife was sick with Covid-19. Backed by the prime minister, he defended his actions as necessary to ensure his young son received childcare. Cummings refused to step down. The British people, who had been asked to make great sacrifices in their own family lives—missing weddings, births, and funerals—were livid.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

Essentially, the shortening has come at the expense of more thorough regulation, and less thorough regulation has come at the expense of patients’ health. 21 Lynn, M. (2020), ‘It’s time to scrap wealth-destroying taxes and empower Britain’s army of entrepreneurs’, Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/11/14/dominic-cummings-exit-should-open-bold-erarishinomics/ (accessed Nov. 2020). 22 Gibson, L. (2005), ‘UK government fails to tackle weaknesses in drug industry’, BMJ 331(7516):534. 23 The best we have right now is an annual review, conducted by people appointed by the MHRA, many of whom, incidentally, have financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

Many contemporary attacks on scientific expertise share certain elements of Hobbes’s suspicion of the Royal Society. The sense that experts are a privileged “elite” who then instruct the rest of us what to believe is prevalent in many reactionary and populist movements such as the Tea Party and the alt-right. Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, is routinely dismissive of “cargo-cult science,” a charge that compares established scientific circles to religious cults, impervious to the critiques of outsiders. Climate-change denialism depends on the idea that climate scientists are an inward-looking community, who only seek evidence that reinforces what they’ve already declared true.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

It was meant to appeal to voters who otherwise felt their lives were not in their control—their lack of job prospects or an education meant that their lives, more than anyone else’s, were more 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 Vote Leave office disagreed on politics, but they were united under Cummings’s leadership behind the scenes. While Vote Leave operated from the seventh floor of Westminster Tower, on the banks of the River Thames, directly across from Parliament, Leave.EU was based more than a hundred miles away, in Lysander House, Bristol, overlooking a busy roundabout.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

But such is the scale of mistrust in an age of partisan and populist politics that by 2020 traditional White House briefings had almost ceased to exist until the coronavirus pandemic left Donald Trump and his officials no choice but to deal again with the ‘fake media’ they had ruthlessly denigrated. A similar Covid-19 adjustment was required in Downing Street, where Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings, had started to follow Trump’s aggressive media marginalisation, to the point of hiring No. 10 its own photographer and TV crew, who were able to provide tame ‘interviews’ with no awkward questions. The retreat from openness into open warfare and the atrophy of time-honoured rules of good conduct on both sides has included boycotts of hostile newspapers, even of flagship BBC news programmes to which ministers were instructed to give no interviews.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

The players behind CA also appeared to have links to the mainstream Brexit group, Vote Leave, which had employed two Westminster public school PR whizz kids with a proven track record in influencing national opinion. Matthew Elliott, educated at Leeds Grammar school, was a founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Big Brother Watch and Business for Britain. He was joined by the Svengali figure of Dominic Cummings (Durham School), a close political adviser of Michael Gove. A third member of the Vote Leave team was Tom Borwick (Stowe), the son of a Tory MP. Borwick had been a consultant for CA before he joined Vote Leave as its chief technology officer, responsible for ‘creating and integrating the development roadmap and tools for the EU referendum campaign’.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

It wouldn’t be until many months later that I would learn that my nagging feeling that some of CA’s work had been used to motivate voters to cast their ballot for Leave had indeed been correct—only, as it turned out, it was Vote Leave that first confirmed having used our approach, or at least one that closely resembled it. It was said that the head of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, regarded data as his religion. His plan was to carry out as much of the campaign digitally (using Facebook, in particular), a strategy at odds with the ways that campaigns in Britain had been carried out for decades. As was revealed in The Observer, Vote Leave had contracted with none other than AIQ, which worked for them throughout the campaign and provided help to groups connected to them, including BeLeave and Veterans for Britain.2 AIQ became embedded in Vote Leave headquarters, maintaining a small but powerful op center there.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

The movement to leave the EU was split in two, between a Farage-dominated camp called Leave.EU and an official mainstream campaign called Vote Leave. Vote Leave was expected to be more respectable, to deliver a traditional eurosceptic message focused on loss of sovereignty. The man at its head was called Dominic Cummings. He seemed to be a fairly typical political figure, with a track record working in the education department during the Conservative government. But in fact he was something altogether different. Cummings was prepared to break all the unspoken rules and principles of political conduct. His thinking was not really conservative at all.

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail
by Nick Wallis
Published 18 Nov 2021

And if a late-dropping story gets any weekend coverage at all, it is usually a passing mention – just enough to stop any news editor bothering with it on Monday morning. I called BBC Radio 4’s Today show and spoke to a producer I know. They felt the 900 figure was unlikely to get much coverage that particular weekend as the programme had a big Dominic Cummings exclusive. The producer proposed holding the story for Monday. Providing Monday’s programme editor liked it, providing no other news outlet got to the story first and providing nothing more newsworthy happened to squeeze it out of the running order, the 900 prosecutions figure could be beamed into millions of people’s cars and kitchens on the same day The Great Post Office Trial started.