Shortcummings

Maior privato visus dum privatus fuit, et omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset — Tacitus 

Or let me give you my own history: Reform should ignore Dom Cummings’s ongoing efforts to give Tim Shipman copy. Really. There’s some evidence as to why they should do that. You don’t need me to tell you, you know it already. But okay, it’s Friday afternoon, so why not? Here goes!

“He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon” would be good advice to any politician who receives a message from Dominic Cummings. Rather than reach for the cutlery drawer even better would be to delete the message and block the sender. Mr Cummings has a near perfect track record in ingratitude, taking credit for other people’s work, disloyalty and shallow and mostly duff political advice. What little skill he has is limited to ingratiating himself into the confidence of gullible politicians and needy hacks, quoting Bismarck, and an unending need for self-promotion.

Having run out of No 10 at the height of Covid to have an eye test in Barnard Castle — I’m sorry, protected his family from his Lockdown, because science, then was betrayed by the Trolley who was an ingrate and didn’t realise the four dimensional chess involved in being a twit — he reappears every now and then to let someone let him tell everyone else that he’s a genius. 

So, it’s a week with days in it, and here he is again, sporting some serious driving glasses and claiming in an interview with Sky News that he had delivered Brexit in 2019, was advising Nigel Farage, and that Kemi Badenoch “is going to go, probably this year.” He got his adrenaline hit. We’ve, for now, been spared, “making money … not speaking to Michael … [and] long delayed operation”. But pacing yourself is a key part of giving unparalleled political advice.

I’m not fit to advise Nigel Farage on who he should take counsel from, but as a public service, let’s remember some of Dom’s greatest hits!

Vote Leave
Contrary to the current myth, VL was badly run, did not have any magic “data” weapon and very nearly failed to get its registration papers in on time. What was Dom’s role? Well, limited. He didn’t set up the predecessor “Business for Britain”, came into VL at the behest of others, alienated those who were already there, spent most of his time feuding with other Brexiteers, claimed credit for the slogan “Take Back Control” and expected to lose. Far from thinking that “physicists” had delivered some inexorable masterplan guaranteeing Leave’s victory, Cummings spent late Spring and early Summer 2016 whining about his not being in control of VL, thus the campaign was going to lose, and it was everyone else’s fault. But maybe that was all a giant bluff?

Mr Cummings turned out to be the one person in Britain who could not keep control of the trolley

World of Michael
For his next trick, Mr Cummings contributed to Michael Gove’s brilliant, modest, loyal and charming idea of stabbing Boris Johnson in the back so that Theresa May could become PM instead. You don’t have to have been in the ERG trenches to rock back and forth, murmuring to yourself, “that … was a pity”. But Dear God it hurts helps.

Boriswave
Today, J’accuse reminds us all that Cummings once called immigration caps an “absurdity” and was behind the Global Talent Visa, launched just before the pandemic, which replaced a visa that had an annual cap.

BRINO in fact
But maybe Cummings didn’t mind May’s disastrous premiership — where she and Gavin Barwell managed to take the party in a national poll to fifth place and 8.8 per cent: a feat even Rishi Sunak and, as yet, Kemi Badenoch have not been able to achieve — because in 2019 the single greatest political thinker and map reader of our time went on to back her Chequers deal, labelling the ERG MPs opposed to it as “idiots”.

What would have happened if Michael Gove’s former spad had got his way in 2019, and Mr Gove’s own lusty, sincere, principled, impeccably well-mannered cheering on of May’s BRINO deal had finally got past the Commons (and not been stopped by, well, me)? That’s very simple: May would have (briefly) remained PM, the Customs Union and all-UK EU-rule taking of her and Gove’s useless deal would have happened, the Tory party would have fatally split, Farage’s Brexit party would have been turbocharged. And as the spurned unionists peeled off, the 2017 hung parliament would have collapsed with Corbyn likely winning the inevitable 2019 general election, where he’d have delivered even more BRINO. This was a stupid strategy. I’m glad we beat it and forced May’s successor to do what we wanted (and not what he — Boris — and Gove voted for, and which Mr Cummings of course called for).

Imagine the smell (of betrayal)
Come 2019, Mr Johnson had, I assume, concluded that he didn’t become PM last time because the Michaelanddom shat on him, so the best thing to do with this strange, double-faced, possibly double-arsed creature was to bring it too into his menagerie of stooges, wives, girlfriends, children, dog, wallpaper loaners and admiring profilers. He had convinced a hapless Boris Johnson to take him into the nest. The deal he, Gove and Johnson came up with was a bit but not much better than the May one, not least leaving a corner of the UK in the EU. Which, as we warned them at the time, has worked out wonderfully for the next Labour government, which has duly used Northern Ireland to start pulling the rest of the UK back into Brussels’s orbit.

Obviously in their “Get Brexit Done” election they promised all and sundry that they had no reverence for EU law and would sort out Northern Ireland later. Equally obviously, they did not. There is a pattern here.

Mad men
One of Dom’s first acts was to remove the Chancellor and install Rishi Sunak (with VL lags as spads to keep an eye on him). We will come back to Rishi Sunak. But now we came to Covid, an initial attempt to follow the official advice was soon overruled and with the help of his “data people” Mr Cummings cheerled a Chinese style lock up. But this was not one that was going to affect him, as he duly ran away from both herd immunity and Number 10. Boris, never one to miss the chance to let someone else take a bullet which might otherwise be coming his way, cunningly forgave him, and by all accounts greatly enjoyed the bizarre spectacle in the Rose Garden of Mr Cummings telling truth after truth after truth.

Sadly Mr Cummings repaid this indulgence by turning out to be the one person in Britain who could not keep control of the trolley. After picking suicide by girlfriend, rather than continuing with the bluff that he was going to do anything Moonshotty in Number 10, Conservative MPs finished the job and forced his dismissal.

Apparently then in some vastly clever way Mr Cummings persuaded with telepathy Mr Johnson to be even more Boris — or just as much Boris as he always was — and his government fell apart. Definitely because of Mr Cummings, who orchestrated the whole thing. Back of the net. Something something hand grenade. And by this telling the most recent example of the unbelievable geniusy brilliance of Dominic Cummings was to Underpants Gnomes make Rishi “winner” Sunak PM. Probably in order to make Keef PM, in order to make Nigel PM, in order to make Oliver “Sonic” Lewis PM.

But of course perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe he did transform government from within. Maybe English state schools are good enough for David Cameron to send his son to them. But then again, maybe the best advice for Reform is to never take any from Dominic Cummings.