Why do you hate Dominic Cummings?
The interview with Boris Johnson's former advisor awoke familiar hatreds among his critics
I will bore anyone about how I’ve mostly quit Twitter, but I couldn’t resist checking how people felt about Dominic Cummings’ interview with the BBC last night. The reactions to the former campaign chief for Vote Leave and former chief advisor to prime minister Boris Johnson were predictably hysterical, but that didn’t make them any less delicious.
Mileages vary, of course, and I suspect some of you reading this harbour strong negative feelings against Cummings. For some his role in winning the Brexit referendum for leave, as recapped in the interview, will be the cause. Others will be more motivated by his rule-flouting during the height of Covid-19 restrictions last year. And some of you, being honest, just don’t like the look of him.
After all, what do you really know about Cummings? According to talk show host James O’Brien, he’s “what you’d get if you built a whole person from offcuts of Tufton Street inadequates [right-wing think tank staff], Spectator columnists (and publishers) and all the shady fuckers who fund them.”
Stephen Bush, the New Statesman’s political editor, puts Cummings within the tradition of the ‘rationalist right’ or what rationalist bloggers call ‘the grey tribe’. This is, to quote blogger Alexander Siskind, “typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football ‘sportsball’, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk”.
These two descriptions are not exactly aligned, but there is hefty overlap. O’Brien’s view puts Cummings roughly on the libertarian right (low-regulation economics, liberal social policies). Bush is describing him as something weirder, which doesn’t hail from Conservative party politics, but odder corners of the Internet.
I suspect that both these views overcomplicate Cummings for the public. The untrusting masses probably see him as a shady politico in the style of New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell. For those who are more engaged, I’d guess he’s more likely to be seen as another bloody Tory.
If you worked for the Spectator (the party’s house journal) and two Conservative governments, you can hardly be that upset that people assume that. But when you read what he actually wants to achieve, Cummings isn’t a small-c conservative.
Witness his attempts to blow up the constitution in 2019 by dismissing Parliament in a bid to ‘get Brexit done’. Consider his oft-stated enthusiasm for reforming the British state by opening up politics and the civil service to more people, for example by hiring “weirdos and misfits”. And remember that one of his signal achievements in office is creating the Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA), which will fund high-risk research.
Much of this was reiterated in the interview last night, alongside recaps on stories that have seeped into the press over the past few years. This included: Carrie Symonds meddling with political appointments, Johnson’s cavalier attitude to people dying during the pandemic (and general ineptitude), and Cummings’ pandemic escape to Durham being motivated by security concerns.
More intriguing were his references to a “network of people”, some connected to Vote Leave, who have tried to capture the Tories to pursue their agenda and even contemplated pushing Johnson out of office after the 2019 election. As Bush points out, most leadership teams can be described as an entryist cabals of sorts.
Either way this should make his critics reflect: if Cummings was a straightforward Tory, why would he need to subvert the party, or openly plot to destroy the two-party hegemony in British politics?
Cummings’ reputation as a satanic figure will no doubt be enhanced by the interview. But to my eye he exhibited many positive traits: a sense of absurdity for how politics works in this country; a blunt appraisal of the shortcomings of those involved; and an acceptance that while he thought Brexit was a good idea, nobody can be sure one way or the other. He at least wants the country to be better governed.
As F Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Alas, partisanship demands even of first-rate intelligences that everyone is an angel or a demon. And that is why you hate Dominic Cummings.