Politics: the curse of Cummings

By Richard North - December 31, 2023

Back in July, according to Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times, there was a meeting held in North Yorkshire, under conditions of the “utmost secrecy” between prime minister Sunak and Johnson’s nemesis, the egregious Dominic Cummings.

If there is any truth in the narrative offered by Shipman – apparently based on an interview Cummings himself – over dinner, Sunak was contemplating bringing Cummings back into the fold, working for the Conservative Party machine on election strategy, to which effect he sought advice on how to win the coming general election.

This was, apparently, the second of two meetings, the first held in December last year in London at which the prime minister’s chief of staff, Liam Booth-Smith, was also present, shortly after the pair had moved into Downing Street.

The revelations – the substance of which have not been denied by No 10 – have certainly got the political hacks excited. Versions of the story have appeared in short order in the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mail and others, including the Spectator magazine.

All the different versions seem to stem from the same source, the ST interview, which means they have nothing to add beyond the basics, although it is the Spectator which makes it clearest that the meetings were at the behest of Sunak, with the point rammed home by the Telegraph headline which declares: “Rishi Sunak tried to lure me back to No 10, Dominic Cummings claims”.

Cummings would have it that Sunak wanted a “secret deal” in which he was supposed to deliver “the election”, in exchange for which, the prime minister had promised “to take government seriously after the election”.

This rather odd choice of words would seem to suggest that Sunak wasn’t prepared to take government seriously before the election, except that Cummings seems to have his own definition of “serious”.

These, if Cummings was to have his way, included No 10 “truly prioritising the most critical things”, like the scandal of nuclear weapons infrastructure, natural and engineered pandemics, the scandal of MoD procurement, AI and other technological capabilities, and the broken core government institutions which, says Cummings, “we started fixing in 2020 but Boris abandoned”.

This transpired in the December meeting, with the Cummings demands rejected by Sunak who instead worked with Isaac Levido, the Tory election director, to devise the “five priorities” against which Sunak would ask the nation to judge his performance.

The were the promises to cut inflation, debt and NHS waiting lists, to boost economic growth and the infamous and so far unsuccessful attempt to “stop the boats”. The only fly in the ointment, with this cunning plan, though, was that Levido thought it would not lead to significant change in the polls before the end of 2023, which rather reduced their utility as an election-winner.

By July, therefore, Sunak – conscious of his party’s continuing slide in the polls and the rumblings of discontent amongst his MPs – was losing his nerve. It was then, encouraged by his political secretary and former Telegraph journalist, James Forsyth, that he met Cummings again, this time in his North Yorkshire constituency.

Currently, No 10 is stressing that no formal job offer was made, with Sunak telling Cummings that “the MPs and the media will go crazy. Your involvement has to be secret”, but we are told by Cummings that Sunak rejected his terms on “radical reform” of Whitehall as “too risky”.

Both times, it is claimed, Cummings told Sunak to settle the NHS strikes and make rebuilding the health service one of his core priorities, launching a national effort in the spirit of the Vaccine Taskforce. He is also said to have advocated “leaving” the European Convention on Human Rights.

In the absence of a firm agreement, Cummings decided he would rather see the Tories lose than continue in office without prioritising what was important. He suggests that “the post-2016 Tories are summed up by the fact that Sunak, like Johnson, would rather lose than take government seriously. Both thought their MPs agreed with them, and both were right”.

Although the publication of the story is too recent (at the time of writing) to attract much editorial comment, with most papers sticking to the basics (with the BBC so far completely ignoring the story), the Independent does add a response from Labour which has its spokesman say that Sunak is “out of ideas” and relying on “the ghosts of Tories past”.

It is left to the Spectator, therefore, to add analytical comment, observing that Sunak is a sticker for the process and structures that Cummings wants to smash. Furthermore, the pair were at odds over lockdown and Sunak thought that Cummings and Johnson shared a “spend now, worry later” approach to public finances. And what Cummings refers to as “repairing” government was his “command-and-control method” that Sunak came to see as the ruination of government.

Thus, the magazine concludes, it’s hard to see a Sunak-Cummings axis ever working but adds that it’s “interesting that the idea was ever considered”.

In fact, it’s more than interesting. It’s utterly bizarre. By the time he was ejected from his No 10 post in November 2020, it must have been abundantly clear that Cummings was a wrecker, leaving nothing but chaos in his wake, and a string of mortally offended co-workers who vowed never to have anything to do with the man again.

Although he stands on his reputation as the architect of the “Vote Leave” campaign, any sanguine view of his efforts can only conclude that he “masterminded” a train-wreck devoid of forward planning in the event of a win, contributing to the shambles that dominated the Brexit negotiations.

As to his efforts in the 2019 election, he is credited with engineering the victory in a context where the completion of the Brexit negotiations was the main agenda item and Johnson was up against Corbyn in a contest that was basically unlosable.

And while Cummings styles himself an “intellectual”, his interminably prolix blogposts offer no signs of the clarity that would be expected of even a reasonably competent communicator, while his aggression and bluster conceals an innate cowardice in that, when confronted by those who stand up to him, he runs away and hides.

Before his current “revelations”, his most recent claim to fame was a rambling dissertation on the creation of a “start-up party” to replace the Tories, with the timing set for last September.

He argued that, from that September, a long election campaign would effectively start, as a continuation of 2023 – a weekly race to show who is worse at politics but with all fundamentals favouring Starmer.

But then, he predicts, the “dud Starmer” will fail from Day 1 and the patterns of failure will be the same as we’ve seen since Brown (with the brief partial exceptions of July-December 2019 and March-May 2020 – coinciding with his time in No 10).

Nearly 20,000 words later, in a single blogpost, and one is not much further forward, other than to learn that the self-appointed Messiah was planning to make a decision around mid-September on whether he was going to spend a lot of time over the next year trying to build a team that can really set up a “start-up party” and, presumably, lead his followers out of bondage.

All this was published less than a month after he had met Sunak for the second time, in July, and it was on his mind when he met the prime minister as he had been signalling his intentions since June.

The real question to ask, therefore, is what on earth was in Sunak’s mind when he approached Cummings. Is the Tory Party so devoid of talent and ideas that he thought he had anything to gain from communing with this powder-keg ego, and was he so naïve that he really thought that Cummings would keep his mouth shut about the meetings?

It remains to be seen, however, whether Sunak is damaged by Cummings’s indiscretions. When a ship is already heavily damaged below the waterline and sinking fast, another torpedo won’t make that much difference. It could be argued that the prime minister is in that position.

But anyone who might have been starting to think that the Conservative leader was a man of integrity and judgement – despite all the evidence to the contrary – must surely be rethinking their position.

Meanwhile, according to Shipman, Sunak is now crafting his own strategy, based on asking voters to decide between “a Conservative Party that is delivering lower taxes, because we have now halved inflation and controlled spending, or a Labour Party that’s just going to borrow an enormous amount more”.

Probably, he needn’t bother because nothing he says is going to make much difference. Over the weekend, though, he must be ruing the day he ever sat down with Cummings.