the times | Wednesday January 19 2022 3
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REUTERS; ANDY PARSONS/I-IMAGES; REX FEATURESto run the Remain campaign, “What
he is brilliant at doing is creating a
kind of guerrilla warfare against the
establishment. He found the weak
spots and probed them relentlessly.”
“They admire each other’s strengths,”
Matthew Elliott, the chief executive
of Vote Leave, told the Financial
Times. “Boris is funny, witty,
charismatic, intelligent... Dom is
massively bright, can bring a team
together and drive things.”
Cummings’s role in the Vote Leave
campaign was flatteringly portrayed
by Benedict Cumberbatch in the
drama Brexit: The Uncivil War.
When Johnson eventually took over
from Theresa May as prime minister
in July 2019, with a mandate to deliver
the result of the 2016 referendum, he
appointed Cummings as his senior
adviser. As ever, he made enemies
and took no prisoners.
A “hard rain” was going to fall
on the civil service, he warned. He
advertised for “weirdos and misfits”
to join his team in Downing Street.
But it was the pandemic that was
to define Johnson’s time in Downing
Street, and end Cummings’s: his
lockdown-breaking trip to Barnard
Castle “to test his eyesight” before
driving back to London, followed by
his self-absolving press conference in
the Downing Street garden.
Some “senior Tories” told Sylvester
that Johnson’s doubts dated from
when Sajid Javid resigned as
chancellor, having refused Cummings’s
demand to put Treasury advisers
under Downing Street control. “That
was the beginning of the end,” one
said. “The prime minster thought,
‘What the hell has happened here?’ ”
Add to that Cummings’s alleged
contempt for the prime minister’s
now-wife, Carrie, and an internal
power struggle broke out. On
November 13, 2020, Cummings was
out, photographed standing alone on
Whitehall with his cardboard box of
political plutonium.
“There was this whole group of
officials in Johnson’s Downing Street
who were basically loyal to Cummings
before they were loyal to Johnson,”
says one well-placed observer. “All that
group have now left and are making
trouble from the outside, trying to
bring Boris down.”
For Cummings, Johnson would be
the hat-trick: the third Tory leader in
his cross hairs. “If a leader no longer
accepts everything he says, he finds
that difficult to cope with, and at some
point he turns on the person he is
serving,” Duncan Smith told Sylvester
in The Times. “He did that with me,
and Cameron and now he is doing it
with Boris.”
Cummings described Cameron
as “a sphinx without a riddle” and his
Downing Street as a “shambolic court”
staffed by third-rate, sycophantic aides.
In return, Cameron appeared to hit
out at Cummings as a “career
psychopath”. Either way, for
Cummings, it’s now Johnson’s turn.
“He taps into the public mood and
that is what’s now so toxic for Boris,”
one insider says. “If getting rid of
Boris is what he sets out to do, he
will succeed.”
In an excoriating blog in June last
year, Cummings castigated No 10 for
lying and said that a public inquiry
would not sufficiently hold the prime
minister to account. “So we either live
with chronic dysfunction for another
five years, or some force intervenes.”
Whether the force is with Cummings
remains to be seen.In June Cummings released
WhatsApp messages of the prime
minister calling Hancock “totally
f***ing hopeless”. He claimed that
during emergency Covid meetings at
the height of the pandemic Johnson
told “rambling stories and jokes”.
“When Cummings made that
blockbuster appearance at the select
committee, attempting to exculpate
himself from the decisions made
during Covid and laying most of the
blame at Boris’s door, I assumed that
was that,” says one insider. “But he
seems to want to keep coming back
until Boris’s premiership is fully dead.
He is embittered that he was forced
out. This is personal.”
It was Brexit, and his job running
Vote Leave, that brought Cummings
to national attention, but he’d been
earning his stripes at Westminster for
years. One who remembers meeting
Cummings when he worked for Iain
Duncan Smith in the early 2000s, at
the Department for Education,
recalls with astonishment that he
spent the whole meeting slagging off
his boss.
“He absolutely laid into him.
He’s totally dismissive of
everyone he’s ever worked for
apart from Michael Gove.” He
can be incredibly charming,
funny and clever, they add, and
“absolutely ghastly” to anyone
he doesn’t like or doesn’t rate.
“He’s quite happy to be
incredibly rude to people. I’m
not at all surprised by what’s
happened. Boris is the third
Tory leader he’ll try to bring
down. He’s a brilliant
campaigner, the best
campaigner in politics, and his
campaign now
is to get rid of Boris.”
Cummings, 50, was born
in Durham. His father was a
of his belligerence and in 2014
Cummings departed.
“He’s an obsessional character and
that’s not inconsistent with how he
behaved in politics,” says one insider
of Cummings, “His obsessions are
systems reform and remodelling
the civil service and he is utterly
uncompromising. That’s why he’s so
effective, but also why he’s ultimately
not that effective because there’s a
ceiling of obsession where people grow
tired of you.”
“Sometimes he was like a small
kid, overexcited and jumping about,
and sometimes he’d just sit in a corner
and basically sulk,” one former
colleague told the New Statesman. “He
just wants to sweep rotten stuff away,”
added another.In 2011 he married Mary Wakefield,
whom he met at a mutual friend’s
party. He already knew her brother,
Jack, and Wakefield later said that
“anyone who’s friends with Jack is
OK by me”. The couple have a son,
Alexander Cedd, known by the
family as Ceddy and named after a
Northumbrian saint. The family live in
Islington, with Cummings said to be a
regular at De Beauvoir Deli, an
upmarket coffee shop.
By 2015, two years after being
ousted by Cameron, Cummings was
back in the thick of it, helping Johnson
and Gove with the Brexit referendum.
Thanks to a long-standing suspicion of
politics and politicians, it was a natural
fit. A former colleague, Sam
Freedman, told Sylvester in May last
year: “He hates politics. He’s never
been a member of a party, he can’t
stand any of them and he’s got that
instinctive suspicion of politicians
that’s pretty standard in most people’s
minds. Boris is only interested in
power and politics and status, whereas
Dom is only interested in achieving
goals — like leaving the EU. He’s a
genuine revolutionary.”
According to Craig Oliver, Downing
Street director of communications
between 2011 and 2016, who helpedconstruction manager on oil rigs, his
mother a special educational needs
teacher. He was privately educated at
Durham School, then read ancient
and modern history at Exeter College,
Oxford, graduating in 1994 with a first.
Encouraged by Norman Stone,
one of his tutors and an adviser to
Margaret Thatcher, he spent three
years in Russia launching an
unsuccessful airline and watching
the collapse of communism from
a ringside seat. Liam Halligan, his
flatmate at the time, told Rachel
Sylvester of The Times: “It gave him
the sense that history and politics
were there to be shaped, and they are
shaped by people doing stuff and
winning arguments.”
Back in London, between 1999 and
2002 he led Business for Sterling, a
campaign that helped to dissuade
Tony Blair from calling a referendum
on membership of the euro, and which
also brought Cummings into contact
for the first time with Gove, who was
then a leader writer for The Times.
From there, and by now aged 30,
he joined the staff of the Tory leader
Duncan Smith as director of party
strategy. He told Sylvester at the time
that the man was “a muppet”. He went
on to work for the campaign that
persuaded voters in the northeast
to vote against Labour’s plan for a
regional assembly, which played to
his mistrust of big bureaucracies,
including the EU, and his belief that
politicians were liable to squander
public money. He campaigned against
the assembly with a giant inflatable
white elephant and the slogan
“Politicians talk, you pay”.
“He was not the most
talkative, but he was probably
the most influential,” the
chairman of the campaign
told the Financial Times.
“He was quite single-
minded. He kept on
message.”
By 2007, when David
Cameron made Gove
shadow education secretary,
Gove remembered the
young man from Business
for Sterling, with whom he’d
kept in touch, and made
Cummings his special adviser.
Cummings is credited with
saving Gove’s career on two
occasions, but according
to the New Statesman,
Cameron eventually tiredIf getting rid of
Boris is what he
sets out to do, he
will succeed
Dominic Cummings
leaves 10 Downing
Street in November- Above right:
watching the 2019
election results with
Carrie Symonds
and Boris Johnson.
Below: with his wife,
Mary Wakefield