50 Britain The EconomistFebruary 8th 2020
F
or a manwidely regarded as a cross between Machiavelli and
Rasputin, Dominic Cummings has lost a lot of battles lately.
The prime minister’s special adviser opposed both Huawei’s in-
volvement in Britain’s 5gnetworks and the hs2 rail network
(which he labelled “a disaster zone”). Boris Johnson has given the
green light to the first and is shortly expected to approve the sec-
ond. Mr Cummings’s plan to cut the size of the cabinet and create a
super-department of business has been ditched. So have his
schemes to turn Downing Street into a nasa-style mission-control
centre and to ship Conservative Party headquarters to the north of
the country.
He suffered yet another embarrassment this week when he
tried to challenge the prerogatives of the lobby—the collection of
political journalists who get special briefings from “Westminster
sources”. Mr Cummings has been waging war on the media for
some time, for instance by banning ministers from appearing on
programmes that he regards as hostile, and he kicked the conflict
up a notch on February 3rd, allowing only selected members of the
lobby to attend a briefing. The rejects included a disproportionate
number of journalists from left-wing publications.
Mr Cummings’s attack on the lobby was as politically inept as it
was illiberal. The entire lobby walked out of Downing Street in
solidarity and even the Tory-backing Daily Mailwrote an angry edi-
torial. And rightly so: Mr Cummings offended against a basic prin-
ciple of a free society that the government can’t pick and choose
who gets official press briefings. Mr Cummings made his reputa-
tion as a campaigner, and campaigners can set whatever rules they
like for the press. Government officials need to understand that
they are accountable to the public that pays their salaries.
Yet Mr Cummings should not be written off as a spent force or
serial bungler. His squabble with journalists is part of a wider war
on what he likes to call “the blob”—the bbc, the universities, the
quangos, the law courts and the Whitehall machine—whose func-
tionaries slither from one comfortable berth to another regardless
of who wins the general election.
Mr Cummings explains his loathing for the blob in his long and
entertaining blog. He argues that it is made up of “grotesque in-
competents” who managed to lose the eureferendum despite hav-ing the resources of the state at their disposal. They think alike;
they are more interested in using ideas to signal that they’re re-
spectable members of the in-group than in engaging in construc-
tive argument; they are woefully ignorant of vital forces such as ai
that are revolutionising the world. A recent advertisement for
“weirdos and misfits” to join him in Downing Street nicely illus-
trates his thinking. “What sw1 needs,” he argues, dismissing the
collective brainpower of the district that includes the country’s
politicians and top civil servants, is “true cognitive diversity” rath-
er than “more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge
humanities graduates.”
The term “blob” was originally invented by William Bennett,
America’s education secretary in 1985-88, to describe the nexus of
officials, teachers and educationalists who always had an argu-
ment against what the government wanted to do. Mr Cummings
once worked as a special adviser to Michael Gove, then education
secretary and subsequently one of the principal forces driving the
campaign to leave the eu. Messrs Gove and Cummings happily
borrowed it. The two battled furiously for more self-governing
academies free from local-authority oversight. They fought the
blob—and the blob fought back. David Cameron grew so worried
that the government was alienating parents and teachers that he
moved Mr Gove sideways and banned Mr Cummings from work-
ing in Whitehall, dubbing him a “career psychopath”.
But as the referendum proved, Mr Cummings is closer to the
spirit of the modern Conservative Party than is Mr Cameron. The
party is never happier than when it is slaying dragons. And now
that the trade unions and the Eurocrats are lying prone the blob is a
promising adversary. It is full of bureaucrats who have grown fat
on restrictive practices and gripped by a woke ideology that started
in university campuses but is now spreading to law and business.
Despite Mr Cummings’s recent setbacks, the war against the
blob is advancing on several fronts. Take the bbc. The government
is holding a public consultation into the case for decriminalising
the non-payment of television licences, through which the bbcis
funded. Or the senior judiciary. Furious at the Supreme Court’s
unanimous decision against Mr Johnson’s proroguing of Parlia-
ment last year, some leading Conservatives are thinking of using
the opportunity of a constitutional review, announced in the man-
ifesto, to abolish the Supreme Court and return its functions to the
House of Lords.
The government is taking on some more unlikely examples of
“blobism”. It is increasingly treating the Confederation of British
Industry (cbi) as a bosses’ trade union that is more interested in
spouting platitudes about corporate social responsibility than em-
bracing disruption. Mr Johnson delivered the organisation a cal-
culated snub this week by not inviting any of its representatives to
his big speech on Britain’s future trading relationships.
And Mr Cummings has an even bigger force on his side than the
Conservative Party’s instincts—the technological revolution that
is reordering the world and that, according to him, most people in
sw1 know almost nothing about. It is particularly menacing for the
liberal professions that depend on licences and restrictive prac-
tices. Can the bbcsurvive in a world of multi-screens and multi-
channels? Or can the cbicontinue to represent business when
companies are being born and destroyed at a furious rate?
The combative Mr Cummings may pick too many fights for his
own good. He might get edged out of Downing Street, or just
flounce out. But if that happens, the blob should not kid itself that
it has won, for it has other, more dangerous enemies. 7Bagehot Cummings v the blob
The prime minister’s special adviser faces a tough adversary