I blame Benedict Cumberbatch. Until he played Dominic Cummings in James Graham’s dramatisation of the winning Vote Leave campaign, few outside the Westminster bubble he professes to hate had ever heard of Cummings. Today, he gets more coverage than any cabinet minister, with the occasional exception of the primus inter pares, Boris Johnson. Dominic Raab, anyone?
With the movie, Brexit: The Uncivil War long under his belt and a Hollywood A-lister playing him, now Cummings gets his own TV documentary, in which TV A-lister Emily Maitlis, reigning Royal Television Society Network Presenter Of The Year, examines his influence for BBC Two. Whether Cummings wants the attention or not, I don’t know him well enough to make a judgement, though his studied scruffiness as he hangs around at the back of the room, his rambling blogs and determination to bring “weirdoes and misfits” to the heart of government all suggest he is looking for it.
The format is fairly standard, trotting through key phases in Cummings’ up-and-down career, alongside interviews with talking heads, nearly all male, white and middle-aged, saying what you might expect them to.
So Daniel Hannan, self-styled “brain of Brexit”, whose most recent contribution to political debate was his expression of the hope that the coronavirus might eradicate handshaking and so herald a return of the bow and the curtsy, views his fellow Brexiteer as a “genius”.
Vote Leave chief executive and mover and shaker of the international right, Matthew Elliott, sees Cummings' skills as a perfect fit to sit at the right hand of a populist prime minister. Dominic Grieve and David Gauke, two of the MPs culled from the Tory party for daring to suggest a no deal Brexit would be a disaster, tend more to the evil side of the evil genius cliché. So does Craig Oliver, Cummings’ Remain oppo in that uncivil war and still clearly shocked by just how brutal and untruthful the Leave side was prepared to be.
Peter Mandelson appears to sit somewhere between the two poles, clearly admiring of Cummings’ drive, determination and take-no-prisoners approach, but suggesting that it might just all blow up in his face.
If I learned anything, it was the extent to which Cummings felt the Tory Party mishandled New Labour and the dominance, over a decade and three election wins, of Tony Blair. “Never hate your enemy. It affects your judgement.”
It’s a Cummings’ line taken from The Godfather – there are quite a few clips from famous movies dotted around the documentary and this one, unlike others, at least has the merit of feeling relevant. Cummings’ point was that so many Tories hated Blair so much – not least for the impertinence of winning power (that’s their job, which is why we have had three times more Old Etonian prime ministers than Labour ones) – that it stopped them from assessing him properly.
He clearly has more respect for Blair’s political skills than those of the former Tory leader he briefly served as director of strategy, Iain Duncan Smith. “I gave him a year to try to prove himself," he later explains, failing to hide his contempt, in one of the few clips in which we hear his actual voice. It was, he explains, “the nightmare of the living dead… This farce has gone on too long.”
His story is of a man weaving in and out of the political wilderness. In with IDS. Then out. One minute launching a rightwing think tank long forgotten, but whose ideas are undoubtedly influencing policy now, almost two decades on, the next helping to defeat the Labour government plans for a North East regional assembly, in which he tried out some of the dubious tactics – such as outright lying about facts and figures and the turning of people against politicians as a breed – that he would later deploy for Brexit. In favour when Michael Gove was in charge of Tory education policy, then out again when prime minister David Cameron felt he was creating too many enemies and damaging the government. In again when Brexit was won. Out again when Theresa May replaced Cameron. Now very much in with Johnson.
Throughout it all, a very rightwing worldview, a quirky mind, a belief that the current political system and institutions don’t work, a love of mavericks, loathing of Europe (albeit angrily denying for years that he felt Britain should leave the EU), a loathing too of incremental change in favour of revolution and a determination to work on his terms, which, for now at least, Johnson appears willing to allow. “Punk rock activism,” is how one contributor puts it.
One of the rare genuinely revealing moments comes from one of the few women interviewed – indeed, writing this the morning after I watched it, I think she was the only one, apart from campaigner Gina Miller (today’s Tory Party is very much a game for the boys). Mary Bousted, a teaching union leader, recalls a meeting with Gove, interrupted by Cummings storming in, barefoot, “And he sat there whistling and looking at me with complete contempt.” Bullying, she calls it, reprehensible. Gove allowed it, as Johnson allows it now.
Another woman I would have liked to see interviewed is Sonia Khan, the former Treasury special advisor marched out of Downing Street virtually at gunpoint after Cummings accused her of consorting with her former boss, Philip Hammond. We will have to wait for an employment tribunal before we get her story, but we did hear from another SPAD, Peter Cardwell, revealing that Cummings had told them all, after Johnson became PM, that if any of them leaked, they would be sacked and marched out. “You have no rights.” I found myself agreeing with Dave Penman, leader of the senior civil service union, First Division Association, that, “People around the prime minister should not need fear to operate in Number Ten.”
“You have no rights.” Fine for a Benedict Cumberbatch movie. Not so clever in the real world. Especially at a time of crisis, when government leaders will require the goodwill of millions of people, among them public servants committed to public service not political revolution, to get through it. Mr Johnson may by now have realised that real doctors, not spin doctors, are likely to be more important to his political survival.
Taking Control: The Dominic Cummings Story is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm.
Brexit: The Uncivil War – Cumberbatch is great as the slippery Dominic Cummings
Boris Johnson's former aide: Dominic Cummings will be gone by the summer
Boris Johnson’s time as a journalist says a lot about the type of man he is
