Taking Control: the Dominic Cummings Story, BBC2, review: failed to tell us anything new about No 10’s puppetmaster

It was difficult not to conclude that the BBC was afraid of asking proper questions about the Prime Minister's chief adviser

Taking Control: the Dominic Cummings Story, BBC2, 9pm ★★

The problem with making a documentary about a man who doesn’t give interviews and doesn’t appear to have many friends is obvious: how do you actually reveal anything about him? It is a problem that Taking Control: the Dominic Cummings Story never quite managed to overcome.

There was almost nothing here about Boris Johnson’s chief adviser that you wouldn’t have known already if you picked up a newspaper from time to time – mostly because the majority of the talking heads were political journalists. Any insight they have has long since been splashed across the front pages.

Dominic Cummings listens to Boris Johnson as he gives a press conference on the ongoing COVID-19 situation (Photo: Richard Pohle / POOL / AFP)
Dominic Cummings listens to Boris Johnson as he gives a press conference on the ongoing COVID-19 situation (Photo: Richard Pohle/POOL/AFP)

The mistake was to focus on Cummings’ career in politics. As a potted history, the film was perfectly efficient, tracing a coherent path from Cummings’ involvement in the campaign against joining the euro to being puppetmaster in Downing Street, via fiery stints working for Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove.

But it would have been far more interesting to dig into his personal life a bit. Where did he grow up? What was he like at school? Why does he wear his jumper inside out? Anything at all to give us a sense of where Cummings’ beliefs were formed and what drives him. Instead, we got Douglas Carswell telling us that Cummings was offering “a very un-Tory approach to Euroscepticism”.

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What did emerge is how fearful people are of Cummings. Only Dominic Grieve and Mary Bousted, former general secretary of the ATL teachers’ union, dared say a bad word about him. The rest trod carefully. One special advisor threw himself at Cummings’ feet, recalling how he had predicted the Tory election victory: “I was 100 per cent wrong; you were 100 per cent right.”

Sadly, one couldn’t help conclude that the BBC was also too afraid to ask the tricky questions, for fear of irritating Cummings, a man people very much seem to want on side – especially political journalists, who need to be privy to his legendary off-the-record briefings. All a bit pathetic, really.

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