By Jordan Fermanis
It was the testimony we were all anticipating. Dominic Cummings was asked to give evidence to the parliamentary select committee tasked with examining what lessons can be drawn from the government’s handling of the covid-19 pandemic.
Cummings famously resigned as one of Boris Johnson’s top advisers in November after an internal struggle inside No 10 ultimately sealed his fate. His resignation followed the exit of another member of Boris Johnson’s inner sanctum, director of communications Lee Cain.
At the time the exit of Cain, but especially Cummings, sparked rumours of an internal power struggle inside No 10 between the pair and Johnson’s girlfriend (now wife) Carrie Symonds. In his testimony Cummings accused Symonds of trying to hire her friends for jobs inside government.
Cummings’s notoriety stems from his role as campaign director of the 2016 Vote Leave campaign. As a leading figure for Leave, Johnson became acquainted with Cummings’s politics and the pair forged a close personal relationship. In his bid to become prime minister, Johnson appointed Cummings as a senior adviser where he coined the “Get Brexit Done” message that propelled Johnson to the prime ministership with the largest Tory majority in over thirty years.
There is hardly a more divisive figure in British politics than Dominic Cummings. To some, he has a reputation as a clever and astute political operator, a man driven by research and data who takes a forensic view of politics, policy and is a mastermind at winning elections. But he is also known as a disruptor. Almost his entire career has been dedicated to opposing the status quo; whether that be in education reform, Britain’s relationship to Europe or government bureaucracy within Whitehall.
It is little wonder that the idea of Cummings giving testimony to the parliamentary committee was met with unbridled expectation. Not only because Cummings’s direct and unfiltered approach would undoubtedly provide an “insiders” view of No 10 machinations, but also because he would spare no blushes in describing the government’s handling of the pandemic.
From the very first, Cummings didn’t disappoint. He said the government failed the public in its greatest time of need. He made an apology for his part in the government’s disastrous handling of the covid-19 outbreak and made multiple accusations of wrongdoing and incompetence against the prime minister and other top government ministers. He even addressed his infamous drive to Barnard Castle to test his eye sight during the first lockdown. This time he explained that he left London for security reasons and called the episode a “major disaster” for the government.
Cummings first had his former boss Boris Johnson in his sights. He said Johnson initially thought coronavirus was a “scare story” like swine flu and repeatedly downplayed the danger it posed to the country. Cummings said that Johnson believed the real danger from the pandemic lay in the measures to fight the disease, rather than the disease itself and that this inspired a reluctance to announce lockdowns that may put the economy at risk. Asked to describe the early days of the pandemic inside No 10, Cummings responded it was like a “scene from the film Independence Day”.
Next up for punishment was health secretary Matt Hancock. Cummings lunged into an all out assault on Hancock, accusing him of not only lying to the government and the public on multiple occasions, but also revealing he recommended Johnson sack Hancock who he says should have been fired at least 15 to 20 times.
When Cummings wasn’t taking aim at either Johnson or Hancock, he was taking umbrage with the system of government bureaucracy more broadly. He described the government’s response to the pandemic as a “classic historical example of group-think in action,” railing against the inadequacies of Whitehall with its mass of incompetent technocrats. He often repeated that the needlessly complicated, antiquated and monolithic machine of Whitehall is not fit for purpose, unable to face the challenges posed by a crisis like a pandemic.
But throughout his testimony Cummings was also giving glimpses of his guiding principles concerning the relationship between government and power. For the last ten years Cummings has assiduously written a blog, writing down his ideas and beliefs and shaping these into ambitious policies and reforms. So important is the blog to Cummings that at the height of the pandemic last year, he altered a previous post about the threat of pandemics caused by coronaviruses to make it look like he had predicted the covid-19 pandemic.
In an earlier post from 2014, Cummings gives a glittering account of visiting the Google headquarters in Silicon Valley for the SciFoo conference. The invitation came after Cummings published his “Odyssean” essay on education reform in The Guardian while working for Michael Gove who was then education secretary. From this post it is clear Cummings is completely infatuated with science, technology and particularly the nascent tech industry dominated by start-ups and utopian visionaries. But Cummings’s praise is often tempered with a healthy dose of self-criticism. Reporting back on what he learnt at the SciFoo event, Cummings said he felt guilty about being there. He lamented that of the 200 or so guests, he was one of the only ones to make no contribution and most likely took the place of someone better placed to attend.
This mixture of a man obsessed by the potential of technology combined with a kind of imposter syndrome continues to the present day. In his testimony Cummings makes judgement calls on the intelligence of those around him ad nauseam. He is at pains to tell the inquiry he sought the advice of the best and brightest experts in the world like the Oxford University epidemiologist Sir John Bell. He frequently suggests those in senior positions in Whitehall lack the required intelligence and prevent young and brighter juniors from achieving more success.
But the most damning piece of testimony Cummings deployed was saved for himself and Johnson. Cummings admits to being focused on other issues when covid struck, not paying enough attention to the virus as it spread ferociously across the country. In his version of events, Cummings said that after he had successfully changed the government’s course on a herd immunity strategy he was largely frozen out of No 10. It is this fact that means Cummings can’t shake the image of a disgruntled former employee still eager to disparage his former boss and colleagues. In one of the more humorous moments of the testimony, Cummings said that any system which ends up giving the public a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson is a system that is “profoundly wrong”. He said it was “completely crackers” someone like himself was in a senior position in government, arguing the system tends to weed out the best while leaving lions to lead donkeys. But most poignant and instructive of all was his answer to the question of whether Boris Johnson was a fit and proper person to get us through this pandemic, Cummings simply replied “no”.
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