Cummings fiasco shows how British politics has become Americanised

On May 31, 2017, Donald Trump got up and did what he does most mornings. He dashed off a tweet. “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”, the president wrote. Then he pressed send, presumably by accident.

But rather than just delete the obvious typo – or laugh it off – Trump did what he does best. He doubled down. The tweet’s wording was intentional, he hinted. The White House press secretary rallied behind his boss. “I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” Spicer told reporters. On Fox News, pundits agreed. Trump was sending a message. “Covfefe.”

I thought about this exchange a lot this week as I watched the parade of British Cabinet ministers solemnly declare that Dominic Cummings had done nothing wrong. Last Saturday – when all we knew was that Boris Johnson’s seemingly irreplaceable special advisor had driven his family to Durham while coming down with coronavirus – Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden told his Twitter followers: “Dom Cummings followed the guidelines and look after his family. End of story.”

Of course, it wasn’t the end of the story. Within a couple of hours of the Tory MP’s tweet fresh news broke. As well as driving 260 miles north, Cummings had gone for a saunter around Barnard Castle, a pretty-looking spot barely an hour and a half from his ancestral home.

Surely now the Downing Street Machiavel was toast? Who could now defend such a flagrant breach of the lockdown rules that we have all been forced to obey? Turns out plenty could.

In television studios and radio booths, grinning Conservative media boosters dismissed anyone who questioned Cummings’s behaviour as an uncaring partisan – conveniently ignoring the fact that both Scotland’s chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, and British government scientist, Neil Ferguson, had resigned for very similar breaches.

It was not just the grifters and the paid provocateurs that rallied around. Health Secretary Matt Hancock effectively rewrote his pandemic strategy during a press briefing to avoid saying that Cummings had broken the rules. The supportive ministerial tweets kept coming in, even as backbench Conservative MPs called for Cummings’s shiny pate on a spike.

As I watched Boris Johnson’s disingenuous defence of his advisor – surely only a man with an indeterminate number of children could believe that Cummings acted “with integrity” – I kept thinking back to three years ago. “Covfefe”.

This is the Americanisation of British politics. Johnson and his neutered Cabinet colleagues might speak with the clipped tones of the public school, rather than the brash Americanisms of Trump and his cronies, but in practice there is increasingly little to separate them.

Dominic Cummings could, as political commentator Kenny Farquharson quipped, “headbutt Dame Vera Lynn and the PM still wouldn’t sack him”.

The importation of the US culture wars feels like it has happened suddenly. Sure, it was only a few years ago that British elections were decided by Middle England’s Mondeo men (and women). “Floating voters” were not just members of the electorate enjoying a quick dip.

It is easy to blame Brexit for the now daily tribalism. Once the whole country had been split into “leave” and “remain” – a division which, of course, Dominic Cummings fostered and encouraged – it’s not such a huge jump to justifying whatever “your side” does.

But look a bit deeper and we see that the Americanisation of British politics has been a long time coming. Indeed, the Brexit vote itself was directly inspired by the same techniques that brought the American right to power, from a bombastic right-wing press to the use of dark money and clandestine influence campaigns.

This isn’t an accident. It is striking how many senior figures in British politics have experience in the shady world of corporate-funded US think tanks.

Take Matthew Elliott. Long before he ran Vote Leave – or headed up Sajid Javid’s ill-fated Conservative leadership campaign last year – Elliott cut his political teeth in Washington DC’s libertarian think tank world. After a stint at Americans for Tax Reform, a “tax payer advocacy group” set up at the behest of Ronald Reagan, Elliott founded the TaxPayer’s Alliance. More than 15 years later, the anonymously funded TPA still has an over-sized platform, preaching its message of tax cuts and privatisation.

Dominic Cummings, too, has taken inspiration from the US right. In 2003, he set up his own think tank, the New Frontiers Foundation to “build something over time that could act as an equivalent to America’s The Heritage Foundation or American Enterprise Institute”. Cummings’s think tank flopped within 18 months – but soon he was taken on as Michael Gove’s advisor. And the rest is history.

And then there is Steve Bannon. The former Trump impresario started visiting Britain regularly in 2013 and has even claimed to have helped Boris Johnson when he resigned as foreign secretary over Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement. “I knew something big was happening in the UK,” Bannon told me in an interview for my new book. “It was the same driving force I could see in the United States.”

As with Trump in the US, Johnson’s government has attacked the press. My employer, openDemocracy, has been banned from Number 10’s coronavirus briefings after publishing unflattering stories about the official response to the pandemic.

The Conservative leader has often been aided by a cadre of sympathetic journalists – especially at his old employer, The Telegraph, where the opinion pages often look more like prime ministerial hagiographies than topical commentary. “The Telegraph has become like Fox News in the US, a for-profit commercial press outfit for a single political figure,” says media scholar Martin Moore.

British politics is starting to look more and more American in other ways, too. A small group of (often very) wealthy individuals have come to dominate the way in which British politics is funded – and to influence what policies make it onto the political agenda.

Unlike in the US, the amount of money involved in British politics is pretty meagre. The 2018 US midterm elections cost almost $6 billion. In the UK, just about anyone with £50,000 burning a hole in their back pocket can join the Conservative Leader’s Group and have an off-the-record dinner with the Prime Minister and leading Cabinet figures.

Of course, British politicians have long looked to the US for inspiration. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Thatcherites talked up the “special relationship”. Tony Blair – and even Gordon Brown – did the same thing, too.

But what’s happening now is different. The administrations on both sides of the Atlantic are conjoined not by their opposition to Soviet Communism but by their commitment to prevarication and distraction. Lying has become the common transatlantic bond.

Boris Johnson has never looked more like Donald Trump than he did in this week. The Prime Minister’s determination to “liberate” us from the lockdown looks awfully like a Trumpian desire to restart the economy at all costs.

What still remains to be seen, however, is whether British voters have become as Americanised as their party of government.

We know Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. More than 90% of Republican voters support the president, even as he uses Twitter to stoke violence in Minneapolis. But is “Workington man” going to support Boris Johnson when he tells them black is white?

Polls suggest most British voters believe that Dominic Cummings broke the rules – and want him to go. Perhaps there is still hope that Britain haven’t reached its “covfefe” moment. Yet.

Peter Geoghegan is investigations editor at openDemocracy. His new book Democracy For Sale: Dark Money And Dirty Politics is out in August