PROBABLY the first time most people learned that Dominic Cummings wrote a blog was when it was revealed last week that he had been caught altering it months later to make himself look like a prophet. Oops.

Some of us have been reading it for a while now, on www.dominiccummings.comand you suspect Boris Johnson is not one of us. Had he read it, he might not have been so enthusiastic in proclaiming Cummings’s genius, given the signs it sends out. Or then again, maybe the Prime Minister did read it avidly and decided that Cummings was the Machiavelli – Domniavelli as I call him – he needed to do his dirty work.

The clues are in the “tell”, as a poker player would say, on a blog he doesn’t write every day as there are often long periods between entries. So here’s a simple interpretation of what Domniavelli wrote.

(To undertake a little exegesis of the blog does not confer on it the status of Holy Writ. Rather it makes clear to even a casual observer that the man, the mind, of Cummings can be detected in what he has written.)

In places it is surprisingly readable. In others it’s far too jargon-filled – so much for the master of the simple message – but frankly it’s more true than anything his boss ever produced in a journalistic career filled with bombast and balderdash. It also goes off at tangents, and is no less entertaining for that.

His most famous and most repeated post was in January when he called for a different sort of people to work for him and Boris, but mostly him. These included data scientists and software developers, economists, policy experts, project managers and communication experts, plus “junior researchers, one of whom will also be my personal assistant”. Good luck with that, whoever got the job, or gets it in future.

Famously he added “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” and explained why: “We want to improve performance and make me much less important – and within a year largely redundant. At the moment I have to make decisions well outside what Charlie Munger calls my ‘circle of competence’ and we do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed. This must change fast so we can properly serve the public.”

There you have it in his own words: he isn’t up to the job. And he added: “I don’t really know what I’m looking for but I want people around

Number 10 to be on the lookout for such people.” Yup, he really wrote that.

Sometimes the devil is in his detail. In one of his blogs on why a second EU referendum had to be avoided, he wrote: “Vote Leave hacked the referendum.” That’s an astonishing admission that nobody has seized on.

READ MORE: Ian Blackford makes formal call for Dominic Cummings probe

Cummings is hugely into complexity and predictions and had – and probably still has – an obsession with Labour and the SNP joining up to defeat Brexit.

As a student of ancient and modern history, he is familiar with the work of many historians, but his principal “go-to” historian was a general in ancient Greece – Thucydides, who lived in the 5th century BC and whose History of the Peloponnesian War is our main source for information on that conflict.

He quotes with seeming approval this passage from Thucydides, as translated by Benjamin Jowett: “Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared … In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple do for goodness; men take pride in one, but are ashamed of the other ... The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition.”

There are so many other insights that can be gained from reading the blog. Try it.