NOBODY should have been surprised when the worm turned. Dominic Cummings not only lacks loyalty to the Conservative party, he has always had a dim view of those leading it.
He was, briefly, Tory Head of Strategy but left describing the then leader Iain Duncan Smith as a “muppet” and “incompetent”. David Cameron he labelled a “sphinx without a riddle”, bumbling “from one shambles to another” whilst he has now called Johnson “unfit” to be Prime Minister, and likened him to a “shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle to the other” .
Yet it is not just party leaders who are subject to his scorn. He memorably called David Davis “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus”, said that the European Research Group, when chaired by Jacob Rees Mogg should be “treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic” and this week called Matt Hancock a serial liar and his Health department a “smoking ruin”.
I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for imaginative invective and Cummings in full flow certainly grabs ones attention, in a sort of car crash manner.
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But governing properly is about much more than verbal fireworks. It is about loyalty, shared purpose and subordinating egos to get results in the face of adversity,
Cummings record on those matters is as threadbare as his actual achievements and therefore no matter how entertained we are, and no matter how great the discomfiture of our political enemies might be, we should sup with a very long spoon when dealing with either him or his accusations.
The Cummings of this world – the creatures of the dark side of politics – do not build, they destroy and if we applaud them we are actually applauding not just the arrogant, bankrupt Westminster majoritarian system which creates and encourages them, but also their contemptuous trashing of democracy.
Of course it is plain to see that there is a Westminster swamp and it is getting muckier and mirkier by the day.
Cummings, though, has not been draining that swamp, he has been wallowing in it. Indeed of all the alligators guarding the fetid mess called the Tory Government he was at one time the most feared as, for example, the former Treasury Spad Sonia Khan discovered when she was cross examined by him, forced to hand over her phone and then marched out of Downing Street by armed police at his instruction.
She received, it is alleged, a five figure sum in settlement of her tribunal claim but of course her boss the Chancellor, in a subsequent showdown, was forced out of office by Cummings’ insistence on absolute control.
Cummings’ legendary cleverness and ability to read the public mood is just that – a legend, lacking in reality. He tried to create an airline and failed, quickly gave up on guiding Tory strategy, dabbled in the dubious world of so called free schools, was forced out of his role working for Michael Gove (someone who, it should be noted, he has not criticised and whose faux emollient manner provides the insidious counterpoint to Cummings verbal brutality) and has now spectacularly crashed and burned as the key adviser to a Prime Minister.
The only job in which he seems to have succeeded was the one in which he chose to mislead the public in order to deliver the worst political and constitutional mis-step in generations, resulting in the hardest of exits from the EU which has already caused – and will go on causing – economic carnage, diminished standards and huge damage to the UK’s international reputation.
Given that record, Cummings’ attempt in his evidence to decry as unworthy the system he served because it could only throw up the choice of Johnson or Corbyn rang hypocritically hollow not least because of the way the Conservatives are increasingly perverting elections by dirty tricks and with dirty money.
The real criticism is not the poverty of choice. It is that someone like Cummings, elected by no one and accountable only to his own exaggerated view of his intelligence and self importance, can gain and then misuse the power of the state in the way he did with no democratic mandate and with a contempt for any and all scrutiny as his previous approach to Parliamentary committees shows.
Cummings proves we don’t need less democracy, we need more of it. Fortunately Scotland has, once the pandemic is over, a clear route to securing such an essential 21st century improvement and leaving such grubby, squabbling, autocratic behaviour behind us.
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