Boris Johnson’s former chief of staff has given a podcast interview to Kamal Ahmed in the Telegraph setting out his, by now, familiar critique of the British state. Heres how Kamal’s summary begins:
“He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet,” Noel Gallagher once said of his brother, Liam. “He’s a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
For those who don’t know him, Dominic Cummings often appears afflicted with the same helpless rage – a maverick, furious with the broken world around him and armed with little more than the wrong cutlery. I don’t even know if Cummings likes Oasis, the rock band that made Liam and Noel so famous in the 1990s that Tony Blair invited them to Downing Street. But one thing is true, Cummings is quietly plotting his own version of a comeback tour. The World of Soup beware.
We meet in his elegant Islington town house, where he lives with his wife, the Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield. It’s situated bang in the middle of the metropolitan, satisfied, liberal, elitist enclaves of the city he so regularly excoriates. The downstairs kitchen is a jumbled mess of family life, a rusting child’s bike in the garden, comfy battered chairs and a list of school packed-lunch arrangements for his young son chalked on a blackboard.
At the end of the garden hangs a large illustration depicting the final scene of the film Modern Times, where the Tramp, played by Charlie Chaplin, is seen walking into the distance with the Gamine, his companion. For a movie about the dehumanising risks of early-20th century industrialisation, it strikes a hopeful note of a better future. Next to it in the garden is a boxer’s punch bag.
And that sums up Dominic Mckenzie Cummings – a man motivated by a frustration so deep that one feels he often wants to hit something. And also a deeply held sense of optimism that there is something different and better both possible and coming. We can get there the easy way, or the hard way.
The elites have lost touch
“There’s a bunch of obvious, relatively surface, phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,” Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson and a man so divisive he could go by the title Lord Marmite, tells me.
“But I think what’s happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality.
“The ideas don’t match, the institutions can’t cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse.
“In the short term no one can, I think, be reasonably optimistic about politics because the old system is just going to play out over the next few years.
“But there are reasons for hope though, right? One obvious reason for hope is that Britain is pretty much unique globally for having got through a few hundred years without significant political violence.”
That seems a pretty low bar – the fact that the UK hasn’t suffered a bloody revolution or a fascist or communist takeover. Following the Southport riots and the more recent events in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, I ask if the risks of widespread disorder are increasing – some have even spoken of civil war, a brutal revolution.
“Ummm,” Cummings pauses.
“[Violence] is definitely a risk, but a lot of these things are very path-dependent. Countries that repeatedly have violence are more likely to have violence in the future.
“And countries that are good at avoiding it have a better chance of avoiding it. I think that the long term cultural capital that’s built up over centuries is an important factor and gives us some chance of avoiding the fate that you can see [elsewhere] of just spreading mayhem all over the world.”
It’s hot sitting overlooking the garden and Cummings, 53 and “fit-skinny”, provides water in glasses better suited for a fine Burgundy. I point out that he is wearing Berghaus foot warmers despite the temperature nudging 30C. “I don’t get hot,” he replies.
My colleague Cleo Watson, with me to record an edition of The Daily T podcast, says that he was known as the Vampire when they worked together in No 10, given his appearance of living in a body five degrees colder than everyone else’s. Like Prince Andrew, he doesn’t seem to sweat. When the production team’s cameras overheat, Cummings is immediately up offering solutions of a fan jammed messily down the back of a sofa.
Worth reading in full.
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I bet he knows just the man to fix it.
The British state is broken?
You don’t say.
Just look at the current government: Starmer, Reeves, Lammy, Rayner.
Nothing works properly. Every institution is busy doing something else than its purpose.
The NHS isn’t very good at healing patients but excels at woke initiatives.
The police can’t solve crime but arrests people for tweets.
Pakistani men sexually abuse girls for years with the authorities covering up for them.
The legal system imprisons Lucy Connolly but lets violent criminals go free.
The BBC – the public broadcaster – is a cultural Marxist propaganda channel that despises its audience.
The education system tells children there are 173 genders and invites drag queens to teach them about a**l s*x.
Shall I continue?
I think there’s way more sex attacks by migrants than the public are being made aware of, due to cover-ups now being the norm;
”A RAPE charge against a man staying in an asylum hotel was kept quiet — as officials feared inflaming “community tension”.
There were also two other rape cases where it was not disclosed that the suspects were in taxpayer-funded asylum hotels. The rape suspects were all housed in Home Office-funded accommodation in Portsmouth, London and Manchester.
At Portsmouth, the alleged rape was followed by a concerted effort to keep secret the suspect’s link to an asylum hotel.
He was charged with rape and voyeurism after the alleged attack on a woman on June 11.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/35503865/rape-charges-asylum-seeker-hotel/?utm_source=sharebar_app&utm_medium=sharebar_app&utm_campaign=sharebar_app_article
”Portsmouth Councillor speaks out telling how high ranking officers allegedly messaged him at midnight this week to “keep his mouth shut” after a Muslim migrant staying at a taxpayer funded hotel raped a young girl in the city.”
https://x.com/WatchdogTh96012/status/1936326952924901786
Yes you can make a reasonable argument that the British State is broken. But how to fix it?
My suggestion is to concentrate all the efforts on just one particular thing first so that all the reforming zeal is not diluted and distracted to the point of ineffectiveness.
Now while everybody might have a favourite, I’d suggest that the one thing which would be visible and the start of an effective turn-around would be to defund the BBC. Give the BBC a year’s notice and pay no attention to the distressed cries of the luvvies, pay no attention for the call for a national news service, pay no attention to the heartrending stories of newscasters reduce to shopping at Aldi. Or stories of brave ‘irregular migrants’. It would be a clear warning to the Establishment that their comfortable living was no longer guaranteed.
Then pick another target and prosecute change or reform to completion.
The spinoff benefit would be that the world’s best funded left wing propagandists would lose their voice and have less malign influence
I think we need to start being more accurate about the child rapists and describe them as Mirpur Kashmiris and not Pakistanis.
Astonishing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirpur,_Azad_Kashmir
This cretin was a prime architect of the disastrous response to covid which ruined this country financially and socially. And now he knows how to fix it. Get lost, crawl back under whichever stone you emerged from.
Yep. Spot on.
I was about to say this – he was one of the many architects of our Covid wrecking ball.
The origins go back to medical professionals that appeared to copy Chinese strategy.
And how can you argue against the medical profession?
Though it is easier to ignore it. 🙂
Seriously, what has this twerp ever done?
He may have been an effective political campaigner for Brexit and for the Johnson govt that supposedly “got it done”. I don’t know much about the other things he did, except for his contribution to “covid” which means that absent a sincere mea culpa (which will never come) he is irredeemable in my book.
Here’s the one thing everyone ought to remember:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=882203302203159
What I remember is him referring to the drive for a “Covid vaccine” as a “Manhattan Project”. I took away from that the idea that he was just yet another megalomaniac glory hunting technocrat with delusions of grandeur.
It’s entirely sufficient to remember him as the coward who abandoned the people who supposedly relied on his advice and literally fled from his workplace because someone “testing positive” had put the fear of Dog into him.
Agreed that was not the act of someone with class, but I would rather him not give anyone advice. His apparent strong advocacy for “lockdowns” and the rapid development of “covid vaccines” were obviously not decisive but are by far his biggest sin in my book.
Mir ekelt vor diesem tintenklecksenden Saekulum …
Should you ever find yourself in a tight situation with Cummings at your side, you can look forward to it soon becoming less tight, at least in a physcial sense, after he has bolted.
The guy is stupid enough that he actually fell for Deadly COVID! and so prominently interested in the physical integrity of his wretched hide that he’ll throw everything else overboard to preserve it and then later try a comeback in grand style via a shameless rigmarole of lies, as could be seen during his post-eyetest press conference.
Yeah I don’t think I would want him in the trenches with me…
He read Ancient and Modern History, so would be ideally suited to use his in-depth knowledge to make decisions in the medical field or, for that matter, in any STEM field. 🙂
It’s not his intelligence that I would question. It is his character. I got 3 dodgy A Levels in Arts subjects and knew enough not to take the “covid vaccine”.