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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