Dominic Cummings: a one hit blunder

Beware the one-hit wonder. There is something about having reached the pinnacle only briefly that seems to destroy the psyches of those who achieve it.

For musicians, there’s the one hit that still gets played decades on, “that other song they did” which people vaguely remember, and then decades of simmering resentment that the public did not appreciate the even greater genius of the rest of their extensive catalogue – which in extreme cases spills over into full-scale public crankery.

Right Said Fred are perhaps the ur-example of this: they’ve got the song we all still know (“I’m Too Sexy”), the other one (“Deeply Dippy”), and at least one-half of the band has descended into being an apologist for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Covid vaccine truther, and a general poundshop conspiracist.

Still, it could be worse – because when it comes to embarrassing themselves, musicians don’t come close to political one-hit wonders, and Dominic Cummings seems to be on a mission to prove to the world just how mortifying one man can be.

Cummings’s vision of the last decade is one in which he, an intellectual colossus, single-handedly tried to lead Britain – in the same manner as Moses led the Jews – to a brighter, better tomorrow, only to be failed by the lesser men surrounding him.

He, after all, was the sole architect of the successful Brexit campaign (his excruciatingly long blog posts make his views on other Brexiteers clear), the “brains” behind Boris Johnson’s 2019 election win and his “triumphant” first year in government, and the man with the vision to reshape Britain – if only he’d been given the chance.

In Domworld, the great man has been newly vindicated by having posted “models” in April 2023 suggesting that Joe Biden would lose the 2024 election by less than most of the alternative candidates – including Kamala Harris. Cummings is vindicated, he says: “SW1 laughed. Today they’re crying!”

In the wake of his supposed triumph, he is launching barbs on social media at all of his imagined foes: The New European, Sam Freedman, Ben Ansell, SW1 in general, Will Jennings, Bluesky (which he sends his “researcher” to monitor, apparently – is the researcher in the room with us now, Dominic?). He is riding high and verily, his enemies are fools.

Cummings imagines himself a modern-day Cassandra, cursed with the gift of prophecy, and forever disbelieved. He is, if anything, the reverse: his memory perfectly moulds the past to write a history in which he is the sole voice of reason and sanity, and is always proved correct.

This revisionist urge preserves the illusion of genius that seems to be Dom’s whole personality. It also cushions him from the truth which is that, over the last decade, his overconfidence, short-sightedness and abrasive personality has torched all of the meagre successes he has won.

The Brexit campaign and Vote Leave is undoubtedly Cummings’s “I’m Too Sexy”. There is no doubting that “Take Back Control” was a great slogan, and that the deeply cynical (and in the long run destructive) decision not to set out any actual plan for Brexit – instead focusing on a deceptive slogan about funding the NHS – paid off beautifully.

But let’s not get carried away. The Remain campaign of 2016 made Kamala Harris’s 2024 White House run look flawless. Both campaigns spent more than their rivals, were based on telling the public the economy was doing brilliantly, actually, and threw a confused welter of messaging at the public.

In the process of trying to beat that inept bunch, Cummings misunderstood the basics of a funding trick they were using – to encourage donors to give to friendly groups outside the main campaign without breaching spending limits – and caused his campaign to flagrantly and needlessly break electoral law in the process.

So much for the one hit. What’s Cummings’s “Deeply Dippy”? The obvious contender is the 2019 general election, in which he helped Boris Johnson secure an 80-seat majority in parliament.

We can debate how much of the utter debacle of the 2019-2024 parliamentary session was Cummings’s fault. But he surely shares responsibility for the Brexit deal at the core of it. That deal was so bad that Johnson was trying to renegotiate it less than a year after it passed.

The election victory itself is, of course, perfectly decent – though it was against Jeremy Corbyn, who had thrown off all restraint and launched a manifesto promising tens of billions more spending than anyone thought plausible.

If beating a no-hoper party leader at a general election is our new marker of political genius, then Dom was far outstripped by Morgan McSweeney’s campaign that took an otherwise politically flat-footed Labour Party to a 170-seat majority this year – twice what the Tories achieved in 2019. That does somewhat take the shine off a meagre 80 seats in 2019.

In government, Cummings was running out of road long before he spectacularly blew up his own political career. He tried to run a civil service of hundreds of thousands like a political campaign of a few dozen, and was constantly baffled when this approach didn’t work. He made enemies in the tiny, warren-like rooms of Number 10 and even fell out with Carrie, Johnson’s wife.

He had become the story long before his ill-fated drive to Barnard Castle to “test his eyesight”, but the incident was an appropriate fall from him – driven first by his obvious belief that rules are for other people, and then by his misguided faith in his ability to lie about his actions. The striking thing about Cummings’s explanation for his excuse was that it showed just how stupid he thinks everyone else is.

The secret of Dom Cummings is he’s actually not that interesting. He’s yet another arrogant SW1 man who thinks the people who come up with ideas are at the top of the pile, and those who have to implement them are lesser men carrying out a much easier task. He doesn’t value any skill he doesn’t personally possess – such as diplomacy or empathy – and so failed to understand why his shortcomings in those areas were so damaging. It’s a line of thinking that goes all the way back to Aristotle. It’s deeply conventional and incredibly common. Cummings’s latest obsession – that he’s the man who said Harris would underperform Biden, when the world scoffed – is just another manifestation of it.

Anyone who spent the slightest amount of time anywhere near DC politics in 2023 would have seen polling indicating that Harris would underperform, be shown models to the same effect, and would hear the topic discussed constantly – not least because it was being briefed out to all and sundry by the White House political team as part of their (successful) efforts to stop Biden facing any serious challengers in the primaries.

Cummings was right in line with the conventional wisdom of the White House and most Democratic Party pundits of 2023. He just either didn’t notice this, or conveniently forgot it, and now thinks his old chart shows something interesting. It doesn’t.

Cummings doesn’t mind being disliked, or being portrayed as dangerous, or some kind of evil genius. He loves being portrayed as the brilliant and disruptive outsider. But in reality, he’s not really any of these.

Dominic Cummings is just another ideas man who couldn’t get anything done, and Westminster is as full of those as reality TV is of one hit wonders – and the novelty lasts about as long, too.