Meet the Trump Brexiteer who thinks washing your hands is woke

Dominic Cummings famously drove 30 miles to a beauty spot during lockdown in order to check his eyesight, but there are growing signs that he should have got his head tested instead. “More huge Brexit benefits – we’re outside the EU’s disastrous Single Market & Customs Union so we could cut our own deal with Trump while Brussels gets screwed,” tweeted the former head of the Leave campaign the other day, in a state of high excitement at the US election results. He added: “Over the next 30 years Brexit benefits will compound to many trillions as the EU system crumbles in economic & political disaster & gets replaced! You’re welcome!!”

A therapist might ask softly, “And are these huge Brexit benefits in the room with us now?” But let Cummings take his pleasure where he can. It must be so galling to be Dom – Britain’s greatest intellect (in his own mind, at least) who until this week four years ago was effectively in charge of the British government, now tweeting alone in his basement to no one. A trained actor reduced to the status of a bum.

Yet some people who are about to be in high places are still impressed. Cummings recently tweeted a photo of Donald Trump’s proposed appointee as secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, wearing a T-shirt bearing an image of George Washington and the slogan “Brexit’d Before It Was Cool”. He was, said Dom, “a Brexit t-shirted inspired choice who will purge the DEI insanity and rebuild forces!”

Hegseth should be disqualified from office for the apostrophe in “Brexit’d” alone, but he may still fail to be appointed by a Senate dominated by Republicans precisely because he is “undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for the job in American history,” according to former soldier Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

A member of the National Guard military reserve force who served as a prison guard at Guantanamo Bay and then in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth is far better known as an outspoken Fox News pundit who wants to remove women from combat roles and ban transgender troops and who has claimed that General Charles Brown, a 40-year Air Force veteran who flew 130 hours of combat missions and is now chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, only got the job because he is Black.

Hegseth is also famous for accidentally hitting an army drummer at the West Point academy with an axe during a live TV segment, and for telling viewers that he may not have washed his hands for a decade, adding: “I don’t really wash my hands ever… germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them; therefore, they are not real.”

Hegseth claims he was joking about his aversion to soap, but he is deadly serious about withdrawing American support from Ukraine and leaning on Nato should his new role be confirmed. Ironically, these are two things that would serve to push Britain back closer into the orbit of the EU, wrecking the work of his fanboy Dominic Cummings.

Will he drop those policies in order to save Brexit and Big Dom? A better bet is that like the rest of us, Pete Hegseth will wash his hands of them instead.