“The course of true love never did run smooth.” This Shakespeare quotation perhaps captures the relationship between Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and the Conservative Party.
In his effort to make the ruling British Conservatives dominant for the next decade, Cummings is willfully upsetting a lot of people, including many in his own party.
Cummings’s collision with powerful party figures isn’t surprising. The prime minister’s eccentric brainiac loves to shake things up. A political Indiana Jones with less hair, and a pen instead of a whip, Cummings spends his time ruthlessly consolidating power and embarking on intellectual adventures on WordPress.
In a telling January post, Cummings called for talented individuals to apply for jobs at the prime minister’s office, No. 10 Downing Street. Yes, he wanted to hire obvious characters such as “economists” and “project managers.” But also, and this is a direct quote, “weirdos and misfits with odd skills.” Cummings hopes these hires will “make me much less important — and within a year largely redundant.”
As I say, he’s unconventional. Even more so than his equivalent in former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s administration, Steve Hilton (now a Fox News host).
Nevertheless, Cummings has truly ambitious plans.
He wants to relocate power away from powerful senior public servants and back into the hands of small working groups. This is a truly revolutionary approach that would abandon at least a century of governing norms.
Cummings is also pursuing his “third way” impulse to reshape the Conservative Party away from its business base and into a more effective servant of the working class. The adviser attracted ire for his 2017 comment, “I know a lot of [Conservative parliamentarians] and I am sad to say the public is basically correct. [Conservative parliamentarians] largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the [public option — National Health Sector]. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.”
Here, Cummings is particularly concerned with earning the continued support of former Labour Party voters who delivered Johnson a stunning majority in the December 2019 elections.
Whatever one thinks of Cummings’s views, he can hardly be blamed for his ambition in this moment. With Britain now departed from the European Union, it has a once-in-a-century chance to shape its future political, economic, and foreign policy identity. Cummings senses that he can be the quiet maestro orchestrating this new Britain.
He’s not afraid to rip up the playbook in order to do it.
