Dominic Cummings is back, and this time he’s… absolutely livid and hellbent on burying the Tory party. In his latest Substack post, the former guru to Boris Johnson lets rip about the “rotten” Tory party and the “collective paralysis” at the heart of government. He calls for the creation of a new party to solve all of Britain’s problems.
He eviscerates the Conservatives and the performance of Sunak as PM. Sunak is diligent but dealing primarily with second-order topics, according to Cummings. This will come as news to Sunak, who has spent a lot of time on the economy, Ukraine, rebuilding relations with the EU, and trying to improve the situation with the Americans when the current President can’t stand the Brits.
Cummings is having none of it: “An easy way to see the utter rot of the Tory Party (and the No10/Cabinet Office system) is to consider that after the Boris-Truss fiasco they’ve put in charge the MP with probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic and he’s ‘respecting the institutions’ and ‘listening to the MPs’ like a good head boy with personal integrity just the way he’s been told to by Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Insider pundits, the Institute for Government et al, and the result is:
- no grip of power, the Cabinet Office a dumpster fire and no No10 plan to fix it, No10 given the run-around by Whitehall as soon as the PM’s office switches from one disaster to the next,
- no governing plan for the NHS, crime, the war, productivity growth, R&D or anything else — just nightmarish Treasury budget/Spending Review processes that vandalise long-term building and entrench the dangerous rot of critical national capabilities,
- no message,
- no serious polling, communication or political machine (just incoherent jabbering to the media per the Tory model of ‘communication’ for decades),
- no political strategy worth spit (current approach is indistinguishable from ‘annoy everyone’),
- a humiliatingly awful level of argument from No10 on every major issue (reduced to defending idiot MPs telling people to ‘fuck off’ out of frustration that their own policy, which officials and their own spads told them couldn’t work, has turned into the predicted fiasco),
- political disintegration.”
So, not much wrong then…
Describing the decline and decay, he says we are in store for more of it: “From September a long election campaign will effectively start and it will be a continuation of 2023 — a weekly race to show who is worse at politics but with all fundamentals favouring Starmer. Then dud Starmer will fail from Day 1 and the patterns of failure will be the same as we’ve seen since Brown (with the brief partial exceptions of July-December 2019 and March-May 2020).”
Those are curious exceptions. Who was the Prime Minister’s chief advisor during those months?
Fear not, politically homeless conservatives, Dom is going to rally everyone round the idea of a new party, which, for now, is being called The Startup Party (TSP).
“Already I’m getting messages from MPs and donors ‘How do we rebuild the Party after the inevitable, can we have a quiet chat?’ NO NO NO. No more excruciating Tory dinners. No more ‘X is obviously not up to it but … maybe … we could build a team around them, oh god pass the red…’ NO. Plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt. I prefer the calls that start, ‘Come on, it’s time for the startup party let’s go’. This is the time to start building the replacement so that from 2200 on election night in October-December 2024 the old Party is buried and a new set of people with new ideas start talking to the country and can take over in 2028 and give voters the sort of government they want and deserve.”
It should be simple enough. Cummings lists some “basic questions” for TSP which, once answered, it’ll almost certainly be unstoppable, maybe.
“What is the political opportunity, why is it here now?…Why are Starmer and Sunak failing so badly?…How to turn some ideas and writing into practically building TSP? Timing? Basic principles for building TSP so it’s 10X higher performance, more interesting, more attractive than the old parties?…”
So it goes on, for some time. Just before signing off, he writes in bold: “If you were part of the Vote Leave network please forward this to others you know in that network. Leave feedback below…”
Avengers assemble, as they say in the movies.
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