Don’t believe the Cummings hype – he’s to blame, he created the Boris mess

Can you imagine Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s “faithful chela” and wartime Minister of Information, taking to the airwaves to rubbish the PM? Or Maurice Hankey, the first Cabinet Secretary appointed during the First World War and Whitehall’s “man of secrets” doing the same to David Lloyd George? In those great crises of the 20th century, Britain was blessed with excellent eminence grise figures whose ghosts still haunt the corridors of power.

In this crisis, we have been unlucky in leadership – both Dominic Cummings and the PM share in the responsibility for the appalling mismanagement of the opening stages of the Covid pandemic.

Dominic Cummings can huff and puff about the failures of the British system all he wants – but his story (“rationalist” bloggers – i.e. misfit friends of Dom – understood what the British state could not understand) is nothing but artful displacement activity. The truth is that Cummings has always been guilty of an appalling cynicism. He has always seen the PM as a kind of election-winning act, the monkey to the organ grinder.

The British system operates on a “pinnacle of command” model. You need the right people in charge – and you need the right advisers present. That’s what creates the near magical transformation of crisis into opportunity, the storm into calm.  

Cummings wanted to be the man behind the throne, demanded the role, and was rewarded with the job after the stunning election victory of 2019. And yet, in February, the month of maximum Boris idleness and inertia, Cummings was not fully engaged with the crisis at hand. He was actually continuing his guerrilla war against the “blob” – his career obsession – and fighting off a media storm over the transparency of Number 10’s hiring processes. Cummings was at the pinnacle of command. Cummings failed to make it work.

His appearance in Parliament on Wednesday looks likely to prove nothing more than an arse-covering exercise before the inquiry proper kicks off next year. Don’t believe the Cummings hype. He owns the failures he so eloquently elaborates as much as Boris.