Dominic Cummings has tweeted in support of the #FreeBritney movement – a campaign for the popstar Britney Spears to regain some control over her life which has been strictly managed by her father and other legally appointed figures since a conservatorship over her affairs was granted in 2008.

Her court-appointed lawyer resigned on 6 July as the singer expressed a wish to be able to choose her own legal representation.  

Cummings’ tweet was characteristically frantic: ‘Now @britneyspears can hire own lawyers: please Britney team write/ tweet to all in Congress, all @POTUS staff, all @GavinNewsome staff, judges’ staff challenging whether *they personally* support the *shocking* conservatorship laws. They won’t & the tide will #FreeBritney RETWEET!’.

Ah, Dom, how *inspiring* that you have taken on this worthy cause!

But it is somewhat bizarre that Cummings, a man of backroom deals and illicit conversations, should choose to publicly lobby for the singer. What allegiance does he feel with Britney?

The link to Britney’s top hit Toxic is rather too easy to make – “a guy like you should wear a warning”. But surely Cummings is not self-aware enough to be making an ironic nod at his poison-paradise deadliness?

Perhaps his backing of Britney is a code – an elaborate puzzle; the key to which will only be released to his paying Substack subscribers …  

Is Gimme More, with its lyric “a centre of attention (do you feel that?)” an allusion to Cummings’ refusal to leave British politics quietly?

Oops! I Did It Again is a bumper enigma, with its tantalising honesty of “I’m not that innocent” and even a possible nod to the eyesight-test of Barnard Castle: “To lose all my senses / That is just so typically me”.

The possibilities are endless: could Work, Bitch! Be an elaborate meditation on the reforms needed in the civil service? The ceaseless removal of grey suit bureaucrats in favour of talent?

Maybe this will be the beginning of other government figures communicating solely in Britney songs; someone please save us from Matt Hancock singing Womanizer…