Nigel Jones
Is Dominic Cummings’ ‘start up party’ a
non-starter?
10 May
2024, 7:50am
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-dominic-cummings-start-up-party-a-non-starter/
We haven’t
heard much from Dominic Cummings since he walked out of No. 10 Downing Street
in November 2020. Now the cerebral Vote Leave mastermind has broken his silence
and given us an insight into his latest project. He has proposed a new ‘start
up’ party to replace the Tories after what he expects will be their decimation
at the next election.
In an
interview with the i newspaper and in an essay on his own Substack post, the
Svengali behind Boris Johnson’s rise and fall offers a typically withering
analysis of what he calls the ‘shit show’ Tories. He is equally scathing about
their likely replacement with Keir Starmer’s Labour party.
Cummings
believes the start up party would magically arise like a phoenix from the ashes
of the old Westminster parties
Cummings
castigates the Tories for presiding over a society hostile to entrepreneurs,
with mounting debt, failing public services, and full of violent crime and
uncontrolled immigration. But he predicts that Labour will pursue the same
policies, leaving everyone ‘even more miserable’ by 2026 than they are today.
The former
Downing Street Chief of Staff’s answer to this scenario is a new pop up party
that will be ‘completely different’ to the old parties. He thinks it would
appeal to a majority of voters outside the Westminster bubble.
Cummings
identifies his rival Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage as a key figure in the
anticipated destruction of the Tories, forecasting that if the former Ukip
leader ‘unretires’ and rejoins the political fray he could reduce the
Conservatives to single figures in the polls. He adds, however, that Farage
would not be welcome in his new party.
So, how
realistic are the chances that Cummings’ new movement would reshape the face of
politics in the wasteland that he imagines will follow the implosion of the old
parties? Though many will agree with his description of the dire state of the
Tories, and his scorn for Starmer’s continuity Tory likely Labour replacement,
he is very vague on the mechanics of actually building an alternative.
Cummings
seems to believe that the start up party he envisages will magically arise like
a phoenix from the ashes of the old Westminster parties. He thinks it could
carry all before it with the help of new media platforms in the same way that
his ‘take back control’ Leave movement triumphed in the 2016 referendum.
He forgets
that even with Farage’s dynamic presence it took Ukip more than twenty years of
patient work before it harvested enough support to make Brexit an existential
threat to David Cameron’s Tories, compelling him to call the referendum.
Another obstacle, as Cummings acknowledges, is Britain’s first past the post
electoral system that makes it all but impossible for new parties to break
through. Cummings also makes little mention of the fact that there is already a
new kid on the electoral block to mop up the votes of disillusioned Tories:
Reform UK, the right-wing party founded by Nigel Farage and currently led by
Richard Tice.
Although he
appeals for people to contact him with their own ideas for constructing the
movement that he wants to see, Cummings discloses no practical plans of his own
for getting his start up party off the starting line. Unless and until he puts
more meat on the bones of his idea , his start up scheme is likely to stay,
well, a non starter.
WRITTEN BY
Nigel Jones
Nigel Jones
is a historian and journalist
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