ARGUMENT
How Dominic Cummings Made Himself Irrelevant
By getting caught violating lockdown rules, Boris
Johnson’s advisor has thrown away a massive polling lead—and with it, his
almost total power over Britain.
BY GARVAN
WALSHE | JUNE 3, 2020, 3:47 AM
Until
recently, Dominic Cummings, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief advisor,
had Britain at his feet. His notional boss is uninterested in detail and
therefore gave Cummings carte blanche to install allies in Downing Street. The
advisor effectively fired the then-chancellor of the exchequer, Sajid Javid,
for trying to appoint his own advisors, and put in place his own plans to
radically reshape Britain’s institutions in his own ostensibly
techno-scientific image.
Then
Cummings was discovered to have broken coronavirus lockdown rules by driving
260 miles to visit his family—supposedly for help with child care—while he
should have been self-isolating because he and his wife had the tell-tale
symptoms of the virus. He was then spotted out on another drive in spite of the
lockdown, visiting a scenic castle 30 miles away. Just weeks before, Neil
Ferguson, the government’s main epidemiological advisor, and Catherine
Calderwood, Scotland’s chief medical officer, had been forced to resign for far
more trivial violations of the rules when they were no longer contagious.
Rather than
bow out as other lesser offenders had, Cummings insisted he wasn’t going. He
had cabinet ministers go on air to support him, before the newspapers published
a second set of allegations that contradicted the talking points given to the
politicians sent out to defend him.
The
Conservative cabinet came out in defense of an unelected advisor because
Cummings had given them something last achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1987: a
solid parliamentary majorityThe Conservative cabinet came out in defense of an
unelected advisor because Cummings had given them something last achieved by
Margaret Thatcher in 1987: a solid parliamentary majority that freed them from
the travails of previous Tory prime ministers, from John Major’s and David
Cameron’s hounding by Euroskeptics on their own side to Theresa May’s quagmire
imposed on her by both hard-line Brexiteers and committed pro-Europeans. The
majority also freed them from the need to agree on policies with Liberal
Democrat coalition partners. Cummings gave them the freedom to govern.
Until last
week, thanks to Cummings, the government’s huge opinion poll leads allowed it
to make decisions, such as refusing to extend the Brexit transition period,
without fear of falling behind in the polls and coming under pressure from
backbench members of Parliament, nervous about losing their seats. Now
Cummings, in a series of self-inflicted acts of arrogance, has thrown this lead
away.
Indeed,
there are now considerably fewer Conservative voters than there were a week
ago. By the middle of last week, the polls had moved as much as 9 points toward
the opposition Labour Party, whose new leader, the understated former public
prosecutor Keir Starmer, has had a good few weeks.
As the
political optics got worse, Cummings was forced into holding a press conference
from the Downing Street garden, dressed in what was, for him, the height of
formality: an oversized open-necked white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to
expose his forearms. There, he explained the reason for his second trip: Unsure
of whether his personal optics were good enough to drive back to London, he
decided to test his eyesight by driving, with his wife and 4-year-old son, to a
nearby castle.
Sherlock
Holmes (who, like Cummings, has been played on screen by Benedict Cumberbatch)
may have said that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains—however
improbable—must be the truth, but the British public don’t agree.
By the
hallowed margin of 52 percent, the people were expressing their will
clearly—except this time they were clamoring for his departure from Downing
Street.
Indeed, 81
percent of those polled thought Cummings broke the rules, and fully 52 percent
of Leave voters—a holy number in right-wing British politics—told pollsters
that he should resign. Indeed, by the same margin as in Cummings’s great
victory as head of the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum, the
people were expressing their will clearly—except this time they were clamoring
for his departure from Downing Street.
This is a
seismic change in British politics, where the government flips between immense
strength and hopeless weakness depending on whether the prime minister will get
his MPs reelected or not.
A powerful
prime minister in Britain is like an elected monarch, who can appoint a court
of advisors able to control the promotion and dismissal of elected politicians.
Members of Parliament, who can remove their party leader, largely put up with
this indignity as long as it keeps their jobs safe. A weak prime minister, as
Theresa May found out, is at their mercy. And this unenviable position of
political weakness is where Cummings has now put his boss.
That’s
because Cummings is not a Tory. He’s never joined the party or stuffed leaflets
into envelopes. He doesn’t knock on doors to talk to voters, preferring to
study them scientifically from afar through opinion research. This objectivity
helped him stir up conflict with great success to win the Brexit referendum,
but it means he misses out on the emotional texture of retail politics. The
political ground game—setting up stalls in town squares, getting to know your
local community leaders and businesses, burnishing your reputation with the
local newspaper, helping constituents deal with their personal and social
problems—isn’t his thing. Cummings is no Gen. George Patton, happy to share
foxholes with his men; he’s more of a Gen. Curtis LeMay, focused on the air
war.
Cummings is no Gen. George Patton, happy to share foxholes with his men;
he’s more of a Gen. Curtis LeMay, focused on the air war.
The
coronavirus pandemic has put most of retail politics on hold, but MPs are
monitoring their inboxes, where they’re facing an avalanche of fury from people
who’ve had to cope with homeschooling their children, watching their businesses
collapse, and being unable to visit their dying parents. They obeyed the rules,
so why hasn’t Cummings?
Cummings
thinks this personal experience is irrelevant. The central premise of his
political doctrine is that most people don’t follow politics outside election
campaigns. Knowing this means you can be much more cavalier about public
opinion than most timid politicians think. You can tough out bad headlines,
awkward stories, and scandals, as long as you have a well-disciplined team
presenting a consistently repeated case on the airwaves and social media. It
doesn’t matter much if the case is true, or even self-consistent. Just that
it’s clear.
He felt the
2019 election victory vindicated him. That Johnson’s opponent was the
ideologically repellent and electorally ineffective Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t taken
away from Cummings’s own sense of superiority.
Unlike
Cummings, Conservative MPs, who retain the ultimate power to dismiss their
leader and prime minister, genuinely care if the party is booted out of office
when the next election is held.
Using the
Tories’ parliamentary majority of 80, bought by promising to get Brexit done,
he believed he could reform the civil service, muzzle judges, clip the wings of
the BBC, and recast the state in his technology-focused image. The MPs, wanting
to climb the political ranks, would do as they were told. Given all this,
Cummings thought his breach of lockdown rules was just another bubble story
that would blow over, like when he had a young woman—an advisor to
then-Chancellor Javid—summarily fired and marched out of her office by armed
police, or when he hired an advocate of eugenics to work in his self-proclaimed
unit for “weirdos and misfits.”
This time
was different. The lockdown affected everyone. Millions of people have been
cooped up in tiny flats and had to cope with child care emergencies; tens if
not hundreds of thousands have had to deal with the impossible pain of their
loved ones dying alone. Every MP will put the most recent polls into the
Electoral Calculus website, where they will see their rapidly disappearing
majorities. They are sharing fears of Black Wednesday in 1992, when a currency
crisis trashed the Tories’ reputation, leading to a thundering defeat four and
a half years later. Cummings isn’t worried, because he isn’t a Tory.
By
contrast, Conservative MPs, who retain the ultimate power to dismiss their
leader and prime minister, genuinely care if the party is booted out of office
when the next election is held in four and a half years’ time. They read emails
from their constituents. As the lockdown is eased, they’ll start speaking to
them again and will send one message back to their leadership: Be careful—we
can’t afford to lose any more votes.
The days of
daring radical moves by Cummings are numbered. Next time he tries one—and he
surely will, as long as he is in his post—worried Tory MPs will see it less as
an act of inspired genius and more like a reckless gamble.
Cummings
won’t change his behavior, but the environment in which he operates has changed
dramatically.
Cummings won’t change his behavior, but the environment in which
he operates has changed dramatically.
From now on, every new initiative will
provoke a yellow warning light, to which Cummings’s long list of enemies will
draw the prime minister’s attention. Cummings’s grand schemes will succumb to the
subtle triangulations and undignified sausage-making of everyday politics—arts
at which he does not excel.
Cummings
may have saved his job, but he has created the conditions for his own
marginalization.
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