For someone who was the prime minister’s “chief adviser” for less than 18 months, Dominic Cummings still exerts an extraordinary hold on the imagination of the political classes.
Partly this is due to his assiduous cultivation of an image as a ruthless and single-minded revolutionary, a man for whom sacred cows are treated like big game: Cummings knows he is box-office.
Over the weekend, it emerged from excerpts of Get In, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s new account of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party, that in 2019 Cummings had offered to help Jeremy Corbyn force and win a general election in order to secure Brexit.
He met Matt Zarb-Cousin, Corbyn’s former spokesman, and director of strategic communications James Schneider, and set out a plan for Labour: embrace leaving the European Union by supporting Theresa May’s Brexit deal and thereby widen the split in the Conservative Party between Leavers and Remainers and bring down the government.
In the ensuing election, Corbyn could run a populist left-wing insurgent campaign that would carry him to Downing Street.
Cummings’s advice came with a warning of the consequences of not following it. If Corbyn and his shadow cabinet colleagues continued to call for a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership, he cautioned, they would face Conservative charges of refusing to accept “the will of the people” and of working against the interest of the working class, especially on controlling immigration.
This is “classic Dom”. To achieve Brexit, his overriding ideological commitment, he was relaxed about seeking to shatter Tory unity and force the party onto the sidelines for the foreseeable future.
Achieving the downfall of an institution as venerable as the Conservative Party would be a feature rather than a bug in his approach, with an instinct to tear systems apart his equivalent of burning stubble to foster the growth of new crops.
Schneider took the proposal to Corbyn and is said to have been supportive of it, but the leader of the Opposition refused to bite. Although it has always been believed that Corbyn’s support for Britain’s membership of the EU was lukewarm, and he played as small a part in the 2016 referendum campaign as he possibly could, he remained committed to a policy of offering a second referendum. It was, he believed, preferable to the “damaging” terms Theresa May had negotiated with Brussels.
Given the rebuff, Cummings adopted a different approach. He became Boris Johnson’s chief adviser and strategist when he succeeded May as prime minister in July 2019, and then co-ordinated an insurgent general election strategy of his own; the message was that the new Conservative leader would “get Brexit done” and it saw the party win unprecedented support in traditionally Labour-supporting areas, the so-called “Red Wall”.
More than five years later, Cummings’s foresight could fairly be described as accurate. It is, of course, impossible to say how effective the counterfactual scenario of Labour supporting May’s Brexit deal might have been. His assessment of the approach to which Corbyn remained committed, however, has proved acute. The idea that a second referendum was an attempt by a political elite to set aside the unwelcome result of the original poll was a frequent and powerful Conservative attack line.
Dominic Cummings is back - but we don't need to worry
Read MoreIn a basic sense, Brexit did “get done”. Whatever view you take on the terms of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement negotiated under Johnson, the United Kingdom formally left the European Union in January 2020, an event that some Brexiteers had begun to fear might never actually take place. The adjustment is still taking place, and many would like to see it reversed, but Cummings helped get it over the line.
Meanwhile, in 2019 the electoral catastrophe and internecine warfare was visited not on the Conservatives but on Labour. In parliamentary terms, the party recorded its worst result since 1935 and Corbyn announced his resignation as leader.
Labour’s emphatic majority at last year’s general election should not obscure the fact that, even after Starmer succeeded Corbyn in 2020, the party was mired in crisis and unpopularity, and Johnson could talk of a decade as prime minister without any sense of over-optimism.
Cummings remains a mercurial and emphatic figure circling British politics. He divides opinion sharply but thinks deeply and likes to provoke; the new book by Maguire and Pogrund suggests that he is often sensitively attuned to the course of events.
The challenge is finding a way to transform that foresight into action.
Eliot Wilson is a writer, commentator and former clerk in the House of Commons from 2005 to 2016
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