Happy Brexmas one and all! Dominic Cummings could really bamboozle us with a Christmas Day election

It is well known by now that the prime minister’s principal aide Dominic Cummings, his Svengali indeed, is a devotee of the US military strategist John Boyd. It was Boyd who came up with the doctrine of OODA, which has in turn framed much of recent political history.

According to Wikipedia (I confess I have not read Boyd in the original), decision-making happens in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organisation) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can “get inside” the opponent’s decision cycle and gain the advantage.

This is why we are going to have a general election on Christmas Day. You see, it is the one day in the year that Cummings’ opponents will assume that no government would be insane enough to pollute with politics.

With that insight into the slow, utterly conventional thinking of Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson, Nicola Sturgeon and Caroline Lucas, you can see where the OODA of Downing Street might well be heading next. You can almost hear the call to action across kitchens from Grimsby to St Austell already: “Put the turkey back in the oven Doris, we’re off to the polling station to help Boris deliver Brexit, unite the country, defeat Corbyn and energise Britain”. OODA meets DUDE: DOODA?

There are huge psephological attractions to holding the vote on Christmas Day. The Queen’s traditional Christmas message might be tricky to manipulate this time round, after all that silliness about prorogation and Johnson giving duff advice to Her Majesty in the 67th year of her reign. No wonder she thought out loud to her flunkies about how to sack an idiot prime minister.

Still, she too can be outfoxed using OODA. No prime minister has ever tried to write her Christmas Message to the Commonwealth, but so what? She has to operate on the advice of her prime minister, and if her prime minister tells her to tell her subjects to “get Brexit done” that’s exactly what she’s going to do. She can slip it in somewhere, and Downing Street can leak it to The Telegraph and the Spectator (via “secret” email) beforehand. Job done.

The clods in the opposition parties, establishment elite figures, the likes of John McDonnell, Angela Rayner, Ian Blackford, will also fail to inspire their voters out. The people who gave Cummings and Johnson their famous and unexpected victory in the 2016 referendum can be relied upon to come out again and deliver Brexit – again. It will be the best possible Christmas present from the British people to the British people. That would work exceptionally well in a micro-targeted social media campaign.

As for other stuff – the key is image transformation. Boris could be done up like Santa – always goes down well. Santa, traversing the planet on his sleigh dispensing the gifts of free trade and liberal economics to the peoples of the world is an excellent allegory for global Britain.

Priti Patel could do panto as the wicked witch of the East (Regent Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, crucial battleground, big surprise, casting her against type there). Jacob Rees-Mogg would make a magnificent Grinch who stole Christmas – such irony would be richly rewarding when the votes are counted. For the party election broadcast, Cummings could produce a special modernised version of A Christmas Carol with Sajid Javid as Scrooge, but with his famous miserliness recast as responsible management of the public finances.

Christmas Day is polling day, then, and it might also be a great moment for the Tories to revive one of their worst election slogans of all time, deployed in the 1989 European elections – “Do You Want to Live on a Diet of Brussels?”, illustrated of course by a massive pile of the miniature brassicas. Yes, Labour won that one, but it was a moment, another staging point on the long march away from Europe. No one at Labour HQ would dream that the Tories would warm up their sprouts for a Christmas election. What would the Remoaners answer to that be?

Happy Brexmas, everybody, and let’s raise a glass to hard Brexit and five more years of Conservative government – making it 15 since Cameron first got in in 2010. What turkey wouldn’t vote for that Christmas dream?