Prospect of Cummings’ return is not only desperate – it shows Tories have no one with radical ideas
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What does it say about Rishi Sunak that he even considered bringing back Dominic Cummings – a man described as a “career psychopath” by Foreign Secretary David Cameron?
Boris Johnson’s former aide turned nemesis was reportedly offered a “secret deal” by the Prime Minister to help the Conservatives to win the next general election.
Downing Street has not denied Sunak met Cummings twice for discussions, as first revealed by The Sunday Times, but rejected the notion that this involved a job offer, saying the Prime Minister simply had “a broad discussion” with him.
Meetings apparently took place in North Yorkshire, where the Prime Minister’s constituency is located, in July and also in London in December 2022, when Sunak’s chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith, who is close to Cummings, was also present.
According to Cummings: “He wanted a secret deal in which I delivered the election and he promised to take government seriously after the election. But I’d rather the Tories lose than continue in office without prioritising what’s important and the voters.
“I said I was only prepared to build a political machine to smash Labour and win the election if he would commit to No 10 truly prioritising the most critical things, like the scandal of nuclear weapons infrastructure, natural and engineered pandemics, the scandal of MoD procurement, AI and other technological capabilities, and the broken core government institutions which we started fixing in 2020 but Boris abandoned.”
Labour and the Liberal Democrats have responded to the revelations by claiming the meetings show the Tories are out of ideas.
Yet the attempted political revival of Cummings, one of the architects of the successful Vote Leave campaign, less than a year after he was sacked by Johnson doesn’t just smack of desperation.
It speaks of Sunak’s lack of political nous
While undoubtedly a damning indictment of an administration that appears bereft of anyone capable of proposing radical ideas and policies, it also speaks to Sunak’s lack of political nous.
Cummings is and always has been one of the most controversial figures in Westminster. Even before he entered Downing Street as “assistant to the Prime Minister” in July 2019, the Oxford-educated Brexit “svengali” made no secret of his loathing for the majority of Tory MPs – a feeling that was mutual bar a few Leave loyalists.
Many Conservative backbenchers carried a long-held deep mistrust of Cummings because of his close links to Michael Gove, to whom he was special adviser when the Levelling Up Secretary was education secretary from 2010 to 2014.
Although he was rightly credited with helping Johnson to win an 80-seat majority at the last general election in December 2019, many allies warned the former prime minister that Cummings could not be trusted.
The limitations of his political “genius” soon became apparent when he was caught breaking the government’s own stringent lockdown rules by driving to Barnard Castle at the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in May 2020.
Some still believe the incident, along with Cummings’ lockdown zealotry set in chain a series of events that ultimately led to Johnson’s demise in September 2022 after just three years in the job.
When Cummings subsequently turned on his former boss, who he nicknamed “The Trolley” because of his indecisiveness and repeatedly branded him unfit for office, allies who had warned of his potential for treachery felt vindicated.
That Sunak chose to hold not one but two meetings with Cummings suggests he is at best unaware and at worst wilfully ignorant of just how unpopular the Durham-born father of one is among his Conservative colleagues.
This smacks of political naivety
As one veteran Tory put it: “It’s bizarre beyond belief. The Conservative party would never accept the return of Cummings.
“One of the attacks that damaged Sunak during the leadership campaign was that he was a ‘Cummings man’ – which he and his team denied at the time.”
Another senior backbencher added: “This smacks of political naivety. The government has a cult of youth problem. The consequence of bringing back Cummings would have been an immediate rebellion by parliamentarians.”
Some are already pointing the finger of blame at the Prime Minister’s political secretary and Winchester College contemporary James Forsyth.
Forsyth, 42, who is married to Johnson’s former press secretary Allegra Stratton, is close to Cummings having worked as the political editor of The Spectator, where Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield has been on the staff for more than 20 years.
He is also closer than the average aide to the Prime Minister, having chosen him to be the best man at his wedding to Stratton in 2011. The pair are godparents to each other’s children.
Yet Sunak’s decision to reach out to a “toxic” figure like Cummings lends weight to the growing fears that the Prime Minister’s team is out of its depth and sinking fast, with a recent poll revealing Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is the most popular leader in 390 seats in England, Wales and Scotland – while the Prime Minister is voters’ first choice in just four seats.
According to one Tory MP: “Right now James Forsyth is a problem. He is no strategist and is risk averse.”
