If there's a man in this country more out of his depth than Dominic Cummings I'd like to meet him. He was hired by Johnson to get Brexit done because Johnson himself hadn't got a clue. It is now clear that Cumming didn't have a clue either. He is on Twitter most days, firing from the hip at anyone foolish enough to offer the slightest criticism, using the handle @dominic2306 (get it?) to wind up his opponents. In his recent interview he said anyone who was certain Brexit would be a success has "a screw loose."
It seems to me it's an admission that at best we are experiencing a huge gamble and, since the weight of expert opinion is that it will not be good, the odds are that it will be a disaster as I have always believed. Everything since 2016 points to it.
The former Tory cabinet minister, David Gauke, has a
nicely argued piece in The New Statesman about Dominic Cummings. Gauke says Cummings "
always makes things worse." I think this is true. If you come up against a problem, particularly complex or potentially expensive ones, with irreversible solutions, it’s best to proceed slowly with a bit of caution.
Gauke says Cummings solves one problem only to be faced with more and bigger ones.
He is one of those people that you often meet in industry who have blind faith in bulldozing their cherished ramshackle ideas through the sceptics and 'making things happen.' The stock market adores them - men like Phillip Green, Neil Woodford or Gerald Ratner. High profile dimwits. Meanwhile the Quandt family behind BMW go on quietly making the right decisions and growing the business into world domination.
A few quotes from Gauke:
"Let us start with Vote Leave’s campaign for the UK to depart from the European Union. No powerful case for leaving the EU was made in the interview on 20 July. Instead, Cummings sounded lukewarm about it (“Is Brexit a good idea? No one on earth knows… what the answer to that is”).
"His central argument for Brexit has always been about democratic accountability, but presumably even he would have found it hard to make that argument in the same interview in which he revealed that he and a small network of his friends plotted to remove a Prime Minister who had obtained a parliamentary majority days earlier."
"His record is of creating problems faster than he has solved them. After all, what is the result of his supposed ceaseless quest to deliver a system of government that is competent and rigorous and serves the public? Boris Johnson as Prime Minister."
Cummings then responds on Twitter to a tweet from Gauke:
Cummings thinks a bonus of him being in No 10 is getting Gauke and Grieve - two of the best minds in politics - out of government!
Anne Applebaum and Hugo Rifkind come in for more withering fire. Applebaum suggested he used "lies and distortions to win the Brexit campaign. He is now laughing about how those lies and distortions 'annoyed Remainers.' Even in the UK it was all about 'owning the libs', winning a fake culture war, not real policy." This is his reply:
He doesn't deny the accusation of lies and distortions but seems rather to criticise Cameron for not stooping to the same level as him. Interestingly, he uses the word "heist" to describe Johnson's victory in 2019.
The result of all his machinations over the last five years is that we are in a bigger mess than we ever were in the EU. The arguments over the NI protocol are set to escalate, food shortages are coming soon and as we emerge from restrictions, covid cases will soar and we will soon face another lockdown.
The EU are set to overtake us in vaccinations in the next few weeks and Johnson's one and only 'success' story will be seen as just another failure.
