Sunday 22 March 2020

Cummings: a very nasty piece of work

I didn't watch Emily Maitliss' programme about Dominic Cummings last Monday but caught up with it on iPlayer last night. In case you missed it you can see it HERE for the next few days. Cummings comes across to me not as a genius, as some of his Brexiteer colleagues think, and certainly not an evil genius as he himself thinks. He is a cross between Chauncey Gardiner (as played by Peter Sellers in the film: Being There) and James I, described as the wisest fool in Christendom.  In other words he appears to be a deep thinker but actually has neither common sense or logic.

Cummings is the career psychopath that Cameron said he was. Driven, obsessed, single-minded, ruthless, he is all of these things plus thuggish, permanently angry, aggressive and arrogant. A thoroughly nasty piece of work. The film covers one attempt to push a CBI member down a flight of stairs after an interview at the BBC as reported by The Times.

That he finds himself in a position of immense power is solely the fault of Johnson who recruited him and is the only one who can fire him. At the moment he shows no sign of doing so but I think it must be a matter of time before he will have to go.

His problem is that he believes in creative destruction, in demolition, in the systematic breaking of things. As far as I know he has never done anything creative unless you consider campaign against something as creative. He was against the euro, opposed to a regional assembly for the north east and as we know to our cost,  membership of the EU.  His time as a SPAD to Gove at Education didn't produce anything of note.

In the programme, when campaigning against joining the euro in 1999, he described the suggestion that some people in the Tory party wanted to leave the EU as a 'deceit'.

He is good as focus groups, poll analysis and slogans. But this is not government as he is now learning.  

Harold Macmillan, when asked what he feared most, was alleged to have said, "Events dear boy, events" and Cummings is finding government is not like campaigning in that you are not dictating things but too often responding to unforeseen events as the current coronavirus pandemic demonstrates.

BuzzFeed has a story HERE about ten days 'that changed Britain' - covering the debate that raged inside government concerning the strategy being used to defeat the virus. There was no consensus that the original herd immunity approach was the right one. One sentence intrigued me because the reporter, Alex Wickham is usually pretty reliable:

"Towards the end of last week, some ministers and political aides at the top of the government were still arguing that the original strategy of home isolation of suspect cases — but no real restrictions on wider society — was correct, despite almost every other European country taking a much tougher approach, and increasing alarm among SAGE experts."

"One minister said that it was then the political responsibility of Johnson and Number 10 to decide which scientists to back, but described a “vacuum of leadership” among aides.

"The minister told BuzzFeed News that Cummings and Vallance were 'close allies' and claimed the government had 'bet' the future of the UK on advice from a very small group of scientists that for a long time differed from the wider international consensus, and other members of SAGE."

Cummings likes to go against the consensus, to use unorthodox methods and isn't worried that everybody else is doing something quite different. He loves pseudo science and mumbo-jumbo and this sort of thinking is right up his street.  Cummings is a forceful, dominating personality who favours radical solutions. I would not be at all surprised to learn he pushed the herd immunity route.

If the PM's senior adviser was behind the delay in switching strategy, risking a much higher death toll,  he may find himself in a lot of trouble. The early deaths of thousands of people is not something you can explain away easily and we can expect a lot of finger pointing later this year. Cummings has made many enemies and you can be sure a lot of fingers will be pointing in his direction.

The number of new cases jumped by over 1000 in a single day yesterday. And deaths are up to 233. We are following Italy's trajectory in spite of having two weeks to learn from their experience. Mike Galsworthy tweeted this:

It was being reported last night that Johnson only agreed to shut bars and clubs on Friday under pressure from President Macron who threatened to close the UK border accusing the British government of benign neglect.
So it looks as if finally, under a lot of pressure, we have adopted a more orthodox containment approach that every other country is following,  but two weeks behind Italy.  We have lost a lot of time that may eventually prove crucial.

BuzzFeed report the comments of anonymous sources:

They [some experts] also raised concerns that the government must be completely transparent with the public, questioning why Vallance later chose to describe the difference between the mitigation and suppression strategies as “semantics”. “This will all come out in the mother of public inquiries,” a source said.

 "If you want to know how much we underestimated this, last Wednesday Rishi's budget gave a £30 billion stimulus for the economy, six days later he had to spend another £330 billion," said a Whitehall official.

All the pre-election talk of spaceports in Cornwall, Advance Research, AI and rejigging Whitehall have gone out of the window as the pandemic and massive borrowing threatens to throw the public finances into chaos for years.

Cummings may also come up against a brick wall in the EU. He may well be good at dreaming up mendacious three word slogans to influence the gullible but it won't cut the mustard in Brussels.

Cummings' appointment to a uniquely powerful position in Downing Street only serves to demonstrate what a stupid man Johnson is. You do not need to be particularly smart to understand that giving responsibility to him, a man more likely to break the very Whitehall machine you need to deliver your manifesto, is not a good idea. He was found to be in contempt of parliament. He is a dangerous man but a Svengali as far as Johnson is concerned.

As an aside from the Maitliss programme, one cannot help notice how a youthful Johnson has aged since he first appeared at the despatch box last July. He looks almost haggard now. The weight of responsibility on his shoulders is crushing him. As it should.
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