British Prime Minister’s Right-Hand Man has been on a mission to destroy his former boss. Since being sacked in November he has pursued what appears to be a personal vendetta against his former employers. He has declared our leaders “blind leading the blind”, has released text messages and WhatsApp exchanges of senior Tories during the early stages of the Pandemic and spoken before Select Committees on his work as an adviser while taking the opportunity to be hypercritical of those around him. Cummings has been a disruptive force throughout the Brexit Campaign and later while advising Boris while in power. The decisive shift seems to have been when Boris became a Centrist incumbent politician propping up the established order instead of continuing to dismantle it alongside Cummings.
Track Record
Dominic was a senior aide to Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and was not afraid to call his boss a “muppet” hopelessly out of his depth. He resigned and publicly ousted the Tory leader as “incompetent”, and needing replacing. He also wasn’t very kind toward the Conservative Party, which he labelled as lacking in “understanding, talent, will and adaptation.”
Likewise, he went after David Cameron, declaring he “bumbled from one shamble to another without the slightest sense of purpose.” Cummings blamed Cameron for dragging his feet on schools reform and a distinct lack of priorities.
Throughout his advisory career, the same theme has emerged: he is hypercritical of a system that is dissuading speaking truth to power. Whitehall for Cummings should be a place where you can prioritise and own up to mistakes, yet in practice lacks the backbone for fear of fierce reprisals.
(Reuters)
His recent lambasting of Boris Johnson and Cabinet leaders has been around the sycophantic self-congratulatory aura surrounding a meek Covid response.
Cummings has shed light on the uncomfortable truth that many talented civil servants are stuck in the mud of structural dysfunction, at the beck and call of politicians running around like headless turkeys at Christmas with little rhyme or reason as to what they’re doing as they jump from Secretary of Education to Health and come full circle to Environment.
According to Mr Cummings, where Duncan-Smith was incompetent, Cameron shambolic, Johnson is unethical and below the competence and integrity, Britain deserves, bordering on breaking the law.
Refurbishing his flat by Tory donor directly breached sleaze and stifling inquiries into a suspect who was close friends with his fiancée should be grounds for compromised leadership in normal circumstances. But are we, under war on Covid, turning the other way on the misgivings of a Churchill-esq PM.
Cummings’ Vendetta, then, is nothing new. Just the scope of the assault. We are being drip-fed WhatsApp messages and now emboldening a Whitehall leak of Health Secretary Hancock’s office-based affair. Cummings’ attacks, whether personal slight or his character, are opening doors thought previously closed to the British public and giving a voice to all those Civil Servants squashed under the weight of idle threats and layered bureaucracy.
While it casts a bad light on Whitehall and harms our trust in our political leaders, British people respect transparency above all else. If it leads to better decisions, less waste of taxpayer funds, and breaking the stranglehold of the entrenched establishment elite; more power to him I say.
