The cardinal standard of good political advisers is supposedly “never become the story”. That was never the rule for Dominic Cummings, whose larger-than-life ego has too often pushed him to the story’s very centre. And so it was on Friday night, when Boris Johnson’s chief adviser ostentatiously left Downing Street in front of a clutch of waiting photographers, guaranteeing his image would be splashed across the front pages.
Cummings has never shied away from the limelight, whether giving interminable press conferences to explain why he broke lockdown rules, blogging his personal thoughts on governing or co-operating with the production of a flattering docudrama in which he was played by an A-list celebrity. And so to talk about his departure when hundreds of people are losing their lives to coronavirus every day and the official death toll of those dying within 28 days of a positive test has exceeded 50,000 may be to fall into his trap of making the story about him.
But his toxic brand of politics imbues his departure with real-world significance. His tenures at Vote Leave and then in Johnson’s No 10 have seen some hail him as a strategic genius: they point to the EU referendum win and Johnson’s 80-seat majority. What this narrative fails to take into account is that liberally borrowing from the populism playbook – by making misleading promises to voters and capitalising on people’s legitimate concerns by deploying racist dogwhistles while having no constructive solutions to offer – makes winning so much easier, particularly in the face of an unappealing opposition. What is far, far harder is governing in a way that speaks to the worries of those who elected you. That is where Johnson and Cummings have been abject failures.
Cummings will always be associated with electoral deceit and implicit racism. He made his name by promising voters that leaving the EU would mean an extra £350m a week for the NHS, a claim criticised by the UK Statistics Authority as “a clear misuse of official statistics and by telling them that if they voted for Britain to stay in the EU they were voting for a border with Iraq and Syria. The 2019 election was won on the back of a falsehood that the government would just “get Brexit done”, as if Brexit would not be dominating the political agenda for years to come. In government, Cummings has helped Johnson spearhead a toxic culture war: ministers briefing that the government would invest in “wave machines” to capsize more boats in the Channel, even as desperate asylum seekers, including children, drowned in its freezing waters; picking fights with anti-racism campaigners in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; virtue-signalling against “political correctness” by waging war on the BBC over Last Night at the Proms.
It would be a nasty form of politics at the best of times, but to deliberately sow discord and division during a pandemic that relies on the public taking collective action to save lives and protect the NHS is a special kind of sin. And Cummings’ uncanny ability to make enemies whichever way he turns – the cabinet, the civil service, the parliamentary party – has unquestionably got in the way of competent governing, as the government has bungled response after response in this pandemic, from its failure to get adequate PPE to healthcare staff, to its botched test-and-trace system.
Make no mistake: the buck for all this stops with Johnson. Cummings served at the pleasure of Johnson, but Johnson was so weak, so reliant, that he could not bring himself to fire the adviser after he flouted lockdown rules, irrevocably damaging trust in the government and undermining life-saving public health messaging. It is so extraordinary it is worth repeating: the prime minister was so subordinate to his adviser that he prioritised keeping him over maintaining consistent public health messaging during a deadly pandemic.
So while it may be tempting to view Cummings’ departure in the broader context of a return to civility in politics, just a week after Joe Biden so decisively beat Donald Trump, there is no cause for optimism yet. Johnson has already revealed his true character as a charlatan, devoid of principle, happy to say what it takes to win. To try to compete with Labour on economic policy to keep the seats he won last year would involve taking on a fiscally conservative Treasury and trying to undo the disastrous impacts that even the best Brexit we can now hope for will wreak across less affluent parts of the country. Johnson sees keeping alive the culture wars – trying to appeal to newly Conservative voters through the prism of social conservatism – as the easiest way to cling on to power, as his inadequate response to the pandemic and the self-imposed pain of Brexit set in train deep, multigenerational cycles of hardship of the sort that we have not seen since the 1980s.
Johnson and Cummings have undermined trust not just in their brand of politics but in the very institutions of democracy. Their rush to embrace populism – the heady quick wins of pretending to be on the side of the people against a corrupt and out-of-touch elite – will do damage that will take more responsible political leaders considerable time to repair. Cummings is gone, for now. But forgive our cynicism about claims that his departure marks some evolution in the nature of Conservativism as a governing force. Boris Johnson is still in No 10.
