He is now the country’s de facto project manager, but what does he actually believe? In a bid to find out, I read (almost) everything Cummings has written in the last decade. By Stefan Collini
When the prime minister of the day describes you as a “career psychopath”, your chances of preferment in the political world may not seem rosy. When associates of a leading minister refer to you as “that jumped-up oik”, you may sense you’re not winning friends in high places. When a senior official in the department where you are employed calls you “a mutant virus”, you may feel less than wholly accepted. And when a prominent MP in the party you work for denounces you as “an unelected foul-mouthed oaf”, it may seem that the game is up. Furnished with these testimonials, some downsizing of career ambitions may appear to be in order.
But Dominic Cummings has never played by the rules, and now, as Boris Johnson’s de facto chief-of-staff, he has become perhaps the most powerful unelected political figure in the country. He thus has an exceptional opportunity to put his ideas into practice. But what are his ideas? Commentators seem vaguely aware that, although he studied history at university, he has dabbled in more than one scientific discipline over the years, but no one, it appears, has really tried to take the measure of Cummings as a serious thinker.
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