Despicable Dom and the squandering of the Boris honeymoon

There is more than one way, more than one door, into Number 10 Downing Street. The place is a cavernous complex of connected buildings, with a back door and assorted other secure routes enabling staffers to get in and out without going past the photographers likely to be stationed at the front of the building.

Any advisor who works there, or prominent figure visiting, who opts to go through the famous front door when they are the subject of public curiosity is making a statement:  “look at me, I am powerful.”

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff, the Vote Leave guru Dominic Cummings, uses the front door. Cummings is so powerful for now that he is dubbed “the real Prime Minister” – at least by devoted supporters of Dominic Cummings, if not by the real Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

This weekend there is a storm of protest building from furious government advisors and ministers about the arrogant behaviour of Cummings. The charge is that the Cummings mode of conflict with just about everyone – cabinet ministers, advisors, the Tory tribe, big business, and the media (though we can handle it) – has despoiled the new government and squandered the goodwill in Westminster and Whitehall that was apparent after the election in December.

For now that might not matter, when voters like the new government. That will change – it always does – and when it does the Prime Minister will find himself needing a sympathetic hearing from those in Whitehall, business and the media who are – right now – being made enemies by Cummings.

Cummings is even at war with his own team. At the Friday evening meeting of SPADS (the team of more than 100 special advisors he oversees) Cummings was again off-hand and dismissive to a group of people who are waiting to find if they are out of a job next week in the reshuffle. Reports vary from inside the room whether Cummings said he would see “half” of them at work next week or “some” of them. Either way, “thank you for your hard work and patience, the reshuffle will bring some clarity, thank you again and have a nice weekend” would have been better and more humane.

“People are so angry. We have had enough,” says an advisor.

“He is out of control,” says another.

So what? We’ve all been spoken to sharply by a tough boss. I have plenty of times and I’m sure I’ve been curt in turn myself at times when under pressure or consumed with my own concerns. But the latest Cummings incident is the culmination of a long journey, a narcissistic expression of a creeping self-obsession with the notion of his own mystique and supreme intelligence. “The bloke thinks he’s a genius,” says one Boris loyalist who wants out.

Anyone who has studied the pronouncements of Chairman Cummings – Leninist in their intensity – in the last decade will recognise the pattern. In Dom World, everyone else is an idiot, or totally useless, unless they are part of his adoring coterie or a scientist he admires.

You might say “good on Cummings” for slapping down advisors and being ill-mannered – because it is a tough old world and all that, and you’re a taxpayer and you like to see people you don’t know kicked up the arse in the abstract – but at root it is simply no way to treat people, certainly not loyal people baffled that the Prime Minister’s hitman is squandering so much Westminster goodwill by behaving this way towards subordinates.

A true leader – say an Alanbrooke, wartime Chief of the Imperial General Staff to Boris’s hero Churchill – would have had any officer caught speaking to his men like that cashiered.

“Cummings and Cain (Lee Cain, the PM’s media supremo) have Boris under lock and key,” says a senior Whitehall insider. “They blame everything on ministers who are being terrorised by Cummings. I’m not sure how much Boris knows.”

Another says: “It is really grim.” For some ministers and advisors the sack in next week’s reshuffle will actually be a blessed relief.

What is Cummings up to? Enjoying the power and attention as long as it lasts, obviously, and living out a fantasy of ultimate control.

Ego is clearly a factor. Cummings has been photographed a lot going through that black front door of late. The resulting pictures sell because there is a degree of public fascination (reader interest suggests) in scruffy “Dom” – a guru attired like a rebellious physics lecturer attending a Star Wars convention, wearing a tea cosy hat.

His behaviour rings a bell with veterans of the Cameron era Number 10, when another messy svengali figure – Steve Hilton – liked to be photographed trooping in and out in a variety of ill-fitting t-shirts and distressed sweatshirts. “Steve loved to be photographed,” says a former Cameron advisor. “Now Cummings goes through the front door. He wants to be photographed. It is attention-seeking.”

Hilton lasted more than two years in Number 10, although he never had half the power given to Cummings. Cameron was the boss and there was no ambiguity about it. The Tories were also in coalition and there was a defined structure for decision-making. Hilton could fume and fire off a fusillade about getting Silicon Valley tech companies in to revolutionise the NHS data operation. Sensibly, Cameron would not let his former friend have control of government.

Eventually even Cameron had had enough of the theatrics. Hilton went off to California, where his wife became a big cheese at Google. He has since been reinvented as a pro-Trump TV host in the US.

While Hilton and Cummings share a taste for disruption, and for what in 1990s management speak used to be called “blue-sky thinking”, Cummings is smarter than Hilton in certain respects. He has a more developed and coherent worldview. Government is unwieldy, he says, but it can be improved. The Whitehall system was developed in an analogue age and without reference to the theories on efficient team-building and project management that have been applied in the most successful companies. Among his splurge of blog posts over the last decade are cogent observations about military leadership and history, and the need to use data more effectively to understand what works.

One caveat. As a reader of those fascinating Cummings blogs, I always felt that there was a missing ingredient – a shortage of understanding of the quirkiness and unpredictability of human beings. Always too much science and data worship. Always too much Maths. A touch too much emphasis on obscure texts for their own sake. And God save us from the hubris of data worshippers.

In the run-up to the financial crisis the industry and its leaders had more data available, and more data analysis, than they had ever had in the long history of banking and financial instruments. There was a torrent of data, feeding into daily, weekly studies, and then into public quarterly reporting. It was a flood of numbers, pored over by analysts and turned into digestible form for investors and sometimes the regulators. Looking in the forest of figures, and confident in assertions that it was different this time, almost everyone could not see the wood for the trees. Disaster ensued in 2008, spawned by greed and an excessive reliance on new technology.

That crisis set off the populist “take back control” wave of protest against globalisation and the erosion of the nation state that Cummings surfed to victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

But the financial crisis is a reminder – echoing down the centuries – that leaders are strange beasts who need guarding, by shareholders in the case of business, and by voters in the case of politics. Very clever people do get things wrong. Confidence is necessary for growth and development but it tips into hubris.

The shortcoming in his blogs – the people deficit – may help explain the peculiar and counter-productive way Cummings is behaving inside Number 10.

Whatever the reason, his antics are having a terrible effect on the government. Ministers – ministers of the Crown – are being bullied and little is getting done in the gridlock.

“It does not produce excellence,” says an insider who loves Boris but now wants out. “It produces, fear, division and failure.”

Another points out how “privileged” Cummings is, with his connections and gilded assumptions that the hardworking people around him are just lazy and thick.

If Cummings was just a blogger, or one advisor among many, none of this squabbling would matter. But the country and control over policy are the prizes being fought over here.

The control-freakery has real world consequences. The Times splash on Saturday morning says that Number 10 wants more direct control of the NHS, because Cummings thinks the NHS England chief executive doesn’t do what Number 10 wants. Spot the pattern?

There may be much that can be improved in the NHS, which is a year into its new long term plan aimed at catching disease early and increasing coordination between GPs, hospitals and care providers to improve efficiency.

Whatever the disputes about the wisdom of the current NHS plan, one thing is for sure. The vast NHS is not going to be improved by being more centrally directed from a desk in Downing Street.

Cummings himself is forever going on about how others cannot run anything properly. See the 2014 video of his speech on YouTube, the Hollow Men, for the distillation of this thesis explaining the uselessness of almost everyone else.

For all the bravado, he, it turns out, cannot successfully run a team of around 100 advisors, even when they are keen to be loyal to the Prime Minister, their true boss.

Now Cummings wants to pull levers and run the NHS. Not a good idea.

Ultimately, this sorry tale is a new version of an old story – the battle for power inside Number 10 – that can only be settled by a Prime Minister who does not like conflict. Boris makes impractical promises because he wants people to get along.

When Cummings agreed to go and work for Boris last summer he set the condition that he – Dom – would be in charge of “everything”. Needing help, Johnson acquiesced. That was a mistake. Rogue advisors cannot be above the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Home Secretary, or the Foreign Secretary, or the Cabinet Secretary or intelligence and security chiefs. The British system has its flaws, but government will not run according to the whim of an advisor lost in a spoof of the Hunger Games.

The Prime Minister would be wise to resolve this immediately. Either put Dominic Cummings in his place, or put him out on the doorstep of Number 10 and behind him lock the door.