Dominic “Take Back Control” Cummings lost control and didn’t like it
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
I’ll keep this short rather than spiralling off into an endless essay in the style of Dominic Cummings, the former guru to Boris Johnson now expelled from government and even more furious with the world than he used to be. Let’s not dwell on him too long when there is so much else going on in the world.
Cummings gave evidence last week at Britain’s Covid Inquiry. It was a frustrating session. His written evidence contained many useful insights into Whitehall’s shortcomings during the pandemic. Understandably, most of it was obscured by the focus on his swearing in WhatsApp and on emails.
I’ll make three quick points:
1) The swearing and bad behaviour matters because it is emblematic of a terrible decline in standards in Number 10 and Whitehall in the last quarter of a century. By the way, I’m not claiming to be non-swearer (I swear a bit) or claiming that no-one ever swore in the Number 10 of Jim Callaghan or Margaret Thatcher. Of course they did. What I mean is that we have to at least try as a country to get back to the relative stateliness, order and dignity of that era, even as an aspiration, or as a baseline assumption. Presumably Cummings wore tracksuit bottoms, bad t-shirts and stupid hats, to give himself an edgy menace and because no one in authority said to him: “Good grief, what have you come to work dressed as? Worzel Gummidge? Go home and change.” Gummidge was a scarecrow character in children’s fiction. Dom’s unkempt demeanour and behaviour was the logical endpoint to a corrosive process that began with the arrival in power of New Labour and its more arrogant elements. One of the best aspects of the Sunak premiership is that, internally, he has attempted to restore some dignity after the bedlam of Boris and the craziness of the Truss interregnum. Keir Starmer, one assumes, will aim to continue that approach if he becomes Prime Minister. Back to the 1970s and early 1980s Britain goes, hopefully, at least in terms of statecraft and manners.
2) One of Cummings’ central flaws is that he clearly has no idea of his effect on others. Even officials who thought him talented kept their mouths shut and tried to avoid him, or worked round him deliberately. He could be effective on the nuts and bolts of a major project and then the next hour a complete nightmare. Despite his intelligence, and long experience, he seems not to have figured out that politics is partly about persuasion, charm and guile.
3) Writing in the Daily Mail last week Sarah Vine had a perceptive take on Cummings that helps explain why he became so embittered. It must have been a difficult piece to write. Dom was a friend and close colleague of her former husband Michael Gove. She suspected that Cummings had assumed he could control Boris Johnson and became annoyed when this didn’t work out. Boris started taking advice from elsewhere, from his girlfriend then wife Carrie, and even, my goodness, from other members of the cabinet. This fits with the theory that Dom saw Johnson as a puppet, a great communicator and hopeless administrator who would do the public facing stuff while Dom the guru and a small band of allies revolutionised government. Cummings was in charge during the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he devised the slogan “take back control”. Dom pointed Boris in a direction and off he went merrily on the campaign trail. In government it didn’t work out like that. Johnson thought that he had become Prime Minister, and there was an official apparatus around him to serve the PM. No-one had elected Dominic Cummings. He had no right to be in charge. What happened in Number 10 is that Dom, the “take back control” boy, lost control and he really didn’t like it.
Britain’s antisemitism crisis
Every weekend now the centres of our cities are taken over for marches in which genocidal chants ring out calling for intifada, revolution and the destruction of the state of Israel. It has moved well beyond calling for Israeli military restraint in Gaza. There is naked Jew hatred and public proclamation of antisemitism.
Next Saturday and Sunday are expected to be even worse when it is Armistice weekend and Remembrance Sunday. On social media are horrifying videos of gleeful demonstrators, smiling idiotically and relishing the transgressive nature of what they’re doing. Outside McDonald’s a group taunted families for daring to eat in a restaurant deemed pro-Israel. Posters of kidnapped children – yes, of kidnapped children – are defaced and torn down.
Jewish Britons are, rightly, terrified of what is going on. We should all – anyone who believes in our institutions, in our peaceful democratic way of life – share their sense of foreboding.
But what can we all do? It is a constant topic of conversation among my friends. Are there groups to be supported? Can pro-hostage counter demonstrations grow?
The politicians find themselves in an extremely difficult position, having brought us here over the course of several decades of disastrous policy. On these antisemitic demonstrations I would favour the French zero tolerance approach on the grounds of the threat to public order, but would London’s senior police be capable of handling such a crackdown?
There is also an increased terrorism risk. Perhaps in allowing these marches the British authorities are trying to allow an outlet for protest in the hope that this crazy movement burns itself out as the temperature dips into winter. At the time of writing, it doesn’t look like it is working.
Meanwhile, the threat to Jewish Britons grows.
Can uncompetitive Europe be fixed?
How uncompetitive does Europe need to get before someone actually does something about it? The Financial Times carried a long report this weekend about Brussels trying to devise another new strategy because the EU is being left behind by the US and China. Growth is negligible. There are no tech giants and few leading universities inside the EU. European companies pay vastly more for energy and its political class imposes ever more burdens in terms of regulation and taxation.
Although the US has its problems, on growth it is an energetic engine of innovation and dynamism compared to Europe.
The British cannot be smug about this. When I use the term uncompetitive Europe I include Britain. We may not be in the European Union, but we are part of the European neighbourhood and economic ecosystem and we have our own competitiveness challenges. British productivity since the financial crisis has grown by just 0.4% annually, trailing the performance of competitors. It is not just an abstract problem. Low productivity growth means households are poorer. That pervasive feeling in Britain – everything is stretched, money is getting tighter and there’s a shabbiness – is down to low productivity gains.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, due to deliver his Autumn Statement later this month, is likely to frame any measures he announces in terms of addressing this core problem.
More broadly, I wonder what kind of economic or social shock it’s going to require to instigate change. Maybe Europe just slides away, declining year by year, being a tourist museum with a host population that gives up in the face of enormous tidal forces in migration, energy policy, culture and warfare.
I say “stuff that” let’s all at least try to fix it. Europe, Britain included, is fantastic and worth fighting for. However, although it’s no longer our bailiwick, I’m sceptical that a plan devised in Brussels is the answer.
David Petraeus on the Reaction Podcast
My guest this week on the latest Reaction Podcast is David Petraeus, retired four star general and former director of the CIA. We discuss the crisis in the Middle East, Ukraine, China and his new book Conflict, co-authored with Andrew Roberts.
Succession planning
To Madrid last Monday, where along with interviewing Petraeus, I was at the Santander international banking conference as a panellist discussing finance and business in literature, non-fiction and on film.
I was invited as the author of a book about the collapse of the world’s biggest bank. Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy is ten years old this autumn.
There aren’t many positive representations of finance and trading in books and on screen. In Trollope’s The Way We Live Now the villain was Augustus Melmotte and the backdrop was the Victorian City of London. Financial power transferred to the US during the First World War and while F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby isn’t directly about Wall Street, it’s there on the horizon. The narrator is a young bond salesman and the hero has shadily-acquired new-found wealth. There was Wall Street with Michael Douglas in the 1980s, the Big Short post-financial crisis and then Margin Call, by far the best of the films about the crisis in my view. Even in It’s A Wonderful Life, which centres on a community-minded savings and loan company, it goes wrong and the Jimmy Stewart character is undone, almost, by a rapacious rival. Financiers tend not to be portrayed as the good guys.
Why is this? As I said on the panel in Madrid, human beings like stories and financial crises are dramatic and costly. When they happen we want to know who caused the mess and why. Good news is less dramatic and not as interesting to an audience. It would be difficult to generate much interest in a book or film on the effectiveness of the modern payments system. But that effectiveness of capitalism is the everyday reality in a million transactions completed every second. We need banks and financial institutions and if we don’t like it when they make too much in profits we sure as hell don’t like it either when they make losses and we, as taxpayers, have to rescue the system. A successful financial sector is an absolutely essential component of a functioning economy.
Also on the panel was Brian Cox, the Dundonian actor whose most famous recent role was in Succession as Logan Roy, the tyrannical mogul who swears a lot, especially when his warring children are around. Cox explained, eloquently, an especially odd, baffling aspect of the modern world. Everywhere he goes, in airports, on the street, in restaurants, people ask him cheerfully to tell them in character as Logan Roy to “f*** off”.
He’s right, it’s weird. Why do people people want this?
What I’m listening to
I have a confession. As a Beatles fanatic I know I should like the new and final (so they say) single by the Beatles, but I’m afraid I don’t.
Now and Then was constructed from a crude tape recording made by John Lennon, with the other Beatles adding overdubs in the mid-1990s when they worked on their Anthology project. At the time they released Free as a Bird and Real Love as singles. The third of the new songs from that period is Now and Then, and Ringo and Macca have added more to it. Last week it was released.
The video is poignant. It could not be anything other than affecting, given the circumstances. Alas, the song is dreary. It sounds like a Rutles pastiche minus any jokes.
The Rutles were the joyous spoof Beatles band created by Neil Innes and Eric Idle in 1975 for a TV show and then turned into a film and several albums. I’m listening to their second album – Archeology – now.
What I’m reading?
Friends keep recommending Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography of Ian Fleming, so that is next on the list once I’ve finished Peter Brown’s academic memoir, Journeys of the Mind.