London, May 12 (iNews) – For some Dominic Cummings is a visionary – a true maverick, defender of democracy and intellectual heavyweight who gets things done by defying convention. Many others view him as an arrogant, vindictive Rasputin-like figure who trampled over the constitution and coarsened public life.
He enraged people throughout the nation with his infamous trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown but today has a growing army of supporters prepared to pay £10 a month to read his uncensored thoughts and ideas on a substack blog.
What is incontestable is that for a brief period Cummings commanded immense influence as one of the most powerful unelected political figures in the country. His political intuition played a key part in the successful campaign to leave the EU and then helped to “get Brexit done” and win Boris Johnson’s Conservatives an 80-seat majority.
Now Cummings is stepping up his plans for a new venture that he hopes will have a similarly seismic impact on British politics. He wants his Start Up Party to step in immediately if the divided Tories are defeated in the general election. And he has used a major interview with i – his first with a British newspaper since leaving government in 2020 – to explain why he thinks it will work.
He enters the north London pub for the interview casually dressed, wearing his trademark baseball cap and headphones, an ink-blotched white T-shirt, sweatpants and trainers. “I was up drinking til 3am,” he explains. “With AI people”.
Despite his reputation for being abrasive – David Cameron reportedly labelled him a “career psychopath” – he is affable and engaging. He asks thoughtful questions and seems genuinely interested in the answers.
What is the Start Up Party?
Dominic Cummings’ plans for his new Start Up Party have been long in gestation – he has written about the idea several times since he left government in 2020.
But now there are signs that with the next general election imminent they are being stepped up and that his anti-establishment party – designed to fill a gap left by a defeated and divided Conservative Party – could soon be reality.
The party doesn’t actually exist yet and Cummings has not released any details about important factors such as its funding, membership and governance.
But there were reports on Thursday that he has been using a series of focus groups across the country to get the public’s views about the potential for the party. And he has used his interview with i to explain his thinking about why the venture would succeed.
He says it would be:
• “completely different from the other parties”
• “ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media”
• “friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country, people who build things in private and public sector”
He says it can be electorally successful despite the first-past-the-post system and that history shows that big changes that “reshape states” can follow wars and pandemics
In August Cummings wrote in his Substack blog that he wants a party focused on reducing immigration, closing tax loopholes for “the 1 per cent,” investing in public services and reforming the Civil Service.
He wrote that it would be needed “immediately after the exit polls are live on election night 2024” to “divert energy and money away from ‘how to revive the Tories’ to ‘how to replace the Tories’.”
Much of what makes Cummings interesting is rooted in his disdain for the established order. His journey to this position wasn’t straightforward. It began in the late 90s when he worked at Business for Sterling – a campaign against Britain joining the euro – and something switched.
“When I first got involved in the Euro campaign I had a completely normal vision of politics,” he says. “I assumed that lots of MPs were super smart and super able. I assumed that they were very interested in policy and government, I assumed that they were super focused on campaigns and communication.
And then I worked with them in 1999 and I realised that was all completely untrue.”
‘MPs are not interested in how voters think’
Many would argue that plenty of MPs are hard-working and make a valuable contribution to their constituencies, politics, and the country as a whole. But Cummings is not convinced.
“The official story is completely fake,” he says. “They’re not interested in how government works, they’re not even interested in elections or how voters think. They’re actually completely absorbed in things like getting peerages and being on the Today programme.”
Cummings attended a state primary school and was then privately educated at Durham School. Unsurprisingly, for someone who is resistant to rigid frameworks it didn’t suit him. “I didn’t fit very well with the regimented structure of it: timetables, ‘read this, do that’.” But it didn’t prevent him from winning a place at Oxford University from which he graduated with a first-class degree in Ancient and Modern History.
Shortly after graduating Cummings moved to Russia where he lived from December 1994 until the end of 1996. His face lights up as he describes the experience as “f**king insane.” “Different places and different times in history are the epicentre of mad energy and in 1994 the epicentre of mad energy in the world was Moscow,” he says.
He helped to set up an airline flying from Samara – which as a ‘closed city’ had been cut off under the Soviet Union – to Vienna. But it was unsuccessful and also, thanks to the business climate in Russia at the time, “a very dangerous business”. “Essentially, in the end our only choice was to make some sort of deal with some extremely dangerous characters and that’s when I got on a plane and f**ked off.”
Ukraine’s a ‘corrupt sh*thole that doesn’t matter at all’
Dominic Cummings fears that by backing Ukraine the West has actually helped Putin, with sanctions forcing Russia to deepen its alliance with China.
“We should have never got into the whole stupid situation,” he says. “This is not a replay of 1940 with Potemkin Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he says. “This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get fked as a consequence. We are getting fked now right?
“Cost-of-living has been a massive shock, [the] sanctions regime has been much more of a disaster for European politics than it has been for Russian politics…
“They [advocates of backing Ukraine] said ‘Oh China will support us’. I said then ‘no China will not, China’s going to make loads of money by supplying Russia’.”
The result he says has been “getting into a war of attrition with Russia who we pushed into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power”.
But what about those who’d argue Putin needed to be taught a lesson and that we can’t just allow him to invade a neighbouring country? “What lesson have we taught him? The lesson we’ve taught Putin is that we’re a bunch of total f**king jokers.
“I mean Putin already knew that before the war. But this has emphasised it and broadcast it to the entire world what a bunch of clowns we are and America now is doubling down on trying to seize Russian assets so it’s already created a sanctions regime which is encouraging the building of alternative financial systems globally… That’s not teaching Putin any lesson only that we’re idiots.”
Asked how the West should have reacted to Putin’s invasion, Cummings argues it should “have never got into the whole stupid situation on Ukraine in the first place”. He blames the “babbling” about Ukraine joining NATO. “We kept talking about it. Russia said repeatedly ‘Don’t do this or we’ll f**king wreck the place’. Why have we got into the whole stupid argument? About what? About a corrupt sh*thole country that doesn’t matter at all. The whole thing is completely senseless.”
He said that for Boris Johnson the war “was like a gift from heaven, a lifeline to get everyone off from his implosion… acting out his Churchillian fantasies”. “Ironically of course Westminster totally swallowed the whole thing even though they kind of hate Boris and constantly critiqued him as a lying charlatan they then swallowed all of his total bullsh*t on Ukraine and actually took it seriously.”
He’s embarked on numerous ventures during his career and his latest endeavour involves plans to establish a new political party dubbed the Startup Party.
“The only point of doing it is to do something which is completely different from the other parties,” he says. “The Tories now obviously represent nothing except a continuation of the sh*tshow; higher taxes, worse violent crime, more debt, anti-entrepreneurs, public services failing, immigration out of control.
“But Labour I think will not alter the ultimate trajectory very much, they’ll be continuity Treasury, continuity David Cameron, George Osborne, Sunak, so everything will keep failing and everyone will be even more miserable by 2026 than they are now.
“So, to change that you have to have two fundamental things: you have to have an entity which is ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media. And you have to have something which is friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country, people who build things in private and public sector.
‘Most people would back my Startup Party’
“If you can bring those two things together then you have something very powerful and very attractive that most people in the country would get behind.”
But does our first past the post system allow for a new party to break through and become electorally successful?
“It’s obviously hard but possible.” Wouldn’t it require proportional representation? “No. Definitely not. It’s seemingly hard but history shows it’s doable but it happens in response to huge system changes. Historically, wars and pandemics are things that reshape states and financial clashes.
“So now we’ve got all of those things we’ve got 2008, we’ve got war, we’ve got pandemic. I think the fundamental division is the people in charge of the old system are desperate to say ‘it’s not our fault, we’ve done a good job, we’ve had bad luck, the real problem is populists and fascists undermining supporting us by misinformation, everyone should just start trusting the old systems again and then everyone would be ok’.
“And then everyone else who can see you’re just a bunch of useless charlatans and we’re not going to trust you and in fact trust is going to keep declining in you for objectively rational reasons. They don’t want to face that.”
Would he like to have been an MP? “No. What’s the point in being an MP? The only MP who has real power is the PM, all the other jobs are fake jobs, they can’t actually do anything. People often ask me things like ‘What did the foreign secretary think of the Brexit negotiations in 2019?’ The answer is I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter, it wasn’t relevant.”
There are growing fears among Conservatives still smarting from a terrible set of local election results that they could be heading for wipeout at the general election. What does he think will happen to the party? “Depends on what Farage does,” he says. “If Farage un-retires the Tories could easily be driven down to double digit seats and then discussions of a Startup Party and replacing them will go from a very fringe idea to being a very mainstream idea.”
But while the Tory Party constantly frets about Nigel Farage’s next move, Cummings says he won’t be welcome in The Startup Party. “No. Farage is basically the same as the MPs. For him, his orientation is towards the Daily Telegraph and the Today programme, that’s what he wants, the same as what the other MPs want. The whole point of the Startup Party is to say we’re not oriented towards the Daily Telegraph and the Today programme, we’re oriented towards voters and towards reality and towards people who build.”
He thinks it’s “highly, highly unlikely” that Farage could ever be PM. “He has a fundamental limit on his support,” he says. “He is what he is, people don’t change at that age. He’s very popular with a certain set of people, if he is motivated he could easily get 15-20 per cent of the vote but he can’t get 40-45 per cent of the vote.”
‘Starmer’s a duff leader’
Cummings is no more complementary about a Labour Party that he says has got a fundamental problem – Sir Keir Starmer.
“In lots of ways Labour’s just a carbon copy of the Tories. They’ve got a duff leader who’s sh*t at politics, can’t communicate, doesn’t actually have any picture of how he wants to be different, he just wants him to be in charge of the broken old institutions and then do what the Civil Service tell him to do all day.
“Starmer will be identical to Rishi in that regard. They’re riding on the total disintegration of the Tory party. Secondly, they’ve got the same problem that the Tories have got, which is the MP ranks are filled with obviously useless people who can’t do anything. And the party itself is dead. It’s intellectually dead, organisationally dead, same as the Tories.”
Cummings says he didn’t get “much of an impression of Starmer” when he worked with Johnson. “He was kind of irrelevant,” he says. “Ironically, it’s part of the reason why Boris thought he could get away with breaking our deal was him dealing with Starmer. He concluded by the end of July, actually, this guy is rubbish so it changed his calculations a lot on government. After he nearly died [in April 2020] his attitude was ‘holy sh*t the system completely imploded’. The mainstream media killed him, the NHS is fked, the economy is fked – we need a fast rebuilding process.
“So for about six weeks we got a lot done, that’s when we built the Vaccine Taskforce and stuff. But then very quickly two things happened. One, a lot of the MPs and the media and the Civil Service said to him: ‘No, no, no, don’t be radical don’t change things you’ll make loads of enemies.’ And secondly, he looked at Starmer and he concluded: ‘I don’t actually need to do anything to win, this guy is totally sh*t at politics, I will kick the sh*t out of him in 2024 why do I have to go along with Dominic’s plans, change all of these things that will annoy a whole bunch of the establishment?’”
Britain run by ‘PPE idiots’ in their 20s
Does he think power is too concentrated to London? “Yes. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Britain was the most powerful country in the world its domestic politics was extremely decentralised and now that so much is broken we are more centralised than we have ever been in terms of where there’s power and money.
“If you’d said to people in 1800 or 1900 that all sorts of decisions about what happens in Bolton or what happens in Birmingham and ‘Do we build this or not build that?’ will be decided by some 27-year-old PPE idiot in the Treasury they’d have just thought this is complete madness.
“They would have correctly said ‘Well if that’s what the future holds then obviously Britain will be sunk as a global power because that’s the sign that we’re completely f**ked’. Again though, that’s the distinction between the entrepreneur world and Westminster. That world seems completely rational and reasonable in Westminster and saying that all of these 27-year-old PPE people should not be in charge of these things is regarded as a crazy view but outside Westminster it seems like it’s obviously true to everyone.”
Brexit, which he played such a part in achieving, was supposed to herald a new start in this country. But, asked how he thinks it’s going, Cummings immediately turns his fire on the EU.
‘We were right about Brexit’
“If you look at the big arguments that we had in 2016… the dynamics of the EU and the Eurozone, the Euro is sh*t, it’s institutionally knackered they can’t fix it, the Eurozone is economically stagnant.
The Eurozone is culturally increasingly hostile to science and technology, it’s going to massively fk up everything like biotech, it’s going to fk up AI regulation etc and it’s got this combination of free movement, can’t cope with Islamic nut jobs and growing political extremist parties. I think we were basically right, all those problems have got worse.”
But, he adds: “The Government has almost entirely not taken advantage of anything, not actually done anything differently. It doesn’t make any sense to do Brexit and then sit the way the Tories have done doing f**k all and basically leaving in place a whole bunch of stupid EU things.”
Cummings hasn’t spoken to Boris Johnson since the day he walked out of Number 10 and thinks it’s “extremely, extremely unlikely” they’ll ever talk again. Does he have any regrets about helping Johnson become PM? “I’ve got regrets about some of the details of things. But I don’t regret in the sense of ‘Do I now think I wish I’d told him to get lost when he came round to the house in 2019 and said would I go into No 10?’
“Do I now wish that I’d said no and stayed retired? No, I don’t. I’m glad that we did it, if we hadn’t done then you’d have had that farce carry on, you’d have had that completely broken Parliament, staggering into dealing with Covid, tens of thousands more people would have got killed in the sh*tshow, possibly Corbyn as Prime Minister and some kind of second referendum.”
His claim to have helped saved thousands from Covid comes despite the many criticisms of the Johnson government’s early handling of a pandemic that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 in the UK. But Cummings argues that without his interventions it would have been worse and that as such his decision to join the government to get Brexit done was vindicated.
“If we hadn’t got that solved when we did the whole thing would have got delayed completely by Covid and then the system would’ve basically tried to say ‘well it’s now six-years ago since the vote and Brexit still hasn’t happened let’s just cancel the whole thing’ which would’ve been extremely dangerous for basic trust in democracy in this country,” he says. “People would’ve seen the biggest democratic vote in this country cancelled. So I’m glad and don’t have any regrets about that, no.”
=FRESH NEWS
