3 days ago
Dominic Cummings: oracle of the new British berserk
Photo by James Manning/PA
The woman next to me wanted more on Nikolay Chernyshevsky. She'd been reading about him and was telling me how his ideas about utopian socialist communes are gaining increasing traction on the American right. The talk was titled 'What Is to Be Done?', an allusion to his most famous work. How had he not been mentioned?
If you're wondering which event could pull this sort of crowd, we'd been listening to Dominic Cummings. On 11 June, he spoke to a packed Sheldonian Theatre over the pealing bells of a midsummer Oxford evening. In the audience were the university's male nerdfolk, in their standard sky-blue shirts and navy trousers, an assortment of academics and curious civilians. Above us was the theatre's scarlet and brimstone ceiling fresco, titled 'Truth Descending upon the Arts and Sciences to Expel Ignorance from the University'. Introducing Cummings, Professor Nigel Biggar called him an 'oracle'.
He didn't look like one. The outfit was of the same pedigree as throughout his latest and ongoing media campaign: red-and-white baseball cap, the same sneakers he mows the lawn in and a polo shirt in storm-cloud grey. The only upgrade in Cummings' 2025 couture has been a pair of finely wired aviator-style spectacles, elevating the look to one of a briefly heralded 2010s house DJ.
And he didn't sound like an oracle either – if oracles are supposed to speak in looping epigrams. As during his career as a freelance critic of the British state, Cummings was clear and frightening. He is a rhetorician of simple invective. Our governing 'regime has become cancerous', he opened, in a speech that also mentioned 'industrialised mass rape', 'stupid [small] boats', 'stupid old tanks', and a 'constant jihad' waged against skilled migration within the Home Office. He was here to tell us how to fix it all.
If there is such a thing as a Cummings critique, this represented its most comprehensive digest. He recited his current favourite examples of state failure – fugitive terrorists using human rights law to sue the Ministry of Defence, deep-state officials murmuring of riots in the provinces, politicians who hide from responsibility behind the scripts of their civil service administrators. He connected this with his current favourite historical parallel: the crisis of capitalism, technology and ideology of the 1840s, which he compares to the revolutions in AI and 'biological engineering' in Silicon Valley about to 'smash into all our lives'.
Cassandra in tracksuit bottoms, then. And given the scale of this upheaval, the corresponding Cummings programme is remarkably precise, but limited. His great theme is, to put it facetiously, paperwork management. Government should be narrower, sharper, modelled after the administrations of Pitt the Younger (he speaks as if there is no difference between late-18th-century carronade procurement and modern bureaucracy). The Cabinet Office should be shuttered. 'Science and technology' should be embedded in the prime minister's office. Only then will we 'at least have a functioning regime that can build things'.
Cummings is probably Westminster's most influential public intellectual, at least among its media-Spad-apparatchik networks. It is odd, therefore, how little actual politics intrudes in his work or recommendations (in this potted account of 20th-century history, the development of socialism and fascism came and went in two sentences). What matters instead is the cyclical appearance of material crises and the attempts of political elites to manage them. Though his present case studies are so extreme as to be unverifiable (in the Q&A after his talk, Cummings alleged an active conspiracy to cover up the grooming gangs inside the Department for Education in the early 2010s), his arguments come laced with what feels like sincerity. Outrage at terminal decline is the best form of patriotism the political right can muster.
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Britain has seen similar outbursts at times of failure. In his claims of discontent among special forces and military intelligence, in his thunderous warnings of ethnic-sectarian civil warfare, Cummings has acquired the frantic disposition of mid-1970s British officials. Watching him, the person who came to my mind was William Armstrong, another chief adviser to a prime minister (Ted Heath), and another man once considered the true power in No 10. He too was prone to dark, rambling introspections about the state of Britain; in 1974, on a rain-lashed government away day at a stately Oxfordshire home, he suffered a nervous breakdown during which he stripped naked, furiously smoked cigarettes and ranted about Red Armies and the collapse of the world order.
Dominic Cummings is nowhere near such a state of dissolution. His arguments about the structural depth of Britain's dysfunction are increasingly axiomatic on the left and right. And there is nothing academic about his pronouncements: Westminster is full of rumour about the extent of his associations with Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, and a project to 'unite the right'. However, like Armstrong, he is a man who has been driven berserk by his exposure to state failure. His reforms for government, pitched somewhere between the Hanoverian and the Singaporean model, may or may not be a solution. But his allegations, and his very Russian vision of a politics wracked by elemental forces, are, at the very least, a vivid symptom of this bout of British sickness.
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