The Dim and Dom Show: Why Dominic Cummings Must Be Banished From Political Life, and Boris Johnson Must Fall With Him

Like rabbits caught in the headlights: Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson.


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

“The Dim and Dom Show” is a phrase I came across on Twitter, and is apparently how the UK is being referred to in New Zealand.

The whole world has been laughing at us, as our Prime Minister Boris Johnson has revealed himself, more conclusively than ever, to be little more than an empty vessel incapable of any kind of leadership without his chief advisor — and effectively his only advisor — Dominic Cummings, the former campaign director of the Vote Leave campaign, which, for those of us who can recall the world before the coronavirus, persuaded a small minority of those who could be bothered to vote in the EU referendum in June 2016 to vote to leave the EU.

Cummings — an alleged anti-elitist who is actually privately educated and an Oxford graduate, and married to the daughter of a Baronet — is routinely described as a brilliant political strategist, but if that is the case then it is only in the malicious, dumbed-down way in which politics has been conducted over the last decade in particular. He is credited with coming up with the winning phrase ‘Take Back Control’, to twist the electorate’s understanding of how EU membership worked, and was instrumental in the lie that leaving the EU would mean an extra £350m a week for the NHS.

Personally, I find that Dominic Cummings seems to be a particularly inadequate type of public schoolboy — permanently stranded in a crisis of his own making, a genius trapped in a world run by inferior people who must be eradicated. He has particular contempt for MPs, and for the civil service, and was, famously, described by David Cameron as a “career psychopath”, as I explained in an article last August, Brexit, Boris the Narcissist Clown and “Career Psychopath” Dominic Cummings, in which I first outlined my fears about the Johnson-Cummings premiership.

Since then, just after the clown Johnson became the leader of the Conservative Party — and our unelected Prime Minister — Cummings came up with another winning slogan — ‘Get Brexit Done’ — to help Johnson win the General Election in December, a dismal affair whose sole focus, sadly, was Brexit. Nearly three and a half years since the referendum, the rabid pro-Brexit part of the electorate — a minority of the total electorate, but powerful enough to win an election because of our dismal unrepresentative voting system — gave Johnson legitimacy via a significant minority.

To the dismay of all but the rabid isolationists — and a much smaller number of anti-EU lefties — the UK then officially left the EU on January 31, although leaving still meant very little, as the details of the divorce have still not been agreed.

Back then — an impossibly long four months ago — few people, it seemed, were awake enough to continue to express their concerns about Cummings, his power over Johnson, and the role also played by Michael Gove, who had first brought Cummings into the government, to throw eugenics-based tantrums at the Department of Education. To those paying attention, however, Cummings was intimately involved in the contempt for the electoral rules that Vote Leave had been fined for, and was also dangerously devoted to efforts to remake the entire administrative structure of British government, controlling it all from his lair in 10 Downing Street, with Johnson the puppet who would sell it all to the gullible public.

Then, suddenly, the world changed, as the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, began killing British people, and the reality of our political situation —  that we were led by people who were completely unsuited to high office, having been elected, or chosen, solely because of their enthusiasm for Brexit — suddenly became a matter not of economic suicide and hubris, but of life and death.

Johnson, the ditherer-in-chief, disappeared once the virus arrived, missing meeting after meeting of COBRA, the government’s task force for emergencies, while the puppet master Cummings found ample reason to roll out his enthusiasm for eugenics across the whole country. Notoriously, he is credited as having outlined the government’s strategy, at a private meeting at the end of February, as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”, and there seems no reason to doubt that he was very much at the forefront of pushing “herd immunity” as official government policy.

When Cummings and Johnson finally realised that a lockdown was necessary, which was implemented on March 23, it was already disturbingly late. The UK now has the highest excess death rate in the world, and tens of thousands of people have died as a direct result of their arrogance and stupidity.

And yet, as the last week’s events have revealed, Johnson regards Cummings as indispensable, and is standing by him even though Cummings, in the early days of the lockdown, so spectacularly broke the rules of the lockdown that Johnson might as well have stood with a placard that read, “it’’s one rule for us, and another for you.”

Cummings flagrantly breaks the lockdown rules

On March 27 or 28, while his wife, Mary Wakefield, appeared to be suffering COVID-19 symptoms, Cummings defied the instruction for anyone displaying symptoms — and anyone living with them — to stay at home to avoid the risk of spreading the virus (an instruction he had played a part in implementing) and drove to Durham, where his parents live, and where he grew up, taking his wife and their young son with them. There was no provision in the lockdown for leaving home, except in cases in which there are fears of domestic abuse, but this didn’t concern Cummings, who, like Johnson, believes that rules are for lesser mortals.

Cummings claims that he was visiting his parents to try and find support for his son if both he and his wife fell ill, but that’s not an excuse for breaking the lockdown, as, up and down the country, ill couples did as they were told, and stayed at home with their children. Moreover, although he claims that they stayed in a property in the grounds of their parent’s house, it was just been revealed that Cummings is on the title deeds, meaning that it is in fact a holiday home — and visits to holiday homes were also completely forbidden, under any circumstances, during the lockdown.

And then, as if this wasn’t damning enough, on April 12 — recently revealed as Wakefield’s birthday — the family drove to Barnard Castle, for what was very clearly a birthday outing, although Cummings, like an inadequate teenage liar, used the press conference he called last weekend — which, incidentally, shouldn’t have been allowed under the code of conduct for special advisors — to concoct an unbelievable story about how he made the 60-mile round trip because his eyes felt a bit funny, and he wanted to test them out before driving back home. As if Cummings taking us for fools on national TV wasn’t sufficient, Michael Gove then appeared on TV the day after to claim that, on occasion, he had done the same.

The final nail in Cummings’ coffin ought to have been that, having broken the lockdown so shamefully, he promptly went back to work on returning to London,  despite the threat the virus posed to his fellow workers and anyone else he came in contact with.

Throughout this whole sorry spectacle, Cummings also remained unconcerned that the lies and spin he was peddling to the British people didn’t even tally with the account his own wife had written for the Spectator (only available to subscribers, but see Guardian analysis here and here), and yet we are all supposed to bow to his right to do whatever he wants, while telling us — the little people, the nobodies, the sacrificial lambs, if necessary — to do exactly what he tells us to.

I don’t want to overplay Cummings’ role as Machiavelli. To my mind he is an inadequate little man with chronic delusions of grandeur, and, like the loathsome Steve Bannon in the initial administration of Donald Trump, a would-be destroyer of bureaucracy with no coherent notion of how to replace it. Seeking to control the whole of Parliament and the civil service via an office in 10 Downing Street doesn’t genuinely seem very feasible, and Cummings’ first efforts to realise it — through a bizarre call for “weirdos and misfits” to apply for new jobs within No 10 — not only added to his general creepiness, but also led to him hiring, and then having to fire, a eugenicist, Andrew Sabisky.

Sabisky had previously written that, as the Guardian described it, “politicians should pay attention to ‘very real racial differences in intelligence’ when designing the immigration system”, that “black people on average have lower IQs than white people”, and that “benefit claimants ‘tend to be less conscientious and agreeable’ and should be encouraged to have fewer children than people in work with more ‘pro-social personalities.’”

However, whether Cummings’ ambitions are genuinely to be feared, what matters now is that his arrogant flouting of the rules he himself played a part in creating are not only making the UK an international laughing stock, but are also endangering public health, as anyone who wants to breaks the rules in any way is citing him as an example of why they too can feel free to do whatever they want, rather than what is for the common good.

Cummings and Johnson already have blood on their hands — the tens of thousands of people who died as a result of their refusal to implement a lockdown before March 23 — and as it stands now, if Cummings doesn’t resign, or isn’t sacked, his continued presence will not only create a situation in which there will be more deaths, via an increase in unsafe behaviour; it will also permanently reinforce the dangerous notion that our leaders are not bound by the same rules as us, even when those rules led to numerous people not even being able to be with their loved ones as they died.

More and more Tory MPs call for Cummings to be sacked or resign

Today, the Guardian reported that over a hundred Tory MPs have now called for Dominic Cummings to resign or be sacked — or have levelled serious criticism at him. A Guardian analysis of 117 MPs “found they have received a total of 31,738 emails” since the Cummings story broke a week ago.

Richard Fuller, the Tory MP for North East Bedfordshire, wrote to constituents, explaining the depth of feeling in the emails.

As he stated, “I have been struck by just how many emails I have received from constituents about the actions taken by Mr. Cummings and the strength of sentiment. Most emails contained strong criticisms. The words used by constituents to express their feeling — ‘disgust’, ‘incensed’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘shameful’, ‘anger’ — convey clearly how deeply hurtful this revelation has been for them. Many constituents included personal stories of sacrifice and loss; a number sharing the searing pain of bereavement in this extraordinary period of isolation and confinement. I have read fully each of the emails sent to me.”

He added, “The explanation of this human dilemma has not been communicated in such a manner as to heal the hurt that has been felt. An apology is not always needed as a concession that you did something wrong but sometimes to show that you understand the pain to others that may have been caused.”

Perhaps the veteran Tory MP — and Brexiteer — Sir Roger Gale, who represents North Thanet, expressed MPs’ concerns most thoroughly in one of the first public messages calling for him to be sacked or to resign. On May 24, Gale tweeted, “While as a father and as a grandfather I fully appreciate Mr Cummings’ desire to protect his child, there cannot be one law for the Prime Minister’s staff and another for everyone else. He has sent out completely the wrong message and his position is no longer tenable.”

And while Dominic Cummings clearly must be removed from his position of power, so too must Boris Johnson, as the inadequacies of this clown who always wanted to be king have been been laid startlingly bare since the crisis first blew up. Without Cummings, Johnson has nothing, and that is not a position in which any genuinely functioning Prime Minister would ever find themselves. Like Cummings, Johnson has blood on his hands, and there is no room for clowning when the reality is so dire and so deadly.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.