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A radical reformer, a “career psycho,” an omniscient Svengali, a serial election winner, or a dangerous disruptor?
How Dominic cummings retires from Downing Street, the sight of his spell at Number 10 will be fiercely debated by his champions and detractors.
The 48-year-old was one of Boris Johnson’s first appointments when he became prime minister in July 2019.
The 48-year-old was one of Boris Johnson’s first appointments as prime minister.
He was already a well-known figure in Westminster due to his past as a special adviser to the government and then the driving force behind the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EU referendum.
And, while at No. 10, Cummings gained national notoriety, becoming one of the few government advisers to have become a household name, due to the heated dispute over his travels amid his confinement to his native northeast.
His reputation as a divisive figure began in the early 2000s, when he served as the Conservative Party’s chief strategy officer.
Upon leaving office, he later called then-Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith “incompetent”, adding that he would be a “worse prime minister than Tony Blair and should be replaced.”
Cummings later led the successful campaign against Labor’s proposal for an elected regional assembly in the Northeast, before going on to work as special adviser to Michael Gove.
However, when the Conservatives were elected to power as part of the coalition government in 2010, Andy Coulson, then Downing Street’s communications director, banned Cummings from the Gove Department of Education.
However, after Coulson resigned amid the News of the World phone hacking scandal, Cummings became Gove’s chief of staff.
Mr. Cummings was previously in charge of the Vote Leave campaign
Officials made accusations of an “intimidating and aggressive culture of us and them” under the couple, before Cummings stepped down in 2013 to open a new free school.
Then-Prime Minister David Cameron later described Cummings as a “career psycho”.
Before the 2016 EU referendum, Cummings joined the Vote Leave campaign, but was soon confronted by Conservative eurosceptic MPs.
He survived an attempt to oust him from the campaign and was later recognized as one of the most influential figures behind the success of Vote Leave under his slogan “Take Back Control.”
Hollywood actor Benedict Cumberbatch played Cummings in a Channel 4 drama from the 2016 EU referendum campaign.
In 2018, Cummings refused to appear before the House of Commons digital, cultural, media and sports committee as part of its fake news investigation.
He was called to appear to respond to the “allegations made against the Vote Leave campaign” during the investigation and to “clarify the allegations regarding the illegal coordination of the EU referendum campaigns”.
But Cummings accused the committee of having “more interest in grandstanding than seeking the truth.”
He was later found in contempt of parliament for failing to appear.
He solidified his reputation as a serial election winner after helping achieve Johnson’s solid 80-plus majority.
Cummings was a constant critic of Theresa May’s handling of Brexit, calling her plans to leave the EU “unacceptable bulls ***” and attacking a “truckload of crappy ideas” from the government, whom she called “idiots.” . “.
He also argued against the government’s decision to activate Article 50 notification to leave the EU so soon after the 2016 referendum, calling it an “unforgivable historical mistake.”
In 2017, he called then-Brexit secretary David Davis “thick as beef, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus.”
And despite being the former head of the Vote Leave campaign, Cummings was no more courteous to the European Research Group of Conservative Brexit MPs.
He claimed the collective had been “useful idiots” to Remain and referred to them as a “metastasizing tumor” to be “excised from the UK body politic”.
Cummings was widely criticized for his mid-term travel shutdown.
After the ERG played a key role in overthrowing Ms. May, Johnson succeeded her at 10 Downing Street and took Cummings with him.
It was at this point that the “classic Dom” meme was born in Whitehall, with political observers ironically giving Cummings credit for a grander master plan as Johnson faced numerous Brexit setbacks.
These included the attempted extension of parliament, a suspension that was later overturned by the Supreme Court, as well as the lack of a “life or death” deadline to leave the EU and the expulsion of 21 Conservative MPs to cost Johnson his majority. of the Commons. .
However, the prime minister and Cummings then finally got the general election they seemed to have yearned for and the pair cemented their reputations as serial political winners.
Having come together as part of the Vote Leave campaign, the pair once again savored victory when Johnson led the Tories to an overwhelming majority of 80 sets in December 2019.
The celebrations lasted until January 31, when the prime minister belatedly oversaw the UK’s exit from the EU.
Cummings, known for often avoiding suits and ties, called for “misfits and weird“to apply to join him in Downing Street under the new Conservative majority government, although one of the employees was subsequently forced to resign soon.
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The onset of the coronavirus pandemic put Johnson’s loyalty to his top aide under severe scrutiny.
On May 25, in what was unprecedented for a political adviser, Cummings held his own press conference in an attempt to try to answer questions about his actions during the national shutdown.
He admitted to taking a trip from London to the northeast, at a time when he feared he might have contracted coronavirus, with his wife and son to stay on his father’s farm.
Mr. Cummings also explained a subsequent trip to Barnard Castle as a way to test whether his eyesight was good enough for driving.
Questions were raised about his claim to have warned of the dangers of pandemics “for years”, after it appeared that he had used his first day back to work after recovering from illness to edit a one-year blog post to add a mention of the coronavirus.
With the prime minister’s backing, Cummings survived the furor over his lockdown actions, which were allegedly in violation of the government’s own COVID-19 restrictions, and remained at No. 10.
But, from that moment on, it is said that he moved away from day-to-day concerns and focused more efforts on his exciting projects; such as the creation of a research agency for advanced defense projects and the reform of public procurement processes.
