Dominic Cummings, mastermind of Britain’s pro-Brexit campaign, once quoted Sun Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, on how to defeat an enemy without warfare: “You disorient them with speed so they make blunders that undermine their own moral credibility”.
Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former consigliere turned potential nemesis, appears to be putting this into practice. Publicly urging the destruction of the prime minister, he is contributing to the steady drip of revelations about alcohol-fuelled gatherings in Downing Street during England’s strict Covid-19 lockdowns that have left the British prime minister’s ratings in freefall.
“Dom is doing everything he can to kick the door down,” said one former colleague. “People sometimes ask, when is he going to stop trying to destroy Boris? The answer is, never.”
The political establishment at Westminster is now waiting to see if he has more secrets to reveal.
The rolling series of stories now dubbed “Partygate” began last month when the Mirror newspaper revealed that gatherings had taken place at Downing Street in December 2020 during the second lockdown.
A photograph subsequently emerged of people, including Cummings, enjoying wine and cheese in the Downing Street garden in May 2020. The former Svengali has insisted that the image showed groups at outside work meetings and was not a party.
Cummings then revealed the far more damaging details of another gathering in the Number 10 garden on May 20, 2020. It involved around 40 people, including Johnson, and was arranged by a senior civil servant with a memo advising invitees to “bring your own booze”.
Cummings added that he and a colleague had warned in writing that the event appeared to break lockdown rules and should not take place, but “we were ignored”. Further details of the party emerged in the Sunday Times just days later. In a blog post published on Monday he said he “would swear under oath” that Johnson not only knew about the May 20 drinks party, but “agreed that it should go ahead”.
The former Number 10 chief of staff’s criticism of Johnson’s lockdown breaches is not without irony. He was at the centre of another furore in the summer of 2020 after he was found to have broken the rules by driving his family 270 miles from London to Durham, despite thinking they had been exposed to coronavirus. He then made a 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle to “see if I could drive safely”.
Johnson subsequently defied a wave of public outrage to stand behind his adviser, who had been the brains behind the successful “Vote Leave” Brexit campaign in 2016.
“Dom first got involved in anti-EU campaigning in around 2000, that’s 16 years in which he never gave up, kept fighting, and he is now bringing that level of persistence to taking out Johnson,” said one friend.
When Johnson became prime minister three years after the EU referendum, he brought Cummings back into Downing Street, where the campaigner forged the no-prisoners approach to Brexit that saw the government prorogue parliament, threaten to breach international law and sack 21 pro-EU Tory MPs.
Johnson’s Conservative party subsequently returned to power with a large majority in December 2019, although Cummings was largely sidelined from that campaign.
Relations with the prime minister started to sour around the time of the Barnard Castle incident and in November 2020 Cummings lost a power struggle with Carrie Johnson, the prime minister’s wife. He walked out of 10 Downing Street clutching a cardboard box which, observers noted at the time, could contain damaging secrets.
In a recent online post Cummings revealed that his departure prompted another party, this time in Johnson’s flat, just hours after he quit on November 13.
That he was pushed out of Downing Street is an obvious motive for his current attacks on Johnson, yet Cummings presents himself as a righteous critic of a flawed prime minister, who he dubs “the trolley” because of what he says is his lack of clear direction.
During a lengthy appearance before MPs in May 2021, Cummings blamed Johnson for presiding over “tens of thousands” of unnecessary deaths and being too slow to lockdown during the pandemic.
There are also suspicions in Westminster that Cummings has an agenda to replace Johnson with chancellor Rishi Sunak. That Sunak has been spared from the former adviser’s online tongue-lashings of other members of the government has fuelled the speculation.
Cummings has claimed publicly that he “tricked” Johnson into forcing then chancellor Sajid Javid out of the Treasury in 2020, leading to the installation of Sunak in his place. One ally of Johnson said it is “clear that he sees [Sunak] as a route back into government”.
In May 2021, during a seven-hour appearance before MPs in which he gave evidence on Covid policy, Cummings described the chancellor as “extremely competent” but denied he was angling for a job in a Sunak government.
The chancellor’s allies stressed that whatever Cummings’ motives for attacking Johnson, there was no conspiracy: “Rishi has not spoken to Dom since he left Downing Street in November 2020,” said one.