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Cummings says Sunak offered him a “secret deal”

Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images

When Boris Johnson lost power, he didn’t just blame Dominic Cummings. He thought he was victim of a wider plot to replace him with Rishi Sunak who, he suspected, was in cahoots with his former adviser. ‘I heard that Cummings has said he started to plot to get rid of me in January 2020,’ he told Nadine Dorries for her book, The Plot. ‘The plot was always to get Rishi in. I just couldn’t see it at the time. It’s like this Manchurian candidate, their stooge.’

Right in time for the paperback edition of The Plot, Dominic Cummings has now confirmed that he was approached by Sunak about making a comeback in a ‘secret deal’. The Vote Leave guru held two rounds of talks with key members of Sunak’s team: once in December last year, shortly after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, and again in July of this year.

‘He wanted a secret deal in which I delivered the election and he promised to take government seriously after the election,’ says Cummings in an interview with the Sunday Times. ‘But I’d rather the Tories lose than continue in office without prioritising what’s important and the voters… The post-2016 Tories are summed up by the fact that Sunak, like Johnson, would rather lose than take government seriously. Both thought their MPs agreed with them, and both were right.’

You can see why the talks went nowhere. Cummings wanted unfunded tax cuts on a scale that would have made Liz Truss blanche, doubling the 40p threshold to £100,000. He wanted to reorientate government around his pet projects and seek to revive the command-and-control modus operandi similar to that which caused such mayhem under Johnson. Cummings tells the Sunday Times: ‘I said I was only prepared to build a political machine to smash Labour and win the election if he would commit to No 10 truly prioritising the most critical things, like the scandal of nuclear weapons infrastructure, natural and engineered pandemics, the scandal of MoD procurement, AI and other technological capabilities, and the broken core government institutions which we started fixing in 2020 but Boris abandoned.’ 

Sunak allegedly replied: ‘The MPs and the media will go crazy. Your involvement has to be secret.’ And yes, it’s a fair bet that Conservative MPs would have been concerned given that Cummings was, by then, explicit about his belief that the Tory party needed to be destroyed and replaced rather than saved. He had also admitted that, rather than serve Johnson, he was plotting to remove him as soon as the 2019 election was won and envisaging that if his Vote Leave team would “get someone else in as prime minister.” Those around Johnson always suspected that this “someone else” was Sunak.

Strikingly, Downing Street has not denied Cummings’s very specific account, stressing only that no formal job offer was made. One source quoted as describing the talks as merely ‘a broad discussion about politics and campaigning.’  That’s quite something, given that by then Cummings’ stated objective was to “plough the Tories into the earth like Carthage so they never recover.”

How seriously should his claim be taken? Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s supporters have been quick to take the meetings as evidence that Sunak and Cummings were working together. However, two meetings over a year where the advice was rejected doesn’t exactly suggest a close union.

It is the case that since entering the Cabinet, Sunak had a good relationship with Cummings who was instrumental in the ousting of Sajid Javid as Chancellor (paving the way for Sunak). In exchange, Sunak was prepared to accept the deal that Javid resigned over: a Treasury subordinated to No10 with a shared pool of advisers. Sunak’s current chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith was one of these advisers, working in the joint No. 10/11 team, so knows both men.

But could this have worked with Sunak in No10? He is a stickler for the processes and structures that Cummings wants to smash. They were also at odds over lockdown and Sunak thought that Cummings and Johnson shared a destructive ‘spend now and worry later’ approach to public finances. So while such a proposition is intriguing, it’s hard to see a Sunak-Cummings axis really working. And even harder to see why Sunak thought he’d ever manage to keep these talks quiet, given Cummings’ record.

Though with Labour still twenty points ahead in the polls, there might have been worse ideas…

Steerpike
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Steerpike

Steerpike is The Spectator's gossip columnist, serving up the latest tittle tattle from Westminster and beyond. Email tips to steerpike@spectator.co.uk or message @MrSteerpike

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