There was a time when Boris backers accused Rishi Sunak of being in cahoots with Dominic Cummings, as part of a plot to bring down the former PM. However, the relationship has certainly cooled since such claims.
In his latest Substack, Cummings accuses Sunak of having no grip on power, no governing plan, no serious polling operation, and no strategy. This is despite Sunak himself having ‘probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic’. Cummings compares Sunak to Gordon Brown, and quotes officials that work with him:
He’d make a great PS [private secretary] or DG [director general], every meeting with him improves some second-order thing a bit, but he isn’t doing the PM’s job, I don’t think he realises this and I don’t think his spads tell him.
Sunak is slammed in particular for failing to stop the boats: ‘The fundamental reason for the boats failure is choices by the PM’s political team and a reluctance by Sunak to face unpleasant reality.’
Cummings also calls Keir Starmer a ‘dud’, but says that ‘Starmer with a Blair-majority really means the civil service running things anyway, so it will be normal-rubbish but hardly revolutionary, and not much different to Tories in charge.’
So what’s the solution? ‘Plough the old Tory party into the earth with salt.’ That, and something Cummings calls ‘The Startup Party’ (although he doesn’t think it should be called that.’ Cummings wants competent, morally authoritative people to build a party that can win the 2028 general election. After that, it would govern for two terms then ‘self-destruct’, so that ‘we’re actually building healthy regeneration into the new approach.’
Oh, and Cummings had more on foreign policy, the area of his thinking that has proved most controversial. He calls for no more Nato expansion, and ‘no war over Taiwan’:
We should be considering where realistic and credible red lines really are — they certainly don’t run through an island visible from China’s shore full of millions of Chinese people with cousins in the PLA. The One China (but peaceful unification) policy was a good one.
Cummings has sent out another bat-signal. Will anyone reply?
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