A few centuries ago, when I worked on the Daily Telegraph under the editorship of the now Lord Moore, there was a very sensible item in the style book. It said (I paraphrase) that when a story sounded too good to be true, you should pause, give your head a wobble and apply a bit of common sense. That local newspaper, for instance, reporting that a giant pike in the village pond had been taking small dogs and toddlers that strayed too close to the edge of the water…Really?
Musk and Cummings are, superficially, aligned in certain respects
This is the heuristic I think we need to apply to a splash headline this week in the Mail on Sunday: “Musk and Cummings ‘In Plot To Sabotage UK Politics’”. The claim – attributed to anonymous “senior government sources” – is that Dominic Cummings is advising Elon Musk on how to slash trillions from the US government budget, while at the same time “helping orchestrate” Musk’s social media attacks on the Prime Minister.
Look, we’d all love this story to be true. Imagine. A supervillain team-up between two of the pantomime baddies of the liberal left, and a thrillingly shadowy global conspiracy against democracy itself. It works because Musk and Cummings are, superficially, aligned in certain respects: they’re both very interested in tech, they’re both quite unshakeable in their self-belief, and they’re both instinctively keen to smash the existing order of things into a million tiny pieces.
They differ, in my reading of it, inasmuch as Dom is basically a Leninist who wants to smash stuff up in order to build an exciting new order of things, whereas Elon just really, really likes the sound of broken glass and being the centre of attention. Neither is likely to feature on Sir Keir Starmer’s Christmas card list, anyway. I should say, by way of full disclosure, that though I’ve been horrified by everything Dom has done in politics (I’m supposed to be!), he’s married to an old friend and colleague of mine. As such, personal dealings we’ve had have always been cordial.
But, back to the pike in the pond. The idea that Dom is “orchestrating” Elon’s interventions in UK politics is questionable on two levels. One is that it’s impossible to imagine a cannon quite so loose and an ego quite so big as Elon Musk’s submitting to be orchestrated by anybody else at all, still less a former Spad from a long-gone UK government.
The other is that Elon’s interventions aren’t even orchestrated by himself. He’s just chucking random hand-grenades: a mixture of gross libels, historical untruths and constitutional illiteracies detonating in his timeline during the apparently 22 hours a day he spends awake and tweeting.
As for Cummings advising Musk on how to cut down the size of American government, that too sounds out of whack. One of the former’s undoubted intellectual virtues is his insistence on the importance of domain-specific expertise – he’s forever banging on about the uselessness of Oxbridge arts grads trying to make decisions about science and technology, or idiots like me pronouncing on anything much at all.
My hunch is that he’d have the intellectual humility (as Musk wouldn’t) to admit that the detail of the structure of US government isn’t something he knows all that much about. He’d be all in favour of the general idea of sacking bureaucrats, but he wouldn’t presume to explain which ones and how; and as previously mentioned, it’s highly unlikely Musk would take much in the way of direction on that front even were it offered.
Finally, even if I’m quite wrong and they are in cahoots – and rather than being a megalomaniac in end-stage mad king syndrome, Musk is playing nine-dimensional chess to the tune of the beanie-hatted Rasputin of our age – the last people likely to be in a position to know about it are the “government sources” who briefed the Mail on Sunday. So it’s an attractive story, and it’s one that I guess those government sources hope will increase Elon’s unpopularity with their core constituency by compounding it with Dom’s unpopularity with their core constituency, but it’s almost certainly almost complete cobblers.
For what it’s worth, what I shall call “senior sources close to Mr Cummings” say that though they know some of the same people, Dom and Elon have “never spoken or met”. And though that doesn’t technically rule out a daily fusillade of WhatsApp messages or emails, I’m minded to read this as a truthful denial rather than a lawyerly piece of misdirection.
It’s very possible they are on one or two of the same tech-bro WhatsApp groups (if Elon WhatsApps at anything like the rate he tweets, that’ll be true of a great many people). And they probably agree on a fair bit in general terms. But the idea that they’re working hand-in-glove to destroy democracy is for the birds. Because, like I say, pike in the pond. Still, good to be reminded that conspiracy theories can sucker in the left just as much as the right.
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