Dominic Cummings isn’t Britain’s saviour. He’s the reason we’re in this mess
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The offer certainly sounds inviting. With his new Startup Party, Dominic Cummings plans to focus on reducing immigration, closing tax loopholes for “the 1 per cent”, investing in public services, and reforming the Civil Service.
Giving his first interview since leaving No 10 in 2020, Boris Johnson’s former advisor-turned-nemesis explained how he wants his new party to be “completely different from the other parties”, “friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country, people who build things in private and public sector” and “ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media”.
Notwithstanding the irony of him announcing all this to the “old media” of the i newspaper (as well as his Substack blog), he made it clear that “the whole point of the Startup Party is to say we’re not oriented towards The Daily Telegraph and the Today programme.”
Which is odd, when you consider that his description of the Tories representing “nothing except a continuation of the s---show: higher taxes, worse violent crime, more debt, anti-entrepreneurs, public services failing, immigration out of control” could have been written by one of this publication’s columnists, or indeed, any of its readers.
Cummings doesn’t appear to have delved into these pages since The Telegraph started questioning why on earth a man who these days boasts of “drinking till 3am ... with AI people” advocated draconian lockdown measures – and apparently on the basis of very little scientific evidence.
Even Prof Neil Ferguson, who incorrectly predicted 4,000-6,000 deaths a day in an email to Ben Warner, the Vote Leave data scientist who was brought into Downing Street by Cummings, had the self-awareness to caveat his doomsday scenario with the words: “This event is in the natural disaster category and the cure (eg massive social distancing, shutdowns) could be worse than the disease.”
Oddly, no one, including the “genius” that is Dominic Cummings, thought to model this at the time. Before he attempts to fix Britain, Barnard Castle’s own tinpot authoritarian might perhaps want to consider owning up to being part of the reason why the country is in such a mess.
