The Cummings Legacy Is Not What The Pundits Think

William Cash | Issue 5 | Comment, Magazine, Politics

From the Archive

Dominic Cummings Special
Special Adviser Dominic Cummings leaves 10 Downing Street leaves with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on October 3, 2019. (Photo by Peter Summers/Getty Images)

As Dominic Cummings leaves Downing Street for the last time, William Cash notes that his legacy will extend far beyond his own disruption of Whitehall

One reason that we launched Mace back in January was our belief that the engine rooms of power and influence inside the ‘Westminster Tunnel’ were too invisible. The goings on inside the adviser world of Whitehall and Downing Street’s corridors were considered to be ‘backstage’ – almost off-limits.

No longer. The events of the last 48 hours have been likened to a Downing Street soap opera with Dom Cummings and Lee Cain ousted by a female trio of Allegra Stratton, Boris’s new TV spokesperson, his fiancée Carrie Symonds and Munira Mirza, Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

Former deputy PM Michael Heseltine said  ‘I can think of no man who has done so much harm to this country in so short a time’.

The papers today are deeply divided on ‘Domgate’ with Downing Street insisting – improbably – that the meeting in which Cummings was given his marching orders was without rancour.

Writing in The Times, James Forsyth (married to Allegra Stratton) claimed that Cummings was a ‘rare individual who bent the arc of history’. Others were less charitable. Former deputy PM Michael Heseltine said  ‘I can think of no man who has done so much harm to this country in so short a time’.

One thing is certain. Cummings is likely to try and set the record straight in one of his infamous blogs. But what about the Cummings legacy?

Yes, Cummings has changed the political landscape but his likely …

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