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Dominic Cummings is irony bitcoin – the peak can never quite be called

The man who launched a thousand leak inquiries, here he is, now named as the ‘Chatty Rat’ leaker

Tom Peck
Political Sketch Writer
Friday 23 April 2021 20:13 BST
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Minister admits not having Johnson’s phone number amid Dyson ‘sleaze’ row

Dominic Cummings no longer bestrides the tree of history, choosing the branch down which our little lives shall walk. So it is even more remarkable that he has still somehow managed to espalier all its many boughs into one perfectly circular arc that leads directly up his own jacksy.

Each and every Cummings narrative now leads directly back to its beginning. It is not yet two years since his installation in 10 Downing Street. Even less since stories appeared in the Sunday newspapers of how he had set up his own web of waiter spies in Westminster restaurants, trained to shop any special adviser seen having lunch with a journalist.

Then there were the pre-dawn meetings in No 10, where every special adviser was told that anyone leaking would certainly be caught and definitely be sacked. The details of that meeting were in the press within about 20 minutes. No one has yet been sacked.

So why should it be any other way, how could it ever be any other way, that screenshots of private text messages between Boris Johnson and various business people have found their way to the newspapers, and the leaker, inevitably, be named as Dominic Cummings? The man who launched a thousand leak inquiries, here he is, now named as the “Chatty Rat” leaker, and as such, the answer to quite possibly the only successful government leak inquiry there has ever been. (Dominic Cummings has since published a blog denying the claims – of course he has – saying that it is “sad to see the PM and his office fall so far below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserves”. That will no doubt create another narrative branch. Can you guess where this might end up?)

In between these two events, the first being Dominic Cummings leaking stories to newspapers about the consequences for special advisers found leaking to newspapers, and the second being Dominic Cummings allegedly leaking to newspapers actual screenshots of the prime minister’s phone, there was one further event.

That would be when, having spent months trying to terrify his team of special advisers into never speaking to any journalist ever again, he, the most senior special adviser of all, would appear, late in the evening, poking his nose around the doors of the newspaper offices above the House of Commons, in a desperate search for the journalist he was looking for, to leak information to.

Some of us thought the irony-o-meter had broken that day. Little did we know. Cummings is irony bitcoin. The peak can never be called. There may, in fact, be no limit at all.

Can it really only be 18 months ago that Dominic Cummings would come and lurk in the corner of the daily lobby briefings to journalists, listening in on questions about himself, that he wouldn’t answer because, in his own words, “I’m not here, I’m just observing.”

Later we would find out that the reason he was “observing” Westminster journalists was to work out a way to wage war on them. He decided the best thing to do was to have daily televised press briefings instead, which he imagined would, through the magic of TV, allow the annoying people asking the questions to be publicly undermined, as was attempted with partial success by Donald Trump.

But then somehow they ended up hiring Allegra Stratton to do the job, she fell out with Dominic Cummings, and the whole thing having been his idea was not deemed sufficient to stop him getting sacked.

And here we are, six months later, the televised press briefings for which a £2.6m TV studio was built have been cancelled. Ms Stratton and others worked out the blindingly obvious. That they were a terrible idea because there is very rarely any 24-hour period that passes in which a large number of appalling stories do not emerge about the prime minister. Be it ignoring the advice of government scientists, or having an affair in his own marital home with a woman he’d taken on government-funded trade missions, and whose businesses received more than £100,000 of public money. Or that he’s been swapping texts with Tory donors about how he might tweak certain problematic tax arrangements for them.

Ms Stratton is now instead working as a spokesperson for the international climate change conference the UK will host later this year. The way to solve climate change is easy, but actually doing it is hard. Human beings simply need to stop consuming things they don’t really need, stop wasting resources on things they might want, but could quite easily do without. And the government’s spokesperson on this subject will sadly not be using a fully £2.6m media suite that was built for her to do her old job, which she never actually started, and now has almost no purpose whatsoever.

All things bend back to the start. Well, not quite all. Turkey hasn’t joined the EU and there hasn’t been an extra £350m a week for the NHS, not even at the very bleakest point of a once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic. But we’ll get there. In time. Maybe.

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