British political strategist who served as chief adviser to UK prime minister from July 2019 until Nov 2020
Dominic Mckenzie Cummings (born 25 November 1971) is a British who served as chief adviser to Boris Johnson from July 2019 until November 2020. From 1999 to 2002, Cummings was campaign director at Business for Sterling, the campaign against the UK joining the Euro. From 2015 to 2016, he was director of Vote Leave, a campaigning organisation active in the lead-up to the 2016 EU referendum, the result led to Britain's exit from the European Union.
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[On then education secretary Michael Gove] They could see he was willing to take a lot of flak. He wants to do what he can for schools in five years. If that means being carted off in a bodybag at the end, so be it. They now work with him to screw other people in Whitehall. So if [Nick] Clegg comes along with another mad idea, our officials work with Michael to scupper it.
[Referring to school half-term in February 2020] Your fundamental point is obviously correct, that there was indeed a massive crisis. It was indeed pretty insane that so many of the senior people were away on holiday at that time.
It's also important to realise that it's not like the civil contingencies secretariat or the national security council, or any of the organisations in charge of this were beating the drum and saying, "We’ve got to get the PM back, this is a massive crisis" — in fact quite the opposite.
The poor buggers are caught between structural dysfunction and politicians running around who don't really know what they're doing all day or what the purpose of their being in power is. Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.
To begin with, it was a disaster every half hour, then every day, by the time I left it was once a fortnight. All the basic things didn't work — every financial model would be wrong, every bit of legal advice, every set of figures. The system had gone toxic. People had to go, a lot of changes had to be made. [...] It would work a lot better if you got rid of even more. There should be between 500 and 1,000 people, but we still have 4,000-5,000.
Well, I think there is a very profound question about the nature of our political system that means that we got at the last election a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. I think any system that ends up giving a choice between two people like that as the people to lead is obviously a system that has gone extremely, extremely badly wrong. There are so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two, and there is obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties if that is the best that they can do.