Rishi Sunak is our first Hindu prime minister. When he first took the oath as a Member of Parliament in 2015, he swore on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Presumably he embraces some notion of karma, of one’s past actions affecting one’s future condition. If he wondered what he’d done to deserve 2023, perhaps he hopes for a better 2024. But it has not got off to a flying start.
Did the Prime Minister hold secret talks last summer with Dominic Cummings, the radical, disruptive Vishvarupa of the right, destroyer of worlds and championship-level profanity user?
The charge, revealed by the Sunday Times, is that, in July, Sunak invited Cummings to his constituency in North Yorkshire, where, over dinner, they discussed the state of the world. Downing Street – tacitly admitting that the encounter took place – described it as “a broad discussion about politics and campaigning”. Dom says it was a little more than that.
In short, Cummings claims that Sunak offered “a secret deal in which I delivered the election and he promised to take government seriously after the election”. The former Boris Johnson enabler had no doubt that he could “build a political machine to smash Labour and win the election” (doubt is not Cummings’s way), but he was very clear on what he wanted in return: more focus on AI and other advanced technology, better preparation for future pandemics, natural and man-made, a wholesale shake-up of defence procurement and renewed work to tackle “the broken core government institutions which we started fixing in 2020”.
Sunak denies any deal was proposed. He has to: as Cummings claims they discussed, his involvement would have caused a media frenzy and outrage in Parliament. Sunak had said publicly, during the Conservative leadership contest in 2022, that Cummings “will have nothing to do with any government that I am privileged to lead”. It must have seemed a safe enough pledge at the time, but 18 months is a long time in politics.
What is going on, then? Remember that Sunak and Cummings are hardly strangers. Sunak became Chancellor of the Exchequer in February 2020 when the incumbent, Sir Sajid Javid, refused to accept the proposal for a shared pool of special advisers between No 10 and No 11. The Joint Economic Unit was devised by Dominic Cummings, and Javid’s deputy, Rishi Sunak, was willing to embrace it in return for becoming chancellor. Also recall that its Cummings-selected head was Liam Booth-Smith, now the Downing Street chief of staff.
It seems unlikely that the Prime Minister invited Cummings to his northern fastness simply to reminisce about the old days. There must have been at least a part of Sunak’s mind which was open to advice that Cummings might have imparted. And he would have known that it would be radical and iconoclastic: after all, he had told Boris Johnson to begin his premiership by giving the NHS an extra £100m every week, and recently remarked on his blog that “ministers are almost never live players, they’re the fake players while the permanent government of officials actually runs the show”.
Radicalism can be seductive. That is true many times over when reality is grim and the future looks bleak, as it must do even to someone with the Prime Minister’s armour-plated self-confidence. Did Sunak think seriously about recruiting Dominic Cummings? Probably not. I suspect, however, that he toyed with the idea, and, as anyone might, decided to see how far he could push it without disaster. Rather than “what’s the worst that could happen?”, his rhetorical question was more likely “what’s the best that could happen?”.
I hold up my hands: I find Dominic Cummings fascinating. He is clearly very bright, thinks deeply and reads widely, and his imagination is both restless and boundary-breaking. The notion of harnessing that furious, often destructive radicalism and changing the game beyond recognition must have tempted Sunak, putting everything on one turn of pitch-and-toss and perhaps delivering an election victory. It probably wouldn’t work, but it would be a brave commentator who said it would inevitably fail.
In the quotidian world of Westminster politics, however, it was a calamitous misstep. The idea that it would remain secret is laughable: the only way to neutralise Sunak’s statement of July 2022 that he would have “nothing to do” with Cummings would have been a frank admission that things were different and radical change, his mantra at last year’s party conference, required extraordinary measures.
Instead, the Prime Minister has diminished himself and gained exactly nothing. If he acts radically now, it will be seen as a crypto-Cummings agenda, while at the same time he must repudiate the man and his deeds. Sunak was entitled to talk to Cummings, but to do so, then to walk away, saying “on reflection, no thanks”, was never going to result in anything but disaster.
Eliot Wilson is co-founder of Pivot Point Group
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