US warplanes transit through UK: Here's what the flight tracking data shows
Flight tracking data shows extensive movement of US military aircraft towards the Middle East in recent days, including via the UK.
Fifty-two US military planes were spotted flying over the eastern Mediterranean towards the Middle East between Monday and Thursday.
That includes at least 25 that passed through Chania airport, on the Greek island of Crete - an eight-fold increase in the rate of arrivals compared to the first half of June.
The movement of military equipment comes as the US considers whether to assist Israel in its conflict with Iran.
Of the 52 planes spotted over the eastern Mediterranean, 32 are used for transporting troops or cargo, 18 are used for mid-air refuelling and two are reconnaissance planes.
Forbes McKenzie, founder of McKenzie Intelligence, says that this indicates "the build-up of warfighting capability, which was not [in the region] before".
Sky's data does not include fighter jets, which typically fly without publicly revealing their location.
An air traffic control recording from Wednesday suggests that F-22 Raptors are among the planes being sent across the Atlantic, while 12 F-35 fighter jets were photographed travelling from the UK to the Middle East on Wednesday.
Many US military planes are passing through UK
A growing number of US Air Force planes have been passing through the UK in recent days.
Analysis of flight tracking data at three key air bases in the UK shows 63 US military flights landing between 16 and 19 June - more than double the rate of arrivals earlier in June.
On Thursday, Sky News filmed three US military C-17A Globemaster III transport aircraft and a C-130 Hercules military cargo plane arriving at Glasgow's Prestwick Airport.
Flight tracking data shows that one of the planes arrived from an air base in Jordan, having earlier travelled there from Germany.
What does Israel need from US?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on 15 March that his country's aim is to remove "two existential threats - the nuclear threat and the ballistic missile threat".
Israel says that Iran is attempting to develop a nuclear bomb, though Iran says its nuclear facilities are only for civilian energy purposes.
A US intelligence assessment in March concluded that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. President Trump dismissed the assessment on Tuesday, saying: "I think they were very close to having one."
Forbes McKenzie says the Americans have a "very similar inventory of weapons systems" to the Israelis, "but of course, they also have the much-talked-about GBU-57".
The GBU-57 is a 30,000lb bomb - the largest non-nuclear bomb in existence. Mr McKenzie explains that it is "specifically designed to destroy targets which are very deep underground".
Experts say it is the only weapon with any chance of destroying Iran's main enrichment site, which is located underneath a mountain at Fordow.
Air-to-air refuelling could allow Israel to carry larger bombs
Among the dozens of US aircraft that Sky News tracked over the eastern Mediterranean in recent days, more than a third (18 planes) were designed for air-to-air refuelling.
"These are crucial because Israel is the best part of a thousand miles away from Iran," says Sky News military analyst Sean Bell.
"Most military fighter jets would struggle to do those 2,000-mile round trips and have enough combat fuel."
The ability to refuel mid-flight would also allow Israeli planes to carry heavier munitions, including bunker-buster bombs necessary to destroy the tunnels and silos where Iran stores many of its missiles.
Satellite imagery captured on 15 June shows the aftermath of Israeli strikes on a missile facility near the western city of Kermanshah, which destroyed at least 12 buildings at the site.
At least four tunnel entrances were also damaged in the strikes, two of which can be seen in the image below.
Writing for Jane's Defence Weekly, military analyst Jeremy Binnie says it looked like the tunnels were "targeted using guided munitions coming in at angles, not destroyed from above using penetrator bombs, raising the possibility that the damage can be cleared, enabling any [missile launchers] trapped inside to deploy".
"This might reflect the limited payloads that Israeli aircraft can carry to Iran," he adds.
Penetrator bombs, also known as bunker-busters, are much heavier than other types of munitions and as a result require more fuel to transport.
Israel does not have the latest generation of refuelling aircraft, Mr Binnie says, meaning it is likely to struggle to deploy a significant number of penetrator bombs.
Israel has struck most of Iran's western missile bases
Even without direct US assistance, the Israeli air force has managed to inflict significant damage on Iran's missile launch capacity.
Sky News has confirmed Israeli strikes on at least five of Iran's six known missile bases in the west of the country.
On Monday, the IDF said that its strategy of targeting western launch sites had forced Iran to rely on its bases in the centre of the country, such as Isfahan - around 1,500km (930 miles) from Israel.
Among Iran's most advanced weapons are three types of solid-fuelled rockets fitted with highly manoeuvrable warheads: Fattah-1, Kheibar Shekan and Haj Qassam.
The use of solid fuel makes these missiles easy to transport and fast to launch, while their manoeuvrable warheads make them better at evading Israeli air defences. However, none of them are capable of striking Israel from such a distance.
Iran is known to possess five types of missile capable of travelling more than 1,500km, but only one of these uses solid fuel - the Sijjil-1.
On 18 June, Iran claimed to have used this missile against Israel for the first time.
Iran's missiles have caused significant damage
Iran's missile attacks have killed at least 24 people in Israel and wounded hundreds, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.
The number of air raid alerts in Israel has topped 1,000 every day since the start of hostilities, reaching a peak of 3,024 on 15 June.
Iran has managed to strike some government buildings, including one in the city of Haifa on Friday.
And on 13 June, in Iran's most notable targeting success so far, an Iranian missile impacted on or near the headquarters of Israel's defence ministry in Tel Aviv.
Most of the Iranian strikes verified by Sky News, however, have hit civilian targets. These include residential buildings, a school and a university.
On Thursday, one missile hit the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, southern Israel's main hospital. More than 70 people were injured, according to Israel's health ministry.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran had struck a nearby technology park containing an IDF cyber defence training centre, and that the "blast wave caused superficial damage to a small section" of the hospital.
However, the technology park is in fact 1.2km away from where the missile struck.
Photos of the hospital show evidence of a direct hit, with a large section of one building's roof completely destroyed.
Iran successfully struck the technology park on Friday, though its missile fell in an open area, causing damage to a nearby residential building but no casualties.
Israel has killed much of Iran's military leadership
It's not clear exactly how many people Israel's strikes in Iran have killed, or how many are civilians. Estimates by human rights groups of the total number of fatalities exceed 600.
What is clear is that among the military personnel killed are many key figures in the Iranian armed forces, including the military's chief of staff, deputy head of intelligence and deputy head of operations.
Key figures in the powerful Revolutionary Guard have also been killed, including the militia's commander-in-chief, its aerospace force commander and its air defences commander.
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that US assistance was not necessary for Israel to win the war.
"We will achieve all our objectives and hit all of their nuclear facilities," he said. "We have the capability to do that."
3:49
Forbes McKenzie says that while Israel has secured significant victories in the war so far, "they only have so much fuel, they only have so many munitions".
"The Americans have an ability to keep up the pace of operations that the Israelis have started, and they're able to do it for an indefinite period of time."
Additional reporting by data journalist Joely Santa Cruz and OSINT producers Freya Gibson, Lina-Sirine Zitout and Sam Doak.
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The Guardian
11 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘This friend of ours will soon be an enemy': how Iran became Israel's foe
With the US now in open warfare with Iran in a long-heralded conflict triggered by fear for Israel's existence, it is worth recalling the prescience of the Israeli spy in Tehran who saw it all coming. As the Mossad station chief in Tehran in the late 1970s, Reuven Merhav was the Israeli foreign espionage agency's man on the ground charged with safeguarding Israel's sensitive intelligence relationship with its closest Middle East ally, Iran under the rule of its pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In a scenario that throws the current state of warfare between the two nations into sharp relief, Israel and Iran had fostered close ties since the Jewish state's founding in 1948. But a March 1978 visit to the Persian Gulf island of Kish – then a hedonistic playground for Iran's rich and well-connected – along with the Israeli ambassador, Uri Lubrani, convinced Merhav that the shah's rein was crumbling and the precious strategic partnership imperiled. With discontent rumbling and opposition protests gathering pace, the two men encountered a monarch and intelligence agents complacent and detached from the gathering storm. The pair communicated their forebodings to their Mossad and foreign ministry bosses in Israel – only to be met by skepticism and disbelief, a feeling shared by the CIA in Washington when the same warnings were relayed to it. Weeks later, as Merhav prepared to leave Tehran at the end of his tour of duty, he had some cautionary words for his successor. 'I'm worried that this friend of ours will soon be an enemy,' Merhav told him as described by Ronen Bergman in his 2008 book, The Secret War With Iran. 'I'm giving you Iran with a time fuse.' It was an eerily prescient forecast. Within months, Iran was consumed with revolutionary fervor. Chaos and upheaval unfolded on the streets. As his power base quickly collapsed, the shah – so recently thought by western allies to be unassailable – fled abroad with his family in January 1979. Weeks later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a radical Shia cleric, returned from Paris after years in exile, to take power and turn Iran into an Islamic state. He immediately severed all ties with Israel. With revolutionaries storming the Israeli embassy, the country's remaining diplomats were forced to flee, lucky to escape Iran with their lives. Thus began a deadly ideological enmity between two countries that had been allies, shared no common border and harbored no territorial claims against each other – and which has now spiralled into open war and, last night, dragged in the United States with consequences that may transform the geopolitical map, after Donald Trump announced that the US had bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. With the US's entry into the conflict on Israel's side, Merhav's gloomy forecast has now acquired graver dimensions than perhaps even he foresaw. More than three decades after he first made them, I had an improbably serendipitous encounter with Merhav on a train from Hamburg in Germany to Prague, the Czech capital. Having entered my compartment after getting on the train at Berlin, the elderly man sitting opposite noticed my reading material and asked if I was reading Arabic. I told him it was Farsi, which I was attempting to learn, in the hope that I might one day be allowed back into Iran. I had been the Guardian's correspondent in Tehran several years earlier, but had been forced to leave Iran in late 2007 after the authorities refused to renew my residence permit, apparently due to objections over my reporting. But the intensity of the experience had kept my interest in the country – and hopes of returning – alive. The man replied that he spoke Farsi, in which we then attempted to converse, with limited success before reverting to English as it became clear that his fluency in the language far exceeded mine. He explained that he was Israeli and had worked in the embassy in Tehran before the revolution. He introduced himself as Reuven – at which my eyes widened in sudden recognition. I had read Bergman's vivid account of Merhav's grim warnings and the subsequent evacuation of Israelis from Tehran months earlier. It left a lasting impression. Now I was in the company of the main protagonist. He sidestepped my question about the book's description of him as Mossad's man in Tehran, confirming only that he worked for Israel's foreign ministry, but acknowledged knowing Bergman and his work. There was no doubt that the stranger on the train was Merhav, a fact confirmed by subsequent Google searches and one Israeli foreign ministry official I later asked. The chance encounter added context and meaning to events I had witnessed first-hand as the Guardian's correspondent. Much of what happened then explains why the two countries are locked in combat now. To be in Tehran then was to be a witness to what turns out to have been a long prelude to the current warfare – as tensions between Iran and Israel escalated. Nearly every night during spring and summer, I could hear living proof of the enmity that Merhav had predicted from the balcony of my rented house in north Tehran as youthful chants of marg bar Israeel (death to Israel) and marg bar Amrika (death to America) emanated from what seemed to be a nearby training camp for the Basij, a volunteer militia run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Both slogans had been absorbed into the fabric of Iran's revolutionary landscape. They could be seen emblazoned on buildings and were a staple chant at Friday prayers. 'Death to Israel' was even graffitied in a section of Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square, a Unesco world heritage site. Israel and Iran had been locked in shadow hostilities for years – with Tehran suspected of masterminding deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish installations in Argentina and backing Hezbollah in Lebanon – when I arrived in Iran in early 2005. But it was after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in June of that year that the ante was dramatically raised. At a conference in Tehran in October, Ahmadinejad, a populist who promoted himself as a champion of the marginalized and underprivileged, stoked international outrage with a comment that was interpreted as calling for Israel 'to be wiped off the map', although other translations offered less incendiary forms of words. Apparently revelling in the notoriety, the president followed up by calling the Holocaust 'a myth'. Worse followed. The following year, Iran's biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, staged the results of a cartoon contest to lampoon history's worst genocide at Tehran's Palestine Contemporary Art Museum. The most egregious instance of Israel-baiting came in December 2006, when the Iranian foreign ministry staged what it called a 'scientific' conference purporting to prove that the murder of 6 million Jews had not happened. The event draw a rogue's gallery of holocaust deniers and antisemites, among them David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and future supporter of Donald Trump, who praised Iran for allowing 'free speech' and denounced Israel as 'a terrorist state'. It was, on many levels, a sickening spectacle, both for its unsavoury catalogue of attendees and the brazen assault on truth, with some exhibits purporting to show that allied forces, rather than the Nazis, were responsible for wartime atrocities. 'The biggest turning point was Ahmadinejad being elected and then denying the Holocaust,' said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Israeli scholar, who teaches Iran studies at Reichman University, near Tel Aviv. 'Iranians lose their mind if somebody calls the Persian Gulf the Arabian Gulf. Yet they fail to understand what kind of emotions it creates in Israelis when somebody says the Holocaust is a myth.' The insult was compounded by growing Israeli suspicions that Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb. The existence of a hitherto secret Iranian nuclear project, in the form of a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, had been disclosed by the opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) movement in 2002. Enrichment activities were subsequently suspended by the then reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, as a confidence-building measure as western powers exerted pressure. Ahmadinejad ordered the program's resumption, stridently asserting Iran's nuclear 'rights' and sending international tensions soaring while elevating Israeli fears to fever pitch. 'You have somebody who denies the Holocaust, they're developing nuclear program, they're supporting Hezbollah – Iran took on a new form in terms of threats,' said Javedanfar. Israel's preoccupation with Iran's nuclear activities underscored how dramatically the relationship between the two one-time allies had been transformed by the fall of the shah, historians say. 'One of Iran's most important allies in the shah's pursuit of a nuclear program in the last decade of his rule was Israel,' said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and a biographer of the shah. 'There are published reports of cooperation between Iran, Israel and South Africa in the last decade of his rule.' The shah, said Milani, saw Israel as a 'strategic ally', a view enhanced by the two countries shared suspicions of Arab nationalism, as embodied by the Egyptian leader, Abdel Gamal Nasser. 'The shah was a realist. He realized Israel is there to stay and it controlled his enemies.' Jews, meanwhile, felt relatively secure in Iran. 'Iran has had long history of very good relations with its own Jewish population,' said Milani. 'It had largest Jewish population of any Muslim country at that time. There were maybe 150,000 at the time of the revolution.' That, too, was transformed by the shah's downfall. The onset of the Islamic regime – bringing with it a climate of fierce anti-Zionism – prompted a mass exodus of Iranian Jews, many of them eventually moving to Israel. In the early 1980s, with Iran embroiled in a bitter attritional war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Israel attempted a rapprochement. Fearing a Saddam victory at least as much as Khomeini's regime, it sent weapons to Iranian forces, helping them to stave off defeat. The Iranians gladly accepted the weapons – but resisted any attempts at restoring the friendship. 'I've spoken to Israelis who served in Iran in the embassy before the revolution and afterwards dealt with Iran,' said Javedanfar. 'They bent over backwards trying to reach out to the regime. They even lobbied the Americans' – who, under President Ronald Reagan, funneled their own weapons to Iran through Israel in an attempt to win the release of US hostages in Lebanon, an initiative that ended in the Iran-Contra scandal. 'It wasn't just for the love of Iran. They had shared interests, but they really wanted to re-establish relations with this regime. But at the end, they found out that the weapons they were giving to Iran to fire at the Iraqis were being transferred to Hezbollah and being fired at Israelis. 'Iran did not want to have any rapprochement with Israel. It was impossible.' Yet unwillingness to mend fences may not have devolved into deadly enmity without the obduracy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who became supreme leader after Khomeini's death in 1989 Khamenei exuded a greater commitment to Israel's destruction than his predecessor, calling the country a 'cancer' on the Middle East. At a 1991 conference, organised at a time when Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organisation were embarking on negotiations in Madrid, the supreme leader sided with factions opposed to a peace deal with Israel – a position at odds with Iran's president at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The result was an intensification of a proxy war that Iran had previously waged haphazardly, through Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas. The latter group embarked on a spate of suicide bombings that killed scores of Israelis and contributed, in 1996, to the election of the hardline Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister, as faith waned in the Oslo peace accords signed three years earlier. There were domestic and foreign policy reasons for Khamenei's anti-Israel crusade. 'After the fall of the Soviet Union, he saw an opening in the Middle East for a new kind of superpower, an Islamic one, so he wanted to take that chance,' Javedanfar said. 'But it also served the economic interests of his allies, because there's billions of dollars to be made in keeping Iran isolated. That allows them complete monopoly over all sectors of Iran's economy, from making tomato puree to cars. And one of the ways to make sure Iran always stayed isolated and western companies did not invest was to continue the anti-Israel line.' Milani argues that Khamenei's animus has even deeper roots in anti-Jewish prejudice, displayed in commentary he provided to In the Shade of the Qur'an, a book by the Egyptian revolutionary and Islamic Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb which he translated into Farsi. 'Many people, even within the regime itself, have asked why this is in the national interest, why do you think the destruction of the state of Israel is your responsibility?' he said. 'The rhetoric and the reality of the policy of anti-Zionism is part of why Khamenei does it, but I think it is also an element of antisemitism.' 'Khamenei thinks Israel today is the same, or even worse than, those [Jews] who fought Muhammad at Medina. When you have that kind of antisemitic thinking guiding you, you can't befriend Israel.' It is a minority view among Iranians, most of whom do not view Israel as an existential enemy and would accept normalized relations, says Milani. Soaring non-combatant casualties or massive damage to Iran's civilian infrastructure resulting from prolonged Israeli bombardment could test such a rosy view, and instead deepen the enmity that Merhav foresaw nearly half a century ago. For now, Milani puts the onus on Khamenei, whom he accuses of failing to live up to years of rhetorical bellicosity when it mattered. 'His devotion to the notion that 'death to Israel' must be part of every ritual of politics in Iran, then putting the country on the path of war, being absolutely unprepared for it when war is imminent is just criminal negligence,' he said. 'To have all of this rhetoric and then to be so unprepared when Israel initially attacked – it's just remarkable.'
Daily Mail
15 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Major US cities go on high alert following Trump's military strike on Iran
Cities across the United States are on high alert following Donald Trump 's airstrikes on three nuclear cites in Iran. The president addressed the nation late Saturday and called the attack a 'spectacular military success,' stating that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities 'have been completely and totally obliterated.' Trump deployed B-2 stealth bombers to take out Iran's key Fordow bunker, Natanz and Esfahan sites. He issued a doomsday warning to Iran if they don't immediately run to the negotiating table to make peace with Israel. Iran's foreign minister called the strikes 'outrageous' and said that Tehran 'reserves all options' to retaliate. After Trump's announcement, police in New York City and Washington DC revealed they increasing their presence amid fears of a retaliatory attack. The New York City Police Department said in a post to X: 'We're tracking the situation unfolding in Iran. 'Out of an abundance of caution, we're deploying additional resources to religious, cultural, and diplomatic sites across NYC and coordinating with our federal partners. We'll continue to monitor for any potential impact to NYC.' Not long after that post, the Metropolitan Police Department also released a similar statement. It said: 'The Metropolitan Police Department is closely monitoring the events in Iran. 'We are actively coordinating with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to share information and monitor intelligence in order to help safeguard residents, businesses, and visitors in the District of Columbia.' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass posted to X saying the city was 'closely monitoring any threats to public safety.' She added: 'There are no known credible threats at this time and out of an abundance of caution, LAPD is stepping up patrols near places of worship, community gathering spaces and other sensitive sites. 'We will remain vigilant in protecting our communities.' Paul Mauro, a former NYPD Inspector who monitored terror cells in the city, told Fox News that police presence will be increased outside religious intuitions. '[NYPD] will put out special attention patrol cars at locations that could track to the conflict in places that have an Israeli connection, and there's a couple of Shia mosques - Iran, is Shia - and there are a couple of Shia mosques,' Mauro said. He also noted authorities will be monitoring online for any bad actors that could be plotting against the US. 'You never know what's going to develop. So [they'll] liaise with those communities. They'll talk to them, they'll put special patrol, special attention patrol,' said Mauro. 'You're going to look very closely online. You're going to be monitoring a lot of the online stuff. NYPD has a very robust cyber counterterrorism program, and you're going to do that very heavily.'
Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Dominic Cummings: The British state is fundamentally broken
'He's the angriest man you'll ever meet,' Noel Gallagher once said of his brother, Liam. 'He's a man with a fork in a world of soup.' For those who don't know him, Dominic Cummings often appears afflicted with the same helpless rage – a maverick, furious with the broken world around him and armed with little more than the wrong cutlery. I don't even know if Cummings likes Oasis, the rock band that made Liam and Noel so famous in the 1990s that Tony Blair invited them to Downing Street. But one thing is true, Cummings is quietly plotting his own version of a comeback tour. The World of Soup beware. We meet in his elegant Islington town house, where he lives with his wife, the Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield. It's situated bang in the middle of the metropolitan, satisfied, liberal, elitist enclaves of the city he so regularly excoriates. The downstairs kitchen is a jumbled mess of family life, a rusting child's bike in the garden, comfy battered chairs and a list of school packed-lunch arrangements for his young son chalked on a blackboard. At the end of the garden hangs a large illustration depicting the final scene of the film Modern Times, where the Tramp, played by Charlie Chaplin, is seen walking into the distance with the Gamine, his companion. For a movie about the dehumanising risks of early-20th century industrialisation, it strikes a hopeful note of a better future. Next to it in the garden is a boxer's punch bag. And that sums up Dominic Mckenzie Cummings – a man motivated by a frustration so deep that one feels he often wants to hit something. And also a deeply held sense of optimism that there is something different and better both possible and coming. We can get there the easy way, or the hard way. 'The elites have lost touch' 'There's a bunch of obvious, relatively surface, phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,' Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson and a man so divisive he could go by the title Lord Marmite, tells me. 'But I think what's happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality. 'The ideas don't match, the institutions can't cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse. 'In the short term no one can, I think, be reasonably optimistic about politics because the old system is just going to play out over the next few years. 'But there are reasons for hope though, right? One obvious reason for hope is that Britain is pretty much unique globally for having got through a few hundred years without significant political violence.' That seems a pretty low bar – the fact that the UK hasn't suffered a bloody revolution or a fascist or communist takeover. Following the Southport riots and the more recent events in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, I ask if the risks of widespread disorder are increasing – some have even spoken of civil war, a brutal revolution. 'Ummm,' Cummings pauses. '[Violence] is definitely a risk, but a lot of these things are very path-dependent. Countries that repeatedly have violence are more likely to have violence in the future. 'And countries that are good at avoiding it have a better chance of avoiding it. I think that the long term cultural capital that's built up over centuries is an important factor and gives us some chance of avoiding the fate that you can see [elsewhere] of just spreading mayhem all over the world.' It's hot sitting overlooking the garden and Cummings, 53 and 'fit-skinny', provides water in glasses better suited for a fine Burgundy. I point out that he is wearing Berghaus foot warmers despite the temperature nudging 30C. 'I don't get hot,' he replies. My colleague Cleo Watson, with me to record an edition of The Daily T podcast, says that he was known as the Vampire when they worked together in No 10, given his appearance of living in a body five degrees colder than everyone else's. Like Prince Andrew, he doesn't seem to sweat. When the production team's cameras overheat, Cummings is immediately up offering solutions of a fan jammed messily down the back of a sofa. Cummings is what management consultants would describe as 'a solutions-focused, completer, finisher'. Where there is a problem, he believes there is a fix. Whether it's overheating hardware or the dinghies bringing ever more people to the shores of England, all sensible (and clever) people need to do is prioritise it, work out the remedy and implement without fear. 'Stopping the boats is simple – but we need to leave the ECHR' 'Stopping the boats' – Rishi Sunak's promise to the voters which even he now admits was a three-word slogan too far – is now a lead weight around Keir Starmer's Government. The Prime Minister's 'smash the gangs' has been as hollow a claim as what went before. Both are metaphors for the deep malaise across politics, the visible manifestation of an inability to 'do anything'. 'Starmer has literally done exactly what Sunak did,' Cummings says, pointing out that the Labour election pledges of 'putting the grown ups in charge' and 'change from the chaos' has not stopped the forces of political and economic failure and decline. 'He stood up and said: 'This is a complete disaster. It's extremely bad for the country, and I am putting my personal authority behind solving it.' 'So are you going to actually stop the problem? No, of course not. Our actual priority is staying in the European Convention on Human Rights. You're not going to stop the boats, and the boats are just going to be a daily joke on social media and on TV.' Cummings is often criticised for lacking a nuance button – a bulldozer eyeing a system that needs the skill of a surgeon. Sunak said that the boats slogan made a complicated matter seem simple. Just like 'Take Back Control' and 'Get Brexit Done' – the three-word campaign rallying cries for the 2016 referendum and the 2019 election of Johnson both driven by Cummings. Cummings disagrees, seeing unnecessary complication as part of the ancien régime 's defence plan. Make everything appear un-fixable in order to maintain the bureaucratic system that keeps thousands of pen-pushers in their jobs. 'Solving the boats is both trivial and tricky in two different dimensions,' Cummings says. 'I went into this in extreme detail in 2020. Operationally, it's obviously simple to stop the boats. You can deploy the Navy, you can stop the boats. 'The entire problem is legal and constitutional. It's the interaction of how the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act and judicial review system works. 'There is complete agreement between specialists who studied this subject that it is not possible for the British Prime Minister now to deploy the Navy and do the things that you need to do in order to stop the boats. The courts will declare it unlawful because of the Human Rights Act. 'So you have to repeal the Human Rights Act. You have to state that you are withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court [the ECHR], you deploy the Navy and stop the boats and you say nobody is landing from these boats. Everyone we pick up will be dropped on an island somewhere. 'No one will be coming to mainland Britain. The boats will be destroyed and the people organising the boats are going to be put on a list for UK special forces to kill or capture the way that we do with various terrorist organisations.' Cummings is in his flow: controversial, blunt, clear. The questions tick over in my mind. How much will it cost? Which 'island'? 'Kill or capture?' via which legal authority, or maybe none. What about the laws of the high seas and the duty to rescue? For Cummings such probing is all so much 'blah, blah, blah' and that, in the end, all challenges can be worked through. The opposite, endless inaction and failure, Cummings argues – where we are now with a crisis on our shores – is worse. And voters can see it. 'As soon as you announce that is your policy and take serious steps to do it, the boats stop straight away because the people doing this are not ideological terrorists who want to die and get into a fight about this,' he continues. 'They're there to make money. So as soon as they realise, oh, an island nation is actually just going to stop these stupid boats, they're obviously going to send the people somewhere else.' 'Whitehall is fundamentally broken' He has a question for Starmer, for our MPs, for the Civil Service. 'Do you actually want to get to grips with the fundamental legal problems and security problems we have in this country or not? The consensus amongst MPs has been for 30 years – no. 'The country doesn't agree with them. Both parties have tried to keep going with the old way and tried to persuade people that it can be done differently. They failed, they've lost the country. The country wants these problems solved. It's going to happen. The ECHR is toast and we'll be out of it.' Starmer's U-turn on the need for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal is another case of system failure. Cummings points out that child sexual assault and rape perpetrated by predominantly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men was being raised by people like Tommy Robinson years ago but being ignored by the state. 'The whole wider Whitehall system is fundamentally broken and the people don't know what they're doing,' he says. 'I think in principle it's obviously correct that the country gets to grips with this absolutely horrific nightmare [which] the old system has essentially tried to ignore for many years, decades. 'However, the kind of inquiry is very important […] I think that any kind of normal inquiry led by a judge will be mostly a farce. It'll be easily played by Whitehall. They'll destroy documents. They'll delay and evade – the normal Whitehall approach will be applied.' Cummings says politics now is about priorities – what do you want to solve first and how do you solve it. Starmer's premiership 'vaporised on contact with Whitehall' because he does not understand the need for fundamental change in the whole system. 'There will be a lot of talk about how Starmer can reset, but at the heart of it, I simply think that – like Sunak – Starmer's fundamental core software patch ['tech lingo' for a computer update] is optimised for pats on the head from permanent secretaries [senior civil servants]. That's what he will keep tuning to, because he can't do anything else.' The Conservatives are holed, probably below the water line. 'The Tories are obviously going to get rid of Kemi [Badenoch]. The only question is whether they do it in the autumn or whether they wait until they're smashed up in the May elections. 'So she'll go, after which they'll either put in James Cleverly [the former Home Secretary], in which case, shut the party down – definitively game over. 'Or there will be one last attempt at 'are we over the cliff or are we not?' Can we somehow reboot ourselves?' I ask him if Robert Jenrick, the noisy, TikTok-friendly, shadow justice secretary who films himself apprehending fare dodgers on the Tube, could execute such a reboot. 'He's obviously the person who everyone's talking about for a simple reason – the rest of the shadow cabinet are literally invisible. No one even knows who any of them are. Even people who are interested in politics don't know who they are.' And so to the big question, Nigel Farage and the plausible route to No 10. The two famously fell out (Farage called Cummings 'a horrible, nasty little man') over the referendum campaign, but more recently a rapprochement of sorts has happened, with Cummings having dinner with Farage before Christmas and backing Reform in the recent local elections. 'I thought it was interesting that he wanted to talk about the Cabinet Office and how power really works,' Cummings said of the December meeting. 'He said: 'I've never been in government myself. I've never been a minister. I don't know how it works. I'm now an MP though, and I talk to other MPs and it's clear they don't understand how it works and they still seem very curious about it and it's odd that they don't seem to know how power actually works inside the Cabinet Office.' 'The fundamental question is, does Nigel want to be Prime Minister in 2029? And if he does, is he prepared to build the thing that you need to build to do that? Which intrinsically involves turning Reform into an entity that can go out and engage with the country and bring in all these wonderful people and get some fraction of them involved with politics at the senior level. 'That's the core question. If he does that, then the whole system will undergo profound shock and it'll be a big deal and I'll be irrelevant to it. And if he doesn't do it, he will just be signalling this is the same old shambles and something else will grow.' Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, Cummings understands the need for deep policy work, deep management and delivery reform that means the end of a 'permanent' Civil Service and attention to how you communicate in a way that is truthful and that voters understand. Can Farage find the equivalent of the Centre for Policy Studies? Who is Reform's Sir Keith Joseph? Who is the Maurice Saatchi? I sense Cummings is not convinced Farage has the ability to move beyond 'the guy with an iPhone' and a provocative soundbite. I ask if he would help Reform and, though open, it seems, to any conversation, Cummings knows that Farage has his loyalists and many of them do not like the high-intellect of the guy with a first in Ancient and Modern History from Exeter College, Oxford University. Being a Reform Spartan brooks little room for compromise. 'Change means tearing down the old and building something new' So far, 2025 has been the year Cummings, who now runs his own consultancy, becomes a little more visible – a gentle public relaunch. The interviews are coming more regularly and two weeks ago he gave the Pharos Lecture at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre. He has attached himself to the Looking for Growth group, a grassroots movement of entrepreneurs led by the academic, Lawrence Newport, who has also put his name to the Crush Crime initiative to radically rethink law and order failings. 'If, in a year from now, it's obvious things have just sunk even further and can't actually change, then I think you'll see a burst of energy from a whole bunch of people saying, OK, right, let's start something new,' Cummings, who is wearing a Looking for Growth cap throughout our interview, says. 'And I think you'll see people from Labour defecting to join it. I think you'll see Tories and Reform people – but, crucially, a whole set of people who are now not involved with politics. We can't go on like this in 2029, in the election, and then have another four years with a bunch of these bozos in charge.' Cummings has spoken of his own start-up party, which remains a possibility, though he gently side-steps whether it might happen any time soon. 'It will certainly not be led by me. And certainly not chaired by me,' is all he will say. I would wager a £5 note that he will be involved if and when the old parties irrevocably fail. Cummings' analysis has clarity. Close the Treasury and the Cabinet Office; rip out the stultifying conformity of the Civil Service and end the job for life culture; make presently 'fake' ministers responsible for the decisions they take; encourage in the young, new talent that presently sees 'tech, maths and money' as more appealing than running the country; bring immigration down 'to the thousands'; embrace AI ('Westminister is always the last place to see anything'); overthrow the stale old media, including the BBC; understand that the public see traditional politics as peopled by incompetents, liars and cheats, and build a new, liberal, libertarian world where the market of good ideas is all that matters. Maybe Dominic Cummings should be prime minister? 'That's a laughable suggestion,' he replies. But all the Labour, Conservative and Reform MPs who regularly contact Cummings 'for a chat' are sure he will have a role. Because the World of Soup is coming to an end. And we're going to need some people with forks to work our way to a new future.
