Dominic Cummings: The British state is fundamentally broken

Telegraph

3 hours ago

'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.