Dominic Cummings breaks silence after secret dinner with Nigel Farage

The Guardian

24-03-2025

Civil servants may wish to dust off their CVs. Members of parliament, brace, brace, brace. Dominic Cummings – the political weather-maker behind the tide that delivered Brexit and raised and drowned Boris Johnson – is eyeing up a Westminster come back, of sorts.
'I might spend more time on SW1 depending how things play out,' Cummings told the Guardian after speculation about his intentions in the Westminster postcode, 'but I do not want a job there. My efforts will only be helping people of any party pushing in what I consider a good direction, I'm happy living away from SW1 and SW1 for sure feels the same about me.'
The trigger for a renewed interest in the beanie-wearing politico from Durham, memorably portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in Brexit: The Uncivil War, has been the recent revelation of a secret dinner with Nigel Farage shortly before Christmas.
It has prompted much excitement in Westminster. The two men were daggers drawn for a number of years, partly as a result of a clash between their respective organisations (Cummings' Vote Leave of which he was campaign director and the Farageist Grassroots Out) over which would be the official Brexit campaign group.
Farage described Cummings, who went on to be Johnson's chief adviser in Downing Street, as a 'horrible nasty little man'. Last summer, Cummings said the re-emergence of Farage on the political scene was 'depressing', adding that '15% of the country [is] pretty much like Farage and hates everybody else'. He warned that Farage did not offer solutions.
It was something of a turn-up, then, for the two men to break bread. Of the dinner, the Reform leader has said only that they talked 'about the blob and what were the practical problems of coming into government and not being able to do what you wanted to do'.
In his first public comments about the meeting, Cummings said it had been a 'friendly chat'.
The focus, the 53-year-old added, had been 'the core problems that we have a broken Whitehall, a disgraceful and shattered Tory party clogging up the party system, how to shake it all up most effectively. And how to bring some of the great people in this country now excluded from government into it to replace the shitshow we all have to live with every day.'
'The current crop of MPs and officials by definition can't fix themselves,' Cummings said. 'It needs an outside force – just as the vaccine taskforce or rapid tests or sewage monitoring did in 2020, successful only because of forces external to Whitehall forcing Whitehall to act differently against its default mode.'
Cummings had pressed on Farage the need for him to build credible policies in order to recruit top-quality candidates and attract donors, it is understood.
In turn, Farage, 60, is said to have made a nod to his own mortality. Reform may be on a trajectory to win 100 seats at the next election in 2029, putting the party in the position where it could execute a reverse take over of the Conservative party.
But Farage would be nudging at Lord Palmerston's record as Britain's oldest first-time prime minister should he be successful against Keir Starmer in 2035. He would be into his 80s by the end of a second term, should that come to pass.
Farage said 'he didn't want to wait until 2035 so wanted to win a majority in 2029', Cummings said.
Not everyone who knows the maverick political strategist is convinced that he would turn down an opportunity to be part of that.
'Farage is – much like Boris, although in different ways – a deeply flawed individual,' said a friend. 'So the question is, do you just throw your toys out the pram and say all of the lead actors are shit, I don't want to work with them, plague on all their houses? Or do you try and work with the cranks that the political process has chucked up? I think he's probably found himself in the latter camp.'
A second source said Cummings was insistent in private as well as in public that he would 'never work for Farage'. But everyone can agree that he has got his old vim and verve back over the past 12 months.
After being fired by Johnson in November 2020, he helped engineer the Partygate scandal that brought his former boss down but then became something of a recluse, friends said.
In line with the image of a tortured genius in exile, he purchased a £161,000 home on Lindisfarne – the Holy Island just off the Northumberland coast.
A friend added, however, that it was in Cummings' nature to disappear only to dramatically re-emerge. That he did in October 2023 to give evidence at the Covid inquiry and chew up what was left of Johnson's reputation, describing the former prime minister as 'a symptom of the system's sickness'.
He still holds Johnson in contempt, friends say. Cummings also believes the Conservative party is moving towards extinction – something he would be pleased to nudge along.
In May last year, before the general election, he floated the idea of a startup party and started talking to potential figureheads, it is understood, including those who are former members of the armed forces, although that plan appears to have been dropped.
Cummings is now 'hedging his bets', suggested a friend.
He retains a few disciples within the parliamentary ranks of the Conservative party, including Katie Lam, the MP for Weald of Kent, a former Downing Street colleague who got on the wrong side of Johnson's wife, Carrie Symonds, after nudging the family dog, Dilyn, away from her handbag over which he had cocked his leg.
Of late, though, Cummings has been focused on helping a cross-party movement led by the academic Dr Lawrence Newport, who first came to public prominence with his successful campaign to ban XL bully dogs.
The two men are understood to have bonded over their respective tales of receiving death threats for their campaigning efforts.
Newport has moved on to champion a tougher approach to crime and, more recently, a plan for economic growth, including the implementation of a fully fledged infrastructure bill. Cummings has opened up his contacts book and is said to be a constant source of advice.
'The hope very much is that it's a movement that grows in size, and the more it grows, the noisier it can be,' Newport said. 'The idea is to create something that politicians have to listen to so that they understand that there is a constituency of people who actually really care about prosperity.'
At the first Looking for Growth (LFG) event in December, Cummings was a keynote speaker. He then led a policy 'workshop' on Saturday at an event attended by about 200 people, including the Labour MP Chris Curtis and the shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith.
'I've talked more to Labour MPs and spads [special advisers] than Tories in last year [because] they are more interested in why Whitehall is broken, what we started doing in 2020 to fix it etc,' Cummings said. 'Almost zero Tories are interested in this as 2021-24 showed. And broader Tory ecosystem is also not interested in how power really works in Whitehall.
'I've been helping Lawrence Newport on crime and LFG because he's trying to push things in good directions and LFG is partly about finding talent outside politics and getting it involved in politics.'
Cummings wrote recently on his Substack blog, for which he has more than 60,000 subscribers, that such campaigns could be the ''third force' that could help influence things one way or another at a crucial moment'.
Should such a crucial moment come, who would bet against him being in the thick of it?