The 'Political Anarchist' Behind Britain's Chaos: Boris Johnson's Russian-speaking senior adviser [View all]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/dominic-cummings-brexit.html

The ‘Political Anarchist’ Behind Britain’s Chaos
Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s Rasputin, is happy to watch the country blow up if he gets what he wants.
By Jenni Russell
Sept. 7, 2019, 10:00 a.m. ET

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Now this single-minded insurgent is the most powerful individual in the British government, vaulted into Downing Street as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief strategic adviser. His job is to deliver Brexit and win Mr. Johnson five years more in office, making up for the prime minister’s deficiencies as a lazy, inattentive bumbler. Mr. Cummings is deploying all the techniques that have worked for him before: disruption, deception, intimidation and an implacable willingness to alienate people.

Those tactics have gone off in British politics this week like a series of grenades. No prime minister has had a more calamitous start. These are the opening battles of a seismic political war. Within five days, Mr. Johnson has lost control of Parliament, lost his party’s majority, lost his ability to leave the European Union at the end of October without a deal, as he has pledged, and lost the loyalty of many moderates in his Conservative Party by brutally expelling the 21 principled, thoughtful, experienced and respected members of Parliament who had opposed his plans to catapult Britain out of Europe without a deal.

Mr. Cummings’s decisions have left Mr. Johnson dangling at the mercy of the opposition parties. He can’t pass any laws, and the opposition now has the power to make the crucial political decision: the date of the next election.

These convulsions have caused uproar in the Conservative Party’s ranks. The former prime minister John Major is demanding Mr. Cummings’s sacking, saying he’s a “political anarchist” who must be ousted before he poisons the government “beyond repair.” Incensed and appalled members of Parliament are watching their party morph before their eyes into a hard-line vehicle for the most intransigent, right-wing Brexiteers, in which centrists and Remainers are welcome so long as they shut up and do as they are told. A senior party figure told me, with classic English understatement, that this is “a ghastly mess.” “I’m not sure that Boris read the small print of the Cummings plan — this is the ultimate proof that one is a charlatan and the other a psychopath,” he said.

This looks like a catastrophe for Mr. Johnson. But the story may not be so simple. Mr. Cummings deliberately framed and precipitated the confrontation with Parliament, intending to lose the vote so that Mr. Johnson could instantly call an election as the people’s champion, the deliverer of Brexit, the supporter of no deal. He didn’t expect so many Tories to revolt or the opposition to derail his timetable for an election, but Mr. Cummings, who considers himself a master strategist, sees these as little more than skirmishes before the real fight.


Dominic Cummings