Farewell Dominic Cummings, a shambolic blagger who leaves behind only a tempest of loathing and dysfunction

Farewell then, Dominic Cummings. Not quite Prospero, as it turned out, more Pisspooro.

The entire apparatus of government has not been rebuilt in the image of a tech startup, but you did get to send some very angry text messages, so who is to say it was all in vain?

It will be up to the historians now, to decide which were the great man’s more productive years. Was it the ones when he sat in his basement firing out 20,000 word blogs about how hopeless the government machine was, and how absolutely any idiot could fix it overnight?

Or was it his roughly sixteen months in charge, transforming that government machine into an international gold standard for incompetence?  

Is it, in fact, harder than it looks to smash everything up and then rebuild it, given that not even the smashing up bit has been achieved in any meaningful way? (Yes, some senior civil servants have been bullied into resigning over catastrophic messes they did not make. But they have, for the most part, been replaced by their deputies, cementing the kind of revolution that does not quite need Lenin to plan it, but Beverley from HR.)

Unfortunately, Cummings leaves us only two conclusions to draw. That it was harder than he said it would be, that actually, any idiot can’t do it. Or that he himself was too idiotic to manage it. Either way, it ends with our protagonist in the idiot role. Though it surely cannot be long before a lengthy blog post appears to put us right.

Already, we are told that, actually, Cummings was a genius. The fact that he has been drummed out of Downing Street before doing any of the things that Brexit was meant to be for, is a mere detail. But for him, there would have been no Brexit at all. There hasn’t been yet, of course. It hasn’t actually started and he’s already out the door, but don’t worry about that.

Not much of a man for the tricky task of actual government, it turned out, not so good at doing any of the things he so desperately wanted to do, that he said were so very easy. Very good at slogans though. “Vote Leave, Take Control,” is the one that will be remembered, even if he himself has been booted clean off the controls just weeks before they were finally meant to have been taken back.

But who cares about that? It made far less impact than another of his snappy little soundbites, “Turkey is Joining the EU,” which for some peculiar reason is also yet to actually happen.

The sociologist Emile Durkheim used to talk of people as pegs and masks. We all have a range of masks we hang off our peg, and the longer we wear any one of them, so they become part of the peg. Boris Johnson, for example, had not banked on playing the joker for twenty odd years, before ascending to his rightful place as prime minister. But now he knows no other role.

And so in the end, with Cummings, what was only meant to be a strategic veneer of anger and aggression became the man himself. Certainly, he leaves behind absolutely no evidence whatsoever to the contrary. He has been found hopelessly, unimaginably wanting.

A long time ago, at a minor comedy night in Bristol, a very unfamous comedian whose name I cannot recall did a long routine about what he called the “dickhead gap”.

The gap between what you think you are and what you actually are – that’s how much of a dickhead you are. Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, thinks he is a gift from God, but he actually is, so the gap is small, arguably non existent.

Cummings, on the other hand, leaves behind substantial evidence that he may very well be the Cristiano Ronaldo of dickheads.

Naturally, he has found the time to anonymously explain to his preferred journalists that this was how it was all meant to be.

The end of Cummings was foreseen, as with all things, on Cummings’s blog. When he wrote, in January, that he wanted to hire “misfits and weirdos” and people much cleverer than him, to make himself “more or less redundant by the end of the year”, this was exactly, exactly what he had in mind.

Presumably, the expectation was always that the misfits and weirdos could turn out to be eugenicists and out and out racists who wanted to fire live rounds at the Black Lives Matter protesters, and who would then themselves have to be made not more or less but completely redundant.

There would then be a massive power struggle in which he would threaten to resign if he didn’t get his own way, then not get his own way, and then resign like he always said he would.

This is Cummings going on his own terms, of  course it is, though it does leave a number of questions unanswered. And none more pressing than, well, what was the point of all this exactly? Back when he launched his recruitment drive for misfits and weirdos, he breezily explained how, after Brexit, there would be “trillion dollar bills lying on the street” for anyone who could just reorganise the workings of government to pick them up.

And yet, here he is, on his way out the door, entirely of his own choosing, leaving all those trillion dollar bills just lying about.

In the summer of 2017, back when he was blogging about what a terrible job Theresa May was doing (you may recall she rejected the Brexit deal Boris Johnson would later sign, describe as oven ready, fight a general election over, then a year later admit he never actually understood it), he made some curious admissions.

“I also think importance of talks and a deal is greatly overstated, and how we shape domestic institutions is by far most important long term,” he said then.

“What will determine that is whether we can reform Whitehall / science / education / real productivity. Brexit is necessary, obviously, [but] not sufficient.”

Of course, for those of us who thought from the start that Brexit was and is the stupidest thing any country has ever done, it is in some ways a little annoying that the guy who instigated it, and saw it as no more than a stepping stone to something else, has now stepped off the stepping stones before getting beyond even the very first one.

It will be up to others now, to try to work out what Cummings was trying to get out of it, and as no one is as clever as he is, that will not be easy.

It does mean that he leaves public life very much in the style of someone who came before him. David Cameron, too, thought it would be a good idea to have an EU referendum, and that he could use the threat of it to renegotiate a better EU membership deal with the EU. He had no idea what he was doing, he got it hopelessly wrong, and so left his unimaginably profound mess for the rest of us to deal with.

And so too it is with Cummings, Cameron 2.0. An Oxbridge egomaniac with a humanities degree, right to the very end. The most shambolic blagger of them all.

Fortunately for Cummings, and unfortunately for the luxury shepherds hut industry, he’s too arrogant to realise he’s exactly the same. 

He leaves no legacy at all, only a tempest of loathing and dysfunction both in 10 Downing Street and the nation at large. In that regard, Prospero and Pisspooro are not totally unalike. Both men, in the end, broke their staff.