Dominic Cummings is out of control. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s right-hand boremonger is going around Whitehall sacking people as if someone elected him, a process that’s bound to end in tears. First he told a bunch of worried Special Advisers that he was going to get rid of half of them. They thought he was half-joking, but he wasn’t. People that one-dimensional never joke. Most of those anxious Spads got sacked all right, as Cummings (above) tightened his grip on the machinery of government far beyond what Alistair Campbell managed in the high days of New Labour.
Not content with that rather unpleasant and unnecessary show of strength, Cummings then turned on the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid, in recent months one of the few Cabinet Ministers to show a spark of at least proximate autonomy and humanity. First he let it be known that the Treasury were thinking about a pensions raid on the rich and a Mansion Tax – the Tory equivalent of attacking Windsor Castle with nukes – and then he said that everything in last week’s reshuffle was going to just be a steady-as-she-goes readjustment. Ah, clever, clever, dastardly stuff.
Subsequently, pow! The Chancellor was forced to resign
after being told he had to replace all his advisers and row in behind a ‘joint
team’ that was joint only in the sense that it was located somewhere between
Cummings’ arse and his elbow. And Tories everywhere ate it up, because No. 11
was some sort of weird socialist hangout that wanted to raise taxes everywhere
and, er, stop Cummings’ dreams of a great big spending spree. Classic, indeed,
vintage Dom – manoeuvrings worthy of a PJ Masks-style caper in the night time
we’re living through. It’s all so impressive and unexpected. If, that is, you
live in a world where people talking about NASA control rooms is seriously
mooted as some kind of amazing analytical breakthrough.
Let’s leave him aside for a moment, and consider the
pygmies whose shoulders he stands on. Because Cummings is just a symptom of a
much, much deeper rot – the gangrene that tells you where the worst of the
wounds reside. The crooked tree can only stand in a crooked forest. His masters should sit in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, and
in normal times the kind of treatment he has meted out to staff in what is (let’s
face it) a real place of work would be reined in by actual Secretaries of
State. Unfortunately, these no longer exist, since they have been replaced by a mysterious group of Churchill nodding dogs who collectively seem to constitute
a postmodern joke about how far you can push things. The sort of supervillain
team that even the most avaricious late-seventies sci-fi ripoff merchant would
have turned down as too tightly spandexed for its own good.
At their head is Boris Johnson – a man who would look away
with the sweats if you showed him a diagram of what facts look like in a
catalogue. An Attorney General in Suella Braverman who doesn’t much like the
law, insofar as it applies to the Government as well as all those silly little
people you can’t see from No. 10. Newly installed as International Development
Secretary? Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who… doesn’t think much of overseas aid. Also,
Grant Shapps. Dear Lord! Grant Shapps at Transport! A man who made up an idiot
to detract from his own personality. And then there’s Dominic Raab, Lord Rictus
of Grin. That’s it. That’s the joke.
To be charitable, Raab is just an arrogant
couldn’t-care-less slab of heartless Easter Island impassivity that serves as mere
accoutrement to an archipelago of evil ruled over by its own Queen of Death,
Priti Patel – a woman who cares so little about you that she would even let you
linger there, on the basis that extinction would be too easy. Oh no. On you
live, forced to endure that spew of utter garbage that comes out of her maw,
all the better to give in to all those stinking fish meats and piles of rotting
dog food that have cornered you in an ever-emptying trash compactor, crying at
the last that your imprisonment actually amounts to the sweet, sweet nectar of
freedom.
So that’s it. Those are the people who are supposed to
control the Pocket Spaceballs Darth Vadar that Cummings thinks he has become: a kind of cult Dark Helmet for politicos. An
evil Blockbusters team from the late 1980s who think of themselves as so darn edgy
that they even have a living mascot, Liz Truss serving along with their college
scarves as some sort of irritating Tigger that forces you to atomise your teeth
by grinding them together so hard they distintegrate. They had to retire Chris Grayling, a kind of overstuffed and
unloved Charity Shop Teddy – a toy so cursed that the Cats Protection League
outlet trying to sell him burned down two days after his bathos-laden arrival –
because even they have, well, standards.
Why is this happening? There’s a single reason the Legion
of Unlikely Spandex are winning everything they touch, and it’s a lack of
anyone to oppose them. The broadcast and print media, who once locked horns
with big beasts such as Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson and Normal
Tebbit, seem enfeebled somehow by the ludicrous spectacle before them – and
let’s face it, that’s a Trumpian tactic that works everywhere.
Remember when Johnson said he liked to build model buses
out of old wine crates? He doesn’t. He was just making the point that he could say anything he likes, whenever he likes. Life
continued as normal, so he did it some more. And some more. You remember that
he bought that dog? Look, hate to break it to you, but he probably doesn't like dogs. Johnson’s
an important signifier, a postmodern marker of just how decadent we
are, how decadent we know we are, and how decadent we are to laugh about it. Like
the flaccid spectacle of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, but without the action – a
lozenge of exhausted ennui that would have been past its best under Harold
Macmillan, but somehow lingers on in a blaze of reupholstered finery.
So while the Government looks at taking the judiciary and the legal system apart, all the better to execute its own will, and considers
abolishing the BBC as we know it altogether, where is the official Opposition?
‘Who?’, we hear you ask, entirely justifiably, and to be honest we’re right
behind you with the disbelief that they could be so bad and just irrelevant at
one and the same time, but their startling absence from the battlefield since
2015 is so discombobulating and so important that we have to consider it
somewhere.
Look, it’s been a litany of failure, a hopscotch across
the political minefield aimed at stamping on every lurking detonation possible
in an all-out push to end the agony. Their one hope? Shadow Brexit Secretary
Keir Starmer, a patently decent and intelligent man who will very likely have
the bad luck to inherit a rag-tag band of misfits and misfires who couldn’t
even get into that 1979 Star Wars warmover that the ‘Cabinet’ feels embarrassed
about. He faces a bit of, well, an endurance test.
Keir Starmer, the future monarch in the dungeon who can
see the watery light shining through the window far above him, but is so far
down beneath it that he can only touch the illuminated column of dust that it
lights up within his reach. Tragically, as he tries to pull on it, the illusion
of solidity will likely dissolve in front of his face as he stands there in the
Marianna Trench of political prisons that Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray have dug for him. Maybe they’ll make a Lego set of the scene as a whole, and kids can light
up different policies around Starmer’s feet like that diving bell that picks
out bits of the Titanic’s dining room.
Keir Starmer, a prince among the quarterwits who ram-packed the court of Bad King Lazy McTemper by virtue of the one awful truth that he
must hide from them all, the long-feared revelation that he has recently read a
book. Keir Starmer, the man forced to tolerate The Leader Who Must Not Now Be
Named – a political bad guy so tedious that he was even more poorly sketched
than Voldemort (and twice as derivative). Keir Starmer, who turned into The
Human Sigh as he had to stand next to Nu-Voldemort in Brussels. He’d make a
good Victoria Wood song, but there’s not enough syllables in his name for a
really good rousing chorus along the lines of that much-loved classic, ‘Ann
Widdecombe’. At least no-one has to hear that Seven Nation Army chant again. Thank
God.
All this Carnival of Revelry is precisely why Dom can do
his vintage stuff – because there’s no-one to stop him, the press stultified by
the sheer stupidity of what they’re seeing, Labour having formed an
inward-facing firing squad straight out of Reservoir Dogs, most of the Liberal
Tories having been vanquished, and the Liberal Democrats having all but disappeared.
So he’ll push and push and push, until he is forced to up the ante once more by saying
stuff so poisonous that it’ll do for him. It’ll probably be his sad devotion to
the long-discredited concept of IQ and the pseudo-science of eugenics that spins
him off into furious renewed exile on a farm full of books. But the pretext
doesn’t matter. He’ll just have to cross the road, and cross it again, to pick a
fight – with himself. No-one else seems to want the hassle.
Reader, you are tethered to them – for now. But most of
this has happened before, and lots of this will happen again. Cummings will
overreach himself. He will be sacked soon. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,
but someday in the not-too-distant future. The Cabinet will blunder. Labour will eventually see the goal, and then start
shooting at it, hopefully before our Sun goes nova and swallows us all. Until
that day, remember: never flinch, never weary, and never despair.
