Bad Spad And Dangerous To Know: How Dominic Cummings Could Shape Both Brexit And The Snap Election

One insider says Cummings now “wastes so much time on HR”, including things like pay rises and contracts. Of course, it was his desire to personally intervene among special advisers that led to his now infamous sacking of Sonia Khan, Sajid Javid’s media adviser.

As HuffPost revealed at the time, she was summarily dismissed and escorted off the premises by an armed police officer. “It was like a public execution, that’s what really upset people,” one aide recalls.

Javid became the first cabinet minister to officially complain about Cummings when he met Johnson the next day. Her case is still being resolved but it looks likely she will emerge with no discredit and with a likely pay-off.

In a lecture in 2014 while he was out of government, Cummings had actually warned of his irritation with usual HR processes in Whitehall, especially for civil servants.

“Almost no one is ever fired,” he said. “Time after time after time, I would be in the [Education] department and on a TV screen it would say ‘Latest Gove disaster, Gove botches X’, and I would look through the glass screen and you would see the official responsible for it the lift, pottering home at 3.30 in the afternoon, doesn’t care. Why not? Because failure is normal, it is not something to be avoided.”

“Between flexible hours, compressed hours and a culture that says it’s perfectly acceptable to go on holiday the day before an announcement you’ve been working on for the last six months, it is very hard to get everyone in the same room. So we just had to ban announcements on Monday, because we knew it would all just fall apart.”

There are mixed messages too. At the very first special adviser meeting, Cummings told staff that if they or their minister felt No.10 was making a mistake, they should tell him. Feedback was to be encouraged. But since then, several feel any department or minister which doesn’t precisely follow his orders will feel the wrath of Downing Street.

Still, Cummings’ admirers say his big asset is he doesn’t buckle when things get tough.

At the most recent spad meetings last week, he appeared to relish the coming week as the government faced its Supreme Court verdict and as more election-focused policy announcements were lined up, one source said.

Cummings even joked on Friday to colleagues that if the court decision went against the government, it could use executive power to once again prorogue parliament.

The Cameron memoir publicity has already been ‘priced in’ too, with Johnson’s chief adviser believing the ex-PM’s re-emergence will remind voters why they voted Leave in the first place.

Cummings himself last week gave a rare public comment when the media doorstepped him outside his house “You guys should get outside London and go to talk to people who are not rich ‘Remainers’.”

It’s perhaps not Remainers but Brexiteers who could be most in his sights in coming weeks, if Johnson does push ahead with an amended deal with Brussels.

Cummings has never held back from his contempt for the European Research Group (ERG) of hardline Tory MPs. He famously described former Brexit secretary David Davis as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus”.

Davis has now gently hit back at that trio of criticism with a three-pronged attack of his own. “It wasn’t so clever for various people in Number 10 to do things which are either unwise or careless or even arrogant,” he tells me.

“‘We’re going to have an election on this day, we’re going to do this.’. why would you do that? What’s what’s the point of that sort of briefing, except to make some spad feel important? Broadly speaking Boris has been right, but I think he’s had some problems visited on him by an over talkative number 10 over the summer in particular.”

Davis refuses to comment directly about Cummings, but his views are clear. “He and I are not friends. So I’ll probably pass on the invitation to continue to criticise him.

“One of the minuses I’m afraid has been the fact that Number 10 has in effect itself provoked all sorts of unnecessary actions, whether it’s about the 21 [rebels with the whip withdrawn], or whether it’s about the choosing of the prorogation. All of these things have been made worse by Number 10’s briefing.”