Dominic Cummings’s response to the plight of the Conservative party is typically bellicose. He calls for it to be driven into the earth, the furrows planted with salt, and banished for eternity like some latter day Carthage. He sees no sense in reviving or reforming it, only blood-eagling it. It is a strong take, and perhaps unexpected from someone who was at the heart of a Conservative government just a few years ago.
Cummings is not, of course, a Conservative. He has never professed to be one, nor seemingly been a member of the party at any point. His relationship with it was always a temporary alliance driven by his own views of what to deliver for the country. Brexit was part, but not all of this, a necessary precondition to unleash the state in a new direction. It was an insurgent project which relied on proximity to the Prime Minister and cultivating an air that the PM needed Cummings more than the other way around.
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