The memo Dominic Cummings never sent

There’s something about Dominic Cummings I will always like, and perhaps partly it’s the danger. I hardly know him well — perhaps at all, really — but will never forget an evening many years ago after a Times debate, when a few of us participants repaired to a restaurant called Fish near London Bridge. We sat up late, talking and drinking until we were just a handful; and one was Dominic. Hours with this arresting man sped by.

He reminded me of one of my heroes in politics, the late Sir Keith Joseph, though Cummings is relaxed and loose, and Keith could be stiff and shy. What they shared, though, beyond a beguiling intellectual confidence, was an appetite for stripping things back to first principles and following the logic. Both would lock straight on to the argument, heedless of the sensitivities, the ‘politics’, the personal risk or sometimes even the likelihood.