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. There was no circumspection, no ‘what if we’re overheard?’, no ‘but how will this play with X, Y or Z?’ It was bracing to cross swords with such a mind, as in an Oxbridge tutorial, careless of the proprieties.

I had a dream last week, which I shall now develop. Only some of this was in the dream which, half-waking and half-sleeping for an hour, I then turned into a glimpse of a time maybe a century after we’re all dead.

It’s an Ozymandian scene. In a wasteland we encounter a fallen statue: a figure in a tracksuit. We resolve to research the life and career of this now obscure figure.

We find obituaries. All mention a then-famous email in the form of an internal Downing Street memo from Cummings, who was chief policy adviser to a long-forgotten prime minister, Boris Johnson. The memo was (wisely and perhaps intendedly) never actually sent, but reveals Cummings’s thinking.