The truth about Dominic Cummings and Elon Musk’s ‘sabotage plot’

A few centuries ago, when I worked on the Daily Telegraph under the editorship of the now Lord Moore, there was a very sensible item in the style book. It said (I paraphrase) that when a story sounded too good to be true, you should pause, give your head a wobble and apply a bit of common sense. That local newspaper, for instance, reporting that a giant pike in the village pond had been taking small dogs and toddlers that strayed too close to the edge of the water…Really?

This is the heuristic I think we need to apply to a splash headline this week in the Mail on Sunday: “Musk and Cummings ‘In Plot To Sabotage UK Politics’”. The claim – attributed to anonymous “senior government sources” – is that Dominic Cummings is advising Elon Musk on how to slash trillions from the US government budget, while at the same time “helping orchestrate” Musk’s social media attacks on the Prime Minister.