My Observer Comment piece on Dominic Cummings:
Skulking in the background of TV news footage of Boris Johnson’s cabinet of C-list politicos, a strange figure in a T-shirt could be seen. His name: Dominic Cummings, now the prime minister’s senior adviser. He’s all forehead and no smile, clutching a pen and possibly a notebook, and doubtless making notes.
What a pity, one thought, that David Davis wasn’t round the cabinet table. In 2017 Cummings noted that Davis was as “thick as mince”, as “lazy as a toad” and as “vain as Narcissus”. As they passed him in the corridor on Thursday, many of Johnson’s new appointees must have wondered how they will be summarised in that notebook. We’ll have to wait a bit to find out.
Cummings’s appointment to the centre of Johnsonian power was the only real surprise of the week. After all, if you’re a prime minister who needs to get the government machine humming in top gear, ready for no deal, then the last person you need to lead the charge is a guy who has for years blogged his contempt for the civil service and the hapless politicians they serve.
His most recent efforts in this regard – an attack on the late, former cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood – is a case study of how to spit on a revered grave…