In the early morning hours of June 24, 2016, a portly blond man in a Brazilian football shirt and mismatched shorts, his hair dishevelled, panicked on the phone from the kitchen of his beautiful historic listed house in London’s Islington district: “What the fuck do we do now? What the hell do we do?!” The man in question, just 52 years old, is called Boris Johnson. The former Mayor of London and Conservative Party MP is in conversation with Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Brexit campaign. “What the fuck is the plan?” Silence at the end of the line. “We didn’t plan anything? I never thought this would happen. What the hell are we going to do?” It happened. Misled by the lies of Brexiteers and their campaign leader Dominic Cummings, 51.89% of Britons have just voted to leave Britain from the European Union. Johnson and Cummings are now united forever in the lie and now the race for supreme power, Downing Street. They will rise together and fall together. Or, in the words of historian Anthony Seldon, author of Johnson at 10: “Dominic Cummings made Johnson Prime Minister and then he destroyed him.”
Anthony Seldon knows what he is talking about. For forty years, with each resignation of Prime Minister, the British historian throws himself into a meticulous research of their time spent in power to deliver the substance of it and draw up the fairest balance sheet. The conduct of hundreds of interviews adds a human and psychological dimension to this research work which makes Anthony Seldon’s works reference books.
In Johnson at 10 (released in Britain in early June), Seldon begins his portrayal of “BoJo” in power with the report of the headmaster of the prestigious Eton school on Pfeffel Johnson’s young Alexander Boris. The principal speaks of “his shamefully cavalier attitude”, “his gross absence of any sense of responsibility” and his conviction that “the rules only apply to others”. For Anthony Seldon, “the end of Boris Johnson was therefore at its beginning”. And the meeting with Dominic Cummings, the “Faustian pact” he needed to raise him to power, the sole object of his ambition.
“It will end with tears”
David Cameron understood very early on the evil side of Cummings, this Oxford history graduate fascinated by Bismarck and Lenin. It was even largely because of him that the Prime Minister (2010-2016) stripped Michael Gove of his education ministry in 2014. shaved off the past to reform well, Cummings, then special adviser to Gove, had succeeded in alienating the entire administration, which he contemptuously called the blob, the “shapeless heap”. Having spent his entire career in the Conservative Party, more out of hatred for social democracy than out of affinity for the Tories, the young Cummings was convinced that the Conservative Party must first be imploded in order to rebuild it into a great technocratic and intellectual force. Destruction in the service of progress: a theory applicable to everything and especially to the central administration, whose civil servants he wanted to replace with experts and “mathematicians”.
His fascination with math remains, according to Anthony Seldon, his only success within the Ministry of Education. Of the math schools have thus emerged in Great Britain since 2014, like those created in the USSR by the great mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. “But instead of becoming the great reformer he would have liked to be, Cummings channeled his immense energy into negative emotions, anger and frustration. Brexit became the cause by which he intended to solve all the problems of the country, the administration to the economy, from productivity to technology,” continues Seldon. Realizing quickly that he would not become a minister, he had to choose a champion who would allow him to reign in the shadows: Boris Johnson.
In mid-July 2019, the stormy Brexit negotiations and the revolt of the ultras within her party got the better of Theresa May in Downing Street. Boris Johnson hopes to gain the support of the conservatives and especially of the inserts during the leadership contest of July 23. He composes his team in an emergency. While on vacation in Greece, Cummings receives a call from Johnson: “I need you on my team”, says the one who feels his hour of glory coming. Cummings is being desired. Johnson goes home as soon as he returns to London. “This is crap,” Johnson begins to say. “I don’t know what to do. I need you. We risk losing everything, the party, Brexit with a second referendum, and the arrival of Corbyn [NDLR : alors chef du parti travailliste] in power.” Cummings, stung by the challenge before him, said he was interested but asked for a written, detailed and signed agreement. Johnson replied: “I’ll give you a verbal agreement and say yes to everything. Is that okay?” “No,” Cummings replies. A few hours later, he sends her a list of all his demands. This document will be known to insiders as the “Terror Memorandum.” his own advisers in Downing Street, who report only to him and not to the Prime Minister. Johnson accepts everything. “It will end in tears”, predicts the permanent secretary in Downing Street, David Bell.
“I will dedicate the rest of my life to destroying it”
The urgency, in this summer of 2019, is to muzzle Parliament in one way or another, to call for new elections and to win them hands down. Cummings engineered the suspension of Parliament, later ruled illegal by the High Court of Justice. He is also behind the resounding victory of the Conservatives in the December 2019 elections, with an absolute majority of 80 seats. His slogan “Get Brexit done!” galvanized the electorate tired of endless negotiations, while Jeremy Corbyn served as the ideal foil. After this electoral victory, Cummings believed himself invincible. He told his friends: “The victory speech is me; the people’s government is me; the 14 million vote difference is me; and who is going to get rid of the chancellor of the ‘Chessboard? It’s me.’ In other words, Cummings treats Johnson like a child king, whose regent he would be.
But by dint of laying down the law and doing it by insulting everyone, Cummings sees those close to Boris Johnson starting to fight back. First, Carrie Symonds, Boris Johnson’s fiancée, who doesn’t like the way ‘Dom’ talks to Boris, but also Sajid David, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who would rather resign loudly than get order by Cummings.
And then Covid-19 hits the world, and Johnson is hospitalized. For months Cummings ruled from the shadows. It is finally Carrie Symonds, the one he called “the crazy princess”, who will get the better of Cummings in Downing Street. In November 2020, Dom and his advisers slam the door, boxes full of arms. Cummings sends one last text to one of Johnson’s relatives: “I’m going to dedicate the rest of my life to destroying him.” Eighteen months later, Johnson joins Cummings in the dustbin of British politics. Mission accomplished.