I see you skulking in the background, as far removed from the gloss and pomp that the cameras demand as possible. I see your back, glued to the wall in your attempt to shield it from both blades and scrutiny by lurking in the shadows. It’s been a long few years, hasn’t it, Dominic Cummings? You’ve pulled strings and sneered and been held in contempt, both literally and figuratively, but you’re finally on the front lines now. You’re the new Wormtongue to Boris’ Theoden, perhaps the only political alchemist savvy enough to take the lead of his feckless indolence and transmute it into electoral gold.
It’s finally happened. Johnson is the Prime Minister, a plot twist so heavily foreshadowed that Chekhov himself would have considered it a little heavy-handed. The boy who would be World King has finally claimed his crown, offering up an inspiring aspirational tale for vicious, spoiled little twats in playgrounds everywhere. Meritocracy is dead, taken for a long walk along a short garden bridge and dumped off the side where no-one will ever find it.
He’s wasted no time either, obviously caught up in the exuberance of success and revelling in the rush of blood to his throbbing ego. His night of the blunt sporks has already weeded out any doubt regarding his intentions, elevating a host of the corrupt and incompetent to positions they have neither earned nor deserve. It is a shrewd political move, Dominic Cummings, a strategy undoubtedly born of your careful whispers. The loyalty of thieves and liars is easily bought, provided you remain their greatest benefactor. It’s hard to go against the leader on a point of principle when you have none of your own left to stick to.
It is absolutely a cabinet on a war footing, a series of treats handed out to the most sycophantic Boris and Brexit enthusiasts. It positions the Tories as a newly credible opposition to the single-issue approach of the Brexit Party, putting all their eggs in the Leave basket and setting a few traps along the way. There’s more diversity than ever before in the upper echelons of government, a positive move in and of itself that also serves as a great big ‘fuck you’ to Labour’s self-declared inclusivity. It’s utterly meaningless when scratching away at every shade of brown reveals nothing but blue and a gaping void where any soul should be but this is Boris we’re talking about. The surface is all that matters.
The cabinet is now stuffed with Uncle Toffs, descendants of immigrants committed to the noble pursuit of Brexit and their own ambitions. Corruption and systemic moral failure are now character traits to be rewarded. Gavin Williamson’s caffeine-tweaking prefect act is back, despite being fired for betraying the integrity of the National Security Council roughly six and a half seconds ago. Dominic Raab has presumably spent his sabbatical looking at a map and learning about islands. I doubt he blinked once but that’s mainly because he lost the ability as a young android programmed to throttle prostitutes on a dark web streaming website.
Priti Patel returns triumphant, despite negotiating with foreign governments in secret and craving the good old days when we hanged Remainers as traitors and burned their corpses. She’s back in government for two reasons and two reasons only; her blind loyalty to the new order and the fact her genuinely shady relationship with Israel will draw legitimate criticism from the left. A couple of racist twats on Twitter later and all of it can be handily reframed as the frothing antisemitism of Corbyn’s acolytes, further fuel for the bonfire of truths.
There are some chuckles to be had, even in the grimmest of appointments. Jeremy Hunt thought he could pout his way to a promotion and instead has disappeared faster than the hopeful glint in a junior doctor’s eye. Ian Duncan Smith stopped roar-clapping just in time to realise he gets nothing because even this set of talentless narcissists think he’s a useless twat. Grant Shapps finally gets a job where he can do nothing but spend all day tweaking his Wikipedia entry and will still perform better than his predecessor.
At the end of it all nothing’s really changed and the country is in the same impossible, intractable mess. Despite the positive spin and the absurd messianic narcissism of all talk of a golden dawn, the soundbites quickly fall apart in the light of the truth, nothing more than plasters on gaping wounds. 20,000 new police officers aren’t ‘extra’. They don’t even return us to the levels before the Tories started cutting and that’s without even pausing to contemplate the depth of experience and expertise lost forever in the original cull.
But that’s exactly your comfort zone, isn’t it, Dominic Cummings? A void of expertise and intellect in which to operate, carefully tugging at the strings with one hand and angrily flipping the bird to bureaucratic convention with the other. Your reputation as a bully and ideological purist are mere window dressing to the darker truths about you; that you’re meticulous, goal-oriented and savagely effective when it comes to getting things done. You’re all the things Boris Johnson is not.
And that should terrify all of us. Boris might be a cartoon of a man, the ringmaster to a host of clowns and tumblers, but the circus now has a business manager so ruthless and Machiavellian that he’ll have the assembled idiots clapping and cheering along in no time. You know what you’re doing, Dominic Cummings. Unlike everyone else, you actually fucking know.
Soon we’ll all be Matt Hancock, grinning and clapping, tears streaming down our faces as we try desperately to convince ourselves that we’re having fun. We’ll laugh hysterically, our grins fixed, paralysed by living rigor mortis in the face of catastrophe. We’ll vote with our feet by staying exactly where we are, fixed to our seats, passive spectators to the carnival of ambition. We’ll lie to ourselves that this is what we wanted, even as the marquee catches fire and the flaming fabric falls on our screaming children.
I see you, Dominic Cummings. I fucking see you.
