Dominic Cummings leaves Downing Street for the final time on Friday afternoon,London time.Credit:Bloomberg
"You will not have weekday date nights,you will sacrifice many weekends. Frankly it will be hard having a boyfriend or girlfriend at all,"he said. There was also this warning:"If you play office politics,you will be discovered and immediately binned."
Cummings this week failed his own criteria. Not only has he been caught playing office politics;he has been outgunned and outsmarted. He resigned this week and walked out of Downing Street at 5pm on Friday,local time,for the last time,cardboard box in hand.Communications director Lee Cain,an ally of Cummings dating back to the Brexit campaign,has also quit in a clear-out that gives Johnson a chance to reset his troubled premiership.
When he posted the job callout in January,Cummings thought the year ahead would be filled with the spoils of war. Johnson had won a thumping victory in the general election three weeks earlier,and the United Kingdom was weeks away fromformally leaving the European Union. Cummings saw a chance to reshape Britain and stacked Downing Street with a band of intelligent but inexperienced Vote Leave figures. The goal was to bypass traditional cabinet government in favour of a highly centralised command and control structure.
Dominic Cummings came under pressure after driving to northern England during a coronavirus lockdown but Boris Johnson stuck by him.Credit:AP
The original misfit and weirdo,Cummings despised Westminster. His disdain was obvious from the way he dressed for work each day in baggy pants,scuffed shoes and crumpled untucked shirts. It was a jarring look for the historic corridors Winston Churchill once roamed. Cummings was such a slob that newspapers had a field day the one time he was spotted wearing a suit.
By the end of the year,Cummings'grand reform plans had fallen apart. The inner circle turned on itself amid a power struggle — the consequence of so much power residing with so few people. Senior staff were leaking against each other and jockeying for influence while50,000 people died from COVID-19 and 750,000 lost their jobs. Ministers found the situation galling,loathed Cummings and thought he and the Vote Leave crowd were slowly strangling Johnson. The political dynamics were similar to how Australian MPs came to resent Tony Abbott's chief-of-staff Peta Credlin.