Dominic Cummings calls for early general election, after Sunak asks him for help

Dominic Cummings, the Vote Leave mastermind who became Boris Johnson’s aide and then one of his harshest critics, is making headlines once again, as The Sunday Times reported he met with Rishi Sunak in July to discuss how the Conservative Party could win next year’s general election.

The outlet’s chief political commentator, Tim Shipman, also wrote that No 10 did not deny Cummings’ claim that the pair met to discuss a 2024 win for the Tories, and a Downing Street source instead said it was a “broad discussion about politics and campaigning” and that “no job was offered”.

In addition to attracting controversy over his Brexit campaigning, Cummings has proven divisive in recent years over branding Johnson a “complete f***wit”, describing cabinet ministers as “useless f***pigs” and that infamous trip to Barnard Castle during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

And it seems Sunak was more than aware of this, as he reportedly told Cummings: “The MPs and the media will go crazy. Your involvement has to be secret.”

Oops.

Speaking to The Times, Cummings explained: “[Sunak] wanted a secret deal in which I delivered the election and he promised to take government seriously after [that]. But I’d rather the Tories lose than continue in office without prioritising what’s important and the voters.

“The post-2016 Tories are summed up by the fact that Sunak, like Johnson, would rather lose than take government seriously. Both thought their MPs agreed with them, and both were right.

He went on to say that he would only “build a political machine to smash Labour” if Sunak committed to prioritising issues such as nuclear weapons infrastructure, “natural and engineered pandemics”, procurement at the Ministry of Defence, artificial intelligence and “broken core government institutions which we started fixing in 2020 but Boris abandoned.”

And Cummings went even further in a lengthy post to his Substack newsletter, confirming his first conversation with Sunak came just after he was made PM in 2022, and that he told the Tory leader he might help out if action was taken on the above issues.

Though this time around, he was a lot more candid about the state of things, branding the Cabinet Office a “dumpster fire” and labelling the UK’s nuclear weapons infrastructure “a dangerous disaster and a budget nightmare of hard-to-believe and highly classified proportions”.

Flaws in national security are not exactly things you should be screaming and shouting about on a public platform, Dom…

Cummings also shared details of what he feels the Tories need to do to succeed both in government and politically, which he said is to “change so radically that it is essentially a new entity”.

He added: “My view is the PM has gone so badly wrong it’s impossible to imagine No 10 now getting much of value done. Meanwhile many critical things continue to rot, even disintegrate, including in national security.

“It would be better for an early election so we can cycle through Starmer’s inevitable failure as fast as possible and, possibly, replace him with something better when there is a broader consensus that both parties are a disaster.”

And of course, Cummings’ name coming up again has got Twitter/X users talking:

Some have even pointed out that Sunak said during his leadership campaign last year that Cummings will have “absolutely nothing to do with any government that I’m privileged to lead”:

Oh dear…

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