I have some regard for DC in the way he speaks his mind and I suspect he probably does have a strong desire to improve the country – or rather change various governmental processes to make them run in a way he personally deems as being more efficient.
The problem when one looks over his CV is that he really doesn’t appear to have had much success at achieving this type of root and branch change in a systemic and organised way. The nearest he got to being effective seems to have been when he was employed by Gove as his personal bully-boy, but other than that his career seems to have consisted of walking out or the usual PR activities.
Looking at the type of language he employs it is all rather sturm-und-drang (no I’m not a Guardian-reading sociology lecturer – just a handy phrase from my German O-Level days).
By that I mean everything is about ‘tearing’ or ‘ripping’ up things. Plus a rather incessant use of the F word which gets a bit tedious – someone needs to tell him it is really not a profanity anymore.
Frankly he seems a little naive about exactly how management works. IMHO true systemic change is often effected by the very 9-5’ers who he seems to despise – they’re the well-balanced people who quietly come into work, seamlessly negotiate to ensure that all the various people and players line up behind the changes they wish to put into place, and then having achieved that increment of the transformation for the day go home to switch off and relax.
As I suspect many of us here have experienced, the wild eyed brigade who are helicoptered in as prospective saviours for the organisation generally escape through the back door within 1-2 years, though sadly usually leaving a weakened organisation and redundancies behind them.
For me the real giveaway is his rather myopic view of the various political parties – Greens and Liberals don’t merit a mention, and his personalisation of the Labour opposition at the time as being simply ‘Corbyn’ reveals a rather disabling prejudice rather than incisive political analysis. Anyone who thinks that Corbyn ‘led’ Labour and would have been in control of policy is displaying an alarming lack of insight into the inner workings of the Labour Party.
Had he said “blah blah and Labour would have been rubbish.. ” that would indicated some sort of insight – but his obsession with Corbyn shows that despite his worship of ‘great minds’, his own has a rather small aspect.
(For one thing I suspect a number of Conservative supporters do now wonder whether the country might not indeed have been better run by what may have been a slightly less dysfunctional Labour cabinet).
The awkward truth is that Dominic Cummings – as well intentioned as I think he probably was and is – was ultimately used and thrown away by the very people he had little respect for at the time and who he now actively disparages. A tale as old as time.

Utterly superb!

I agree with a lot of the comments Dominic Cummings has made over the past few years about how the civil service has prioritised recruiting obedient people rather than people who actually have expertise in issues that they should be advising democratically elected leaders on.
I was rejected from the UK Foreign Office in 2003 at the application stage. I applied to them very clearly stating that I had a First Class degree in Arabic and Persian, had studied at Esfahan University in Iran and the British Council in Egypt and that I had travelled extensively around Asia. Someone from the company Capita, who had been given the contract for sifting applications at that time, told me on the phone that they couldn’t see any evidence of me having enough experience of being able to deal with living in other cultures. How much experience did a person need to get an interview with the Foreign Office back then?
Back when I applied, Bush and Blair were loudly celebrating their invasion of Iraq and were talking openly about invading Iran. Having written my final year dissertation on British-Iranian relations since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, I was dead set against their invasion. I had enough knowledge of Iran’s history to know about how it was the British and Americans who had destroyed Iran’s short-lived democracy in the 1950s by organising a coup against Mohammad Mossadegh to replace him with the Shah that made their claims to want to ‘bring democracy to Iran’ to be something of a joke.
Looking back it feels to me as if I was deliberately kept out of a government job back then where I could have been of use to the UK. Whilst the Labour Party continue to blame everything that is wrong with the UK right now on the Conservatives, it was under a Labour government that I was rejected by way of Capita – a much loved company by Tony Blair and his friends that most people in the UK could see was very far from being an effective organisation.

Suzanne – or anyone – any idea when the aution is?

Not that I want to rant about Brexit but it would be fascinating to spend an hour talking to him!

Cummings’ own political views are incoherent but very good on other people. Does he really think we could have stopped Covid by shutting down earlier – he hasn’t learned much in two years.

I’m not a joiner by nature. I don’t like parties. “Parties” or parties. I don’t like going to parties.

Who would want this leaky glum bucket at their parties? I met his wife Mary Wakefield once at a Spectator tea party, and she’s really nice and normal. Perhaps he is too, in a domestic setting, but he comes over as difficult and grumpy. I hope he doesn’t swear like a trooper in front of his son.

He doesn’t seem to want to answer the question “Do you still think it was right to leave Europe?”. And why would a second referendum have been a disaster when he wanted two referenda in the first place? Could it be because that would have shot down his beloved Brexit?

This man lacks any sort of moral fibre and l am saddened by the fact you would even consider giving him a column inch ! Do better !

I’d like to see Putin and Cummings put in the same place, so they could rail against everything until they die.