The rage of Dominic Cummings

Britain’s rogue intellectual has predicted a civil war. Is he also cheerleading one?

Britain, we hear from TV studios, Telegraph columns, Whitehall meeting rooms and post-industrial focus groups, is a “tinderbox”. People are disconnected and angry; our cities and towns are lawless hellscapes overrun with threatening migrants and gangs of knife-wielding teens. There is an apocalypticism in the air, with the far right back on the streets barracking asylum hotels with shouts of “remigration now!” The people are winning. The small M25 town of Epping has become the locus of a national confrontation, with sustained protests this week leading to a High Court injunction blocking the use of the Bell Hotel for housing asylum seekers. There is much more to come. Things cannot go on as they are. It is time for civil war.

One of those who claims to have taken the nation’s temperature and found it feverous is Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to the prime minister and once a consummate political insider. “This regime,” he recently told an audience in Oxford, “has become cancerous… Step by step, the old regime has piled up the tinder” so that we are now “only random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control”. “The yookay trajectory,” he wrote in July (using the ugly, very-online-right neologism for contemporary Britain that now has its own Wikipedia sub-page), “is not sustainable.” To get us out of this nightmare requires “regime change”, no matter how “painful and divisive” it may be.

As with many of these predictions of immanent doom, it is hard to disentangle terrified warnings from gleeful rallying cries. Is Cummings a Cassandra, shouting his dire prophecies into the void, or a cheerleader, waiting to benefit from the coming disorder? Is he “patient zero” of the frenzied politics now sweeping the right, or its diagnostician? If you are reading this, you are likely already aware of Cummings and the voluminous online blog that he has maintained, in various forms, since the early 2010s and which he now hosts on Substack. You may even be among his subscribers, paying £10 a month for an irregular dose of unfiltered and very much unedited Dom.

Even those of you who don’t read him will surely be familiar with the kind of thing it offers: nuggets of higher gossip from the Vote Leave campaign and his time in No 10; various bits of wisdom gleaned from the world of science and tech; glosses on science and philosophy; and anatomies of contemporary politics spliced with invectives about, well, more or less everyone. Starmer (useless), Johnson (“the Trolley”, for the way he crashes around from one issue to the next), and the majority of the media and the civil service (“NPCs”, gamer slang for “non-player characters” controlled by the computer, not human players).

Across journalism and politics, his output is read with everything from devotion to disdain, but always with attention. Cummings is the kind of insider-outsider that politicians and the media love, reflecting the darkest thoughts – too dangerous to state openly – of the Establishment back at itself. Harder to determine, though, is just what Cummings, one of Westminster’s most influential public intellectuals, actually believes. At the head of his most recent essay, Cummings quotes his hero, Bismarck: “If we do not prepare for ourselves the role of the hammer, there will be nothing left but that of the anvil.” The Britain that will be forged between the two, however – that remains unclear.

What coherence there is in Dominic Cummings’s output has often felt the result more of the man behind the words than the words themselves. Often maddeningly wide-ranging, it has at times been hard to follow the trail of Cummings’s thinking to any kind of firm world-view. The closest he has come to a manifesto is his 240-page essay on “Odyssean Education” from 2013. There, Cummings sketched out both the problems faced by the British state, along with the opportunities they present for the country finally to find a post-imperial role for itself.

Reading it again today, it is striking less for its length and range (absurd and startling in equal measure) than its comparative timidity. Cummings takes the meaning of “Odyssean” from the Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to describe an ideal form of elite education, one that is interdisciplinary and integrative and which could be used to train “synthesisers”, the kind of people who can understand and react to the increasingly interconnected and complex world around us. Set against this, for Cummings, is the standard British elite education, whose representative figure is the Oxbridge PPE graduate. This, Cummings says, does “not train political leaders well”, encouraging “superficial bluffing, misplaced confidence”. Fatally, it also embeds an ignorance of modern mathematics and science, particularly probability and statistics, in our elites. “Most of our politics,” Cummings writes, “is still conducted with the morality and the language of the simple primitive hunter-gatherer tribe: ‘which chief shall we shout for to solve our problems?’” While the world has moved on, gaining in complexity, we are still mired in “chimp politics”. “Our fragile civilisation is vulnerable to large shocks and a continuation of traditional human politics as it was during 6 million years of hominid evolution,” Cummings writes. This, he says, “could kill billions”.

The good news is that with the right tools we can “build teams that suppress Chimp Politics [his caps]”. To map our route out of the past, Cummings sketches a broad syllabus in maths, logic and the sciences for the future elite. As many readers have noted, it is daringly, often breathlessly broad, covering everything from a cribbed history of economic thought to the development of modern physics and the relationship between genetics and IQ. At times it reads like the brain dump of an over-caffeinated teenager addicted to YouTube. But there’s little doubt that it’s the product of the prodigious reading of a dedicated autodidact. The overall aim of all this is the creation of a world in which a “combination of science and market institutions [would] enable nine-tenths of ~10 billion people to thrive in prosperous and peaceful nonzero-sum [sic] societies”.

Yet for all its futurology, Cummings’s emphasis on the power of a scientifically trained technocratic elite that can shepherd us into the future feels oddly old-fashioned. This is a vision which read, for the intellectual historian Stefan Collini, like “CP Snow on speed”. Snow, of course, was one such technocratic member of the establishment, a novelist and civil servant trained in chemistry whose 1959 lecture on the “Two Cultures” was a brief cause célèbre in mid-century Britain. In the lecture, Snow (sounding much like Cummings today) chided the British elite for their scientific illiteracy. Yet as the stacks of yellowed CP Snow paperbacks in my local Oxfam attests, Snow is less a thinker for the century ahead than one of a very particular moment in the British past.

In the decade and a bit since the publication of his thoughts on “Odyssean Education”, Cummings has continued to publish his varied musings online. With this has come a subtle if meaningful change to his thinking. It is no longer complexity, education, reform and risk that define Cummings’s world, but crisis.

The broad outlines of Cummings’s biography are well known. Born in Durham in 1971, Cummings read ancient and modern history at Exeter College, Oxford, where his tutors included the classicist Robin Lane Fox and the historian and adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Stone. Soon after graduation, Cummings moved to Moscow, partly at the suggestion of Stone, to see the newly post-Soviet world being created. Among his ventures included a failed attempt to start an airline to connect the Volga city of Samara with Vienna, in Austria. Returning to Britain in 1997, Cummings entered the world of right-wing think tanks and pressure groups, and was later a key figure in the “North East Says No” referendum campaign against a proposed regional assembly. After a brief stint at the Spectator, Cummings was appointed a special adviser to Michael Gove at the Department for Education in 2011. It was then that he began publishing his writing online.

Much of his early work was informed by the intellectual atmosphere of this right-wing insider milieu. It combined a faith in the power of the market and a technocratic managerialism with a deep mistrust of the actual workings of the state and civil service. “Odyssean education”, therefore, was as much a project of putting the state to work in the interests of science, technology and industry, fostering a new high-tech entrepreneurialism fit for a 21st-century economy, as it was about education or civil-service reform. For this, his touchstones were the titans of mid-century state-directed R&D: the Manhattan Project and Darpa, the Cold War-era moon-shot institution that played a pivotal role in everything from the development of mRNA vaccines and GPS to the internet. The questions that motivated him, he wrote in 2019, were: “How can we make economies more productive and what is the relationship between basic science and productivity?”

His recent essays, though, have seen a shift in priorities, and a different sense of the tenor of the present moment. What has emerged is a darker, harder-edged Cummings. If 2013 Cummings could see a way out of the mess, 2025 Cummings cannot. The contemporary world, he tells us, is increasingly crazy. “Consensus reality”, the idea that regardless of politics or background we are all living in broadly the same world – seeing the same news, experiencing reality in the same way – is collapsing. That reality was the product of the revolutions of the mid-19th century, which birthed the mass media and new technologies of communication. The proliferation of newspapers, radio and television fostered a unity of experience within nation states, even across borders. But as the pace of technological change became ever more rapid, and new media, particularly the internet and AI, has begun to replace the old – with its ability to react to individual users via algorithmic filtering and siloing – this unity of experience has fractured. In turn, the crumbling of our shared political and social reality has, in a kind of madness doom-loop, only added to the craziness.

The world today, then, is much like that of the 1840s, the era in which the previous consensus reality was created. Back then, a generation that had lived through the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars were confronted with a rapidly changing world, in which the old certainties were rapidly disintegrating before, as Cummings has explained, in 1848 “dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created”. Interestingly, Cummings is not the only one to see parallels between the 1840s and today: the film-maker Adam Curtis has said that his most recent series, Shifty, was inspired by reading Christopher Clark’s history of 1848. “The world [Clark] describes,” Curtis told the Guardian, “feels so similar to today.”

In the contemporary doom-loop, the information that comes out of Whitehall and Fleet Street is increasingly dysregulated and (a favourite Cummings adjective) “fake”. The news cycle spins ever faster, and what is on the front page one day is rapidly forgotten (“memory-holed”) the next. More than that, news stories are often entirely the creation of journalists, or else are fed to them by political insiders simply to keep the wheels turning. In turn, there is “constant mimetic Narrative Whiplash” as stories race across Twitter feeds only to be replaced by ever-more urgent news, nothing ever settling for more than a few days, even hours. (Another favourite quotation of his, this time from the Def Jam impresario Rick Rubin: “Pro wrestling is real, the news is fake”.)

History, for Dominic Cummings, is cyclical not linear and progressive. In this schema, the breakdown of consensus reality is merely one of the more potent symptoms of a deeper crisis. Roughly every 50 years a crisis develops, Cummings tells us, which changes the balance of historical forces. Structures that have been at work over the longue durée, operating above the heads of politicians and pundits, start to tear at the seams of the old regime. For a while the forces of order continue to function as before, even as changing material conditions distort their ability to make and implement decisions. But errors occur with increasing frequency, and disruption and instability gain in magnitude and unpredictability. The slide towards disaster gathers momentum. All of this is spurred on by elite inertia. Once the crisis reaches a certain stage, the final step in the process is regime change: new elites and new ideas take the place of the old, which is swept aside as so much dust on the factory floor of history.

The scale of this present crisis is as great as any other in modern world history. Drawing on the German-American conservative philosopher Leo Strauss in a blog published on 30 April this year, Cummings wrote that there have been three distinct waves of modernity, each of which found form in political philosophy. The first, inaugurated by Machiavelli, came in the 16th century with a rejection of the classical inheritance; the second, by Rousseau in 18th-century France, with the move from individual to general will. The final came with Nietzsche in the 19th century and was powered a fierce critique of Enlightenment rationalism. Each in turn produced distinct forms of politics: liberalism, communism and fascism. For Cummings we are now on the verge of something new, as the cracks in the edifice of the third wave of modernity grow ever wider. “A fourth wave of modernisation has begun,” he writes, “not driven by traditional philosophers or the universities but mainly by the internet and technology.” (There is perhaps an unspoken assumption here: today’s heir to the three great philosophers of modernity is the sage of De Beauvoir Town himself, Dominic Cummings.)

The risks of this technological acceleration are compounded by what Cummings sees as a particularly antiquated political system. At the heart of contemporary British politics and society is what he calls, quoting Carl Sagan, “a combustible mixture of ignorance and power”. In chronologically identified layers, these are a combination of: “21st-century markets plus science plus technologies,” even more disruptive than the revolutionary conditions of 19th-century industrial capitalism; “20th-century state bureaucracies”, increasingly centralised and anti-adaptive; “19th-century crisis management”, “similarly educated men sitting around tables like the cabinet table in 1914”; “Pre-19th century… education and training for political leaders”; plus “Stone Age instincts”, that drive in-group collectivities and out-group violence. It is a period when, in old vulgar Marxist lexicon, the superstructure of society begins to fetter its material base.

In this scenario, all sorts of horrors are produced. “Ever wondered what it was like to live in the Austro-Hungarian Empire pre-1914?” Cummings writes. “Wonder no more.” Another favourite historical analogue, marshalled regularly, is that in the run-up to the First World War, another moment when Britain stood on the precipice of a new world, there was only a single meeting between the British prime minister and the military command concerning the implications of the Belgium guarantee. In 1914, the British elite sleepwalked into a conflict that the country was unprepared for. Much the same, Cummings tells us, is happening today. The pattern of breakdown is strikingly familiar: “Slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.”

Yet if much of the elite is still blind to the approaching chaos, some in the establishment are starting to catch up. One of Cummings’s recent blogs, published on 28 May, reflects on the work of David Betz, professor of war in the modern world at King’s College London, as well as writing by the historical social scientist, Peter Turchin. Both thinkers see imminent mass civilisational breakdown as a very real prospect. In recent months, Betz has made headlines with his predictions about a looming threat of a new British civil war. Falling living standards, the rise of identitarian factionalism, including religious and ethnic sectarianism, rising levels of immigration and a crisis of political legitimacy could all lead to disaster. Turchin, meanwhile, is the founder of the study of what he calls “cliodynamics”, the modelling of complex systems to generate long-term rules for the rise and fall of great civilisations, with an eye to events in contemporary America. Like Cummings, Turchin sees patterns of collective violence running on roughly 50-year cycles, driven by popular immiseration, geopolitical instability as well as what he calls “elite over-production” (think of downwardly mobile graduates) unable to find work within the system.

In the work of both Betz and Turchin, Cummings sees portents of a new age of violence, and mass disorder returning to the streets of British cities. “Inside the intelligence services, special forces… bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence,” Cummings writes, “including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence [emphasis in original].”As this suggests, much of the most apocalyptic rhetoric in his recent missives is racial in tone. One part of the insider-NPC consensus that Cummings pours most scorn on is the continuation of what he calls the “immigration Ponzi” – the use of cheap immigrant workers to shore up Britain’s flagging productivity figures. This, for Cummings, will only fan the flames of discontent.

The threat that large-scale immigration poses to complex societies has long been a theme in Cummings’s writing. Yet in the past, dealing effectively with immigration was seen as a way to inoculate against the rise of extremism. By tackling the effects of mass immigration early, in a rational and technocratic manner, by stopping small-boat crossings and removing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights for instance, the rise of xenophobic populism and nationalism could be averted. As he wrote in 2023: “I thought (and said before the referendum) that taking back democratic control of immigration policy would: kill off extremism here, shift immigration from being the top public priority to a medium or low priority, retire Farage/UKIP, and allow a better immigration policy similar to the Australian points system.”

That has seemingly changed in recent months. Now, he is more than ever aping the most extreme rhetoric of the right. His most recent essay complains of the flood of immigration from “the most barbaric places on Earth”, of “immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs”, and “the spread of those barbaric ideas… [being defended by] human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe”. His most recent blog, from July, goes even further, claiming that, on the “grooming gangs”, “Tommy Robinson was more right than ‘the mainstream’”.

Part of this he blames on what, riffing on the online right meme of the “Boriswave”, he calls the “2021-4 Boris-Carrie wave” (a periodisation that conveniently leaves out his own time in the Johnson administration while shifting the blame on to his great bête noire, Carrie Symonds). This, he believes, is leading to a fierce backlash, part of which can be seen in the return to prominence of Nigel Farage and, more portentously, in the riots last summer. There is, he says a “spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy” and the “growing politicisation of white English nationalism”. The crisis is coming. Race war and civil conflict are imminent. If only we’d listened to Dom when we had the chance.

Many have detected shifts in Cummings’s beliefs before this point. In 2019, Harry Lambert noted for the New Statesman that while Cummings’s short-lived Noughties think tank, the New Frontiers Foundation, was decidedly Hayekian in its policy proposals – freer trade, less regulation, lower taxes, privatisation – something began to change after the referendum. Sometime around 2016, Lambert observed, his economic outlook moved from “neoliberal to populist”: arguing for reductions in executive pay, for instance, and against the idea that Brexit was simply a revolt against an overbearing institution and for a smaller state.

There is little doubt that the referendum signalled a change of emphasis in his thought, but to say that it was part of a move away from neoliberalism is to oversell it. Even today, Cummings continues to advocate for the classically neoliberal policies of lower taxation and a smaller state. He still sings from the same hymn sheet, even if the music has gained in pitch and intensity. He may have led the official campaign for Brexit under the impeccably populist slogan of “Take back control”, and his deep aversion to the political and media elites strike similarly populist chords. But there is little substantive to differentiate the broad swathe of his thought from his neoliberal peers. Rather than using a plebiscite like Brexit to give voice to the unheard and excluded, its aim was to force through what amounted to thoroughly neoliberal policies.

Brexit, he wrote in 2021, was an attempt “to throw a spanner in the works of this ‘normal’ and provide a chance for regime change”. It was to be an “icebreaker of the revolution”^⁠, a way to break with “Insider conventional wisdom”. What the ideal world after the revolution would be, he has said, is “much more Hayek for 95-99% of the economy, much more Lee Kwan Yew for 1-5%”. The reference to the former prime minister of Singapore here is instructive. He has long been enamoured with the Singaporean leader, with a good chunk of his early writing on Substack from 2021 notes taken from Lee’s From Third World to First, his political memoir-cum-handbook for state development first published in 2000. And Singapore has in recent years become something of the neoliberal model du jour. Perhaps this is because, in a world where borders are hardening and unrest fomenting, the country’s marriage of free markets with social authoritarianism seems a more realistic bet than, say, the more libertarian regime of pre-handover Hong Kong. Allied with this is a pessimism about the power of democracies to get things done. Lee’s “Singapore model” pioneered a successful merger of a legal and economic regime favourable to international capital with severe restrictions on political freedom. The ruling People’s Action Party, until recently led by Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, has been in power continuously since 1959, heading up a de facto one-party state.

It is “enthusing to read about someone who a) can think long-term and integrate policy, politics, communication and the ‘complex coordination’ needed to turn ideas into reality, and then b) actually relentlessly implements a virtuous circle of policies that works over the long-term”, Cummings has written. The active suppression of democracy, unsurprisingly, gets far less attention. And in this, we can see a certain overlap between his work and that of Curtis Yarvin, the computer engineer and amateur political theorist beloved of many in the Trump regime. Much like Cummings, Yarvin thinks that government bureaucracy should be gutted. And both are deeply sceptical about the ability of democracies to effect lasting change. Much like Yarvin, the figures that Cummings is most inspired by are CEOs and business leaders, alongside great men like Bismarck and Lee, not democratic leaders. For both, governments should learn from the top-down decision-making of tech start-ups, led by visionaries and engineers unencumbered by popular scrutiny, not the other way around. One set is interested in action, in getting hard things done; the other, merely staying in power.

The Vote Leave revolution that Cummings masterminded during the Brexit referendum, and which he tried to bring back into power while adviser to Boris Johnson between July 2019 and November 2020, was of course a failure. No permanent changes to the state or the civil service were enacted, and few of Cummings’s policies remain. And while much of his recent writing can be read as a reflection on his ill-fated time in government, it is hard to deny the truth in much of what he says. The civil service and the state bureaucracies are deeply conservative institutions, and much of the political and media class are blind if not entirely ignorant of the deep well of discontent in the country. Most of us work ever-longer hours for ever-less pay, while the rich lap the cream off the top. Perhaps the most visible symbols of British decline are the degradation of the public sphere after a decade and a half of austerity, and the brutal hollowing out of local-authority budgets. Immigration has undoubtedly contributed to this admixture, and provides easy scapegoats for declining public services and a decaying public realm.

Nor are his anti-democratic impulses alien to the nation at large. As recent polling by Hope not Hate revealed, 40 per cent of British people would prefer a “strong and decisive leader who has the authority to override or ignore parliament” to a liberal democracy. The sclerotic nature of parliamentary democracy is only accentuated by the media-obsessed short-termism that Cummings so pungently anatomises. That same poll also noted that this political and cultural pessimism is driving the rise of Reform and the hard right; when the state so visibly fails to deal with the problems most people face it is easy to see why outsider forces appeal.

It is not just Cummings who has hardened his rhetoric. There has been a sweeping radicalisation of the British right over the past year and a bit. Ideas once deemed anathema, or at least not to be aired publicly, are now openly debated and declared. If there is a governing historical scheme underpinning this new right it is that Britain is reliving something like the 1970s, although now rather than the over-mighty trade unions fettering the power of British capital it is the bureaucratic straitjacket of the “Blairite consensus”. For much of them, 1997 represents a fundamental break in British history, with the ruling post-New Labour regime constituted by a web of legal and regulatory bodies that has trapped the country in a stultifying embrace, making it impossible to exercise its proper sovereignty as a nation-state. Such a legal and bureaucratic matrix is typified for the new right by the European Convention on Human Rights and the Equality Act, hence the constant calls to abolish them. With this intellectual context in mind, we can group Cummings with everyone from Rupert Lowe to Robert Jenrick, down to the grottiest denizens of Substack and X. It helps explains why Cummings can cast his lot in with those who only a few years ago he expended so much energy trying to disavow, such as Nigel Farage, with whom he has been meeting since before Christmas.

Yet it seems almost too obvious to say that much of what Cummings advocates will only deepen the crisis. Social and economic crisis, atomisation and state failure have not happened in spite of Britain’s neoliberal economic model, but because of it. Going harder and faster down this path, with even less democratic oversight, will only make things worse. Cummings has never been a conservative in the strict sense. It is not for him the yearning for stability and the established order. He is more of a revolutionary, even as some have noted a strange kind of neo-Leninism: bring on the pounding gales of creative destruction so we might renew ourselves again. But as his recent output shows, such themes are reaching new heights. In this, he has once again shown that he is a thinker of the present moment. England has a fever – and so does Dominic Cummings.

[See also: The prophet of the new right]