In the wake of Labour’s damning loss in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election, as Keir Starmer was consulting his wife on whether he should resign as leader of the opposition, Dominic Cummings exploded. The former No 10 special adviser, who had acrimoniously resigned from Boris Johnson’s government six months earlier, launched a textbook rant against the Labour leader on Twitter. Starmer was a “beta-lawyer-gamma-politician”, Cummings said, who “obsesses on media reality not actual reality”. He claimed Labour would “win the general election easy” if it had a leader “80 per cent as good as Tony Blair”. Ouch.
In a blog post later that year (which opens with the disclaimer “IF UNINTERESTED IN BRITISH POLITICS DO NOT READ”) Cummings launched another attack on the now prime minister. “Starmer is a dud,” he wrote, “it’s so basic it’s a sign of a total dud that he hasn’t even tried to have an economic story”. Though written in 2021, Cummings’s words were prescient. A criticism often levelled at Starmer is his lack of a coherent vision, story or plan for government.
But now, Cummings’s prophetic denunciation of Starmer and his wider diagnosis of the decline and dysfunction of the British state has begun to bear influence among some Labour MPs and, to a greater extent, wider party circles. Though he has not had a direct role in British politics for almost five years, Cummings and his ideas are increasingly influential. Labour MPs subscribe to his Substack – though Cummings won’t say how many – and some have even “exchanged WhatsApps” with him.
“I think many Labour MPs now realise what I have been saying for over a decade is true,” Cummings said when we spoke (typically) over WhatsApp. “They are now in the mad meetings with all three options mad and the non-mad idea is ‘unlawful minister.’” This is Cummings’s central thesis: that Whitehall procedure and convention is holding back Britain from making any actual progress in key areas of policy. The fury developed after years spent in government departments – first at the Department for Education famously tackling the “blob” with Michael Gove, and later at No 10 – butting heads with civil servants and growing ever more frustrated at what he saw as roadblocks to progress.
Within Labour circles, the Labour Growth Group (LGG) – co-chaired by the MP for Milton Keynes north, Chris Curtis and the MP for Darlington, Lola McEvoy – is perhaps the most obvious channel for Cummings’ influence. The group, which was founded shortly after Labour won the general election and is made up of more than 60 MPs, has set out to put friendly pressure on the government and includes several pro-Starmer members of the 2024 intake. There are lots of similarities between the ideas put forward by Cummings – on planning reform and on changing the civil service to make it more agile and responsive – and the work currently being completed and discussed by those MPs in the Growth Group.
Mark McVitie, the director of LGG said “Vote Leave was probably the most effective political campaign of the past decade so for MPs or advisors of my generation, you’d be foolish not to learn lessons from it.” He explained that Cummings’ work at Vote Leave “had a diagnosis of the dysfunction of the state and the detachment of the political class from voters’ priorities that is hard to argue with”. Though clearly supportive of this Labour government, the LGG have transitioned from their initial conception as a pro-Starmer backbench caucus, to a critical friend of No 10. (Cummings has no direct involvement with the group himself, though sources suggest to me that LGG figures have spoken with him about his experience in No 10 and his attempts to reshape Whitehall. Neither LGG nor Cummings would confirm that there has been any contact between the two.)
“You see that relentless focus on voters’ priorities from this No 10 political operation, but we know that’s not enough,” McVitie said, “the Vote Leave team had full control of No 10 in 2019, but Tory MPs and the bureaucracy still stopped them implementing major reform.” This is clearly where the Growth Group sees the problem – with the bureaucracy and protocol slowing down genuine progress. Cummings agrees; but places the blame for a lack of progress squarely at Starmer’s door – something which LGG, obviously, cannot do.
“Labour MPs show far more interest in the problems of Whitehall than the Tories did,” he told me, “but they have a leader like Sunak who totally believes in the old system! So, they’re snookered.” He pointed to the crises faced by Starmer – the U-turns, the fiscal constraints, the inability to “smash the gangs” – and places responsibility for their severity firmly with the prime minister. “Starmer is blaming everything on ‘bad comms’ privately and publicly,” he told me, “like Sunak, he does not understand the job of PM – fundamentally a lot of it is about gripping very tough problems and conflict between ministers/departments.” Where Sunak retreated to his spreadsheets, Cummings said, Starmer has retreated into foreign affairs.
By his logic, perennial problems with the UK’s system of government are exacerbated by a “non-functioning PM”. Though none have (or likely will) publicly align themselves with this damning indictment of Starmer’s leadership, Cummings asserts that “LAB MPs can see the obvious truth – the PM has no ACTUAL PLAN – he just announces stuff HMT [The Treasury] wants to do, then when it goes wrong politically No 10 is in chaos.”
Though LGG are not quite as willing to place blame for Labour’s chaotic start to governing with Starmer, there is another group of Cummings-adjacent MPs, who have been more openly critical of the government. The socially conservative but economically statist Blue Labour group, which was originally founded during Ed Miliband’s leadership, has made its return to politics. There are currently 16 MPs who form the Blue Labour caucus. Their rhetoric and language is more closely matched to Cummings’. Jonathan Hinder, the MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, and a member of Blue Labour has been more openly critical of the government than those in the Growth Group. He has called on the government to “go further to reconnect with our working-class base”. They too agree with Cummings’s assessment that the government needs to further refine its vision (although unlike Cummings they would never go as far as to call Starmer a “dud”).
Tobias Phibbs, who has been involved in re-establishing the Blue Labour parliamentary caucus pointed out that “Cummings is not the first and won’t be the last to alight on a criticism of Britain’s state capacity.” But he added: “a year into what has been a difficult first year of government, it would be churlish to ignore his insights, and younger people in the party are certainly reading him – if not always in agreement”. Phibbs, echoing Cummings, criticised the current approach to government that prioritises bureaucratic processes over outcomes. “Until that changes,” he said, “thoughtful people will continue to think not just about policy, but about the underlying architecture within which policy is made and implemented.” He added: “The task for this government is to grip the centre so that it can deliver for the country. When some in government talk about the need for insurgency, they show this understanding.”
The issues that Cummings points to have not just been recognised by those who sit outside of the machinery of government. There are some senior members of the civil service who likely would and do agree that in order to reshape and reform Britain, the government must be more innovative and better at hiring and retaining genuine talent. Philip Rycroft, who was permanent secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union between 2017 and 2019 said the reason that civil service reform often fizzles out is because “it has never been a high priority for civil servants themselves”. Speaking to me from his home in Scotland, Rycroft pointed out that “ministers aren’t interested, because you don’t get political kudos” for reform of the civil service. Still the need remains.
“There are some of Cummings’s ideas that are absolutely right,” Rycroft said, “you do need to get more innovative thinking in, mavericks and so on. We are now beyond the age of the generalist.” Still, he cautioned that while the attraction and retention of more in-depth specialist knowledge and skills into the civil service is essential, there will always be a need for at least some people with knowledge of government. “That’s the core of the job. You know, a data scientist in government is brilliant if they’re doing data but a data scientist trying to work out how you put together a briefing for ministerial questions, is probably going to struggle.”
The arrival of Labour, and a growing awareness of need among Labour MPs and those in and around the party may turn the tide on Rycroft’s observation that there has never been the political will to enact more radical changes. Some in government do understand the need for radical reform – to move fast even if that means breaking things. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has been involved in rolling out a raft of new measures to draw talent into the civil service and rewire the centre of government. His most recent attempts include a Cummings-coded call out for applications to the civil service from “innovators and disruptors” and the recent change to criteria for the civil service internship scheme to only allow entries from working-class applicants.
Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s maverick chief of staff also bears some understanding of the challenges the government has had in its first year with the civil service – it is rumoured that he and Cummings have spoken. Plenty of Labour MPs clearly take Cummings and his ideas seriously. Considering Cumming’s influence on Brexit, his long-term association with leading Conservatives such as Michael Gove and Dougie Smith, and his service under Boris Johnson, this influence on British social democrats is fairly extraordinary. It would have been unthinkable five years ago.
But there remains a crucial divergence between Cummings and those in Labour who share his diagnosis of the failings of the British state. To Cummings, responsibility for the rot lies with Keir Starmer; get rid of him and Labour may be able to shake off this past year of turbulence and start afresh. This is a tricky conclusion to come to for the MPs – in LGG and Blue Labour – who are often thought to be some of the primary acolytes of Starmer’s Labour.
For his part, Cummings thinks Starmer’s departure is now inevitable. “Everybody is talking about changes to No10 but – a/ obv no10 is a shambles but b/ no reorganisation of no10 can compensate for a PM who does not believe in anything and does not want to do the PM job,” Cummings texted, “I did think they’d keep KS but now think he’s so bad he’ll prob go.”
[See also: Dominic Cummings: oracle of the new British berserk]
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