Britain should prepare for more rape cases involving illegal migrants, Dominic Cummings has warned. Speaking on The Spectator’s Quite right! podcast, the former advisor to Boris Johnson referenced the case of two young Afghan asylum seekers who were jailed earlier this month for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. Places like Leamington ‘better get used to it’, Cummings said, ‘because there’s going to be a lot more of it.’

Criticising the lack of information Warwickshire police were initially willing to share about the identities of the Leamington perpetrators, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, following their arrest in May, Cummings told Michael Gove and Madeline Grant:

The odd thing is, the country knows it’s all fake. The voters know it’s all fake

Dominic Cummings

It’s only after the media actually sues and goes to court that their identities are revealed. And the boys from Leamington are revealed to be two illegal Afghan asylum seekers who just got off the boat.

Citing this as just one example of how broken the British state has become, Cummings said that he believed that there is an ‘incredible parochialism inside Whitehall where they hate the idea of learning’. Branding the concept of ministerial responsibility ‘fake’, he said: ‘​​the odd thing is, the country knows it’s all fake. The voters know it’s all fake. The only place where anyone still pretends the fake is real is inside Westminster itself.’

Cummings described how, on joining Johnson’s team in 2019, he had plans to reform how certain aspects of Whitehall functioned, including the Ministry of Defence and the immigration system. His efforts were, however, scuppered by the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic in early 2020 – and Johnson himself:

Every single thing pretty much that I’ve just described…was either deliberately closed by Boris or more often, the system just closed it down and Boris didn’t even know or didn’t care.

Reflecting on his time working for Johnson in No. 10, Cummings denied being responsible for putting the former prime minister in power. ‘I very deliberately had nothing to do with the Conservative party leadership contest or anything to do with the Conservative party at the beginning of 2019’. Nevertheless, with ‘Corbyn waiting in the wings’, he agreed to go and work for Johnson in an effort to solve the ‘nightmare’ crisis the government found itself in thanks to its efforts to find a workable Brexit deal:

We said, okay, we’re going to try and get Brexit done, force through an election, get a democratic mandate for change and then deliver it in government. Will Boris blow up and screw it all up? There’s a very reasonable chance that he will. But what’s the alternative?

Touching on the focus the ongoing Covid inquiry has had in recent months on Cummings’s influence in No. 10, Gove asked the former political advisor if he had a response to those criticising the response of Johnson’s government to the pandemic. Cummings answered: ‘I think it is important to separate out that first initial crisis from what came later, after the first crisis.’ Had government departments taken on board the lessons of the first lockdown quicker, ‘there would never have been any need for further lockdowns and all of the huge economic and other damage that they did,’ he added.

Cummings said the first lockdown, which was put in place between March and May 2020, was ‘defensible’ because ‘there was no system, there was no testing, there was no nothing’. Accusing the cabinet office of misleading Johnson and his team in the months prior to the pandemic, Cummings said:

If we’d actually had proper pandemic planning and preparation in the first place, if we’d had the ‘world’s best pandemic preparations… as [we] were all told in January…there would definitely be no need for the first lockdown either.

You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here.