Dominic Cummings has warned Nigel Farage that Whitehall will break the law to prevent Reform winning power. Speaking on The Spectator‘s Quite Right! podcast, Cummings said: ‘They’ll leak medical records, they’ll leak tax records. They’ll bug his phone and leak that. They’ll do anything that they need to’.
The former Vote Leave campaign boss and ex-chief aide to Boris Johnson said that Farage’s political opponents were determined to learn from their mistakes in the Brexit referendum – and ensure that Reform doesn’t win the next election. He told Michael Gove and Madeline Grant:
‘The people around Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Trump. They’re looking across Europe, and they’re saying to themselves: The lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in. We should never have let Vote Leave win the referendum on Brexit. That was the beginning of the disaster for us. We can’t make this mistake again. Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage and make sure that he doesn’t win it by fair means and foul.’
With the Tories trailing both Labour and Reform in the polls, Cummings said the Conservative party is ‘completely dead’ – and that most voters feel apathy, rather than anger, towards Kemi Badenoch’s party:
‘The Tories…are dead. I think they’re completely dead. One of the striking things in the focus groups is people have moved on from hatred. They just say things like, ‘I just don’t think about the Tories any more because they’re just not relevant to our lives anymore, are they? They’re just finished.’’
Cummings described the Tories as ‘like the local vagrant who used to smash everything up, but he’s now cabbaged and sitting in a wheelchair and isn’t relevant any more. That’s the metaphor that I would use. They’re just not relevant. People don’t discuss their ideas or any of the people.’
While some Tory supporters insist that a change of leader could help, Cummings is sceptical. Many voters, he said, don’t even know who Robert Jenrick – a favourite to succeed Kemi Badenoch – is. Jenrick’s social media videos, which are popular in Westminster, are largely irrelevant to most ordinary people, he said.
Gove, who used to work with Dominic Cummings at the Department for Education, asked his former colleague whether he thought he wasn’t cut out to be Prime Minister:
‘I’ve never asked you this before. But I always formed the view that, whatever you thought of the things that I did right or wrong in politics, that actually you thought: Michael, you know, however good you are, you don’t have what it takes to be prime minister. I think you think that. Do you?’
Cummings said:
‘So I think you could be prime minister in the sense that – this will sound insulting and rude, and I don’t mean it like that – (but) in a world in which Boris and Keir Starmer and David Cameron can be prime minister, then, in that world, in one sense, why couldn’t you be prime minister? However, I don’t think you could be a prime minister like Pitt or Palmerston or someone like that.’
You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here.
