Cummings' blog, to which I have linked on a few occasions, is of course the primary source for understanding him. It's not all Bismarck, physicists and abuse of MPs: he compares Jeremy Heywood to Michael Quinlan, he quotes from Citizen Kane, he tells you about Colonel Boyd and the Apollo Program. It's not to be missed.
What you need to understand about Cummings is that, unlike the vast majority of politicians, he is interested in how to make things happen in politics. Do you remember the Blair Government getting all worked up about they pulled levers in Westminster and nothing happened? Cummings' life's work is all about not repeating those mistakes. That is why he cares so little about media/political commentary - all about making oneself look good - and cares much more about data.
So, e.g., "The measures were devised by the prime minister’s senior aides who have spent the summer in their Downing Street bunker war-gaming how to respond to potential parliamentary manoeuvres by MPs determined to block no deal. The rebels, by contrast, spent the August holidays debating whether they would back Ken Clarke as a potential caretaker prime minister in an unlikely government of national unity." Well, quite. (To be fair, they also spent some of it wondering whether Caroline Lucas' fantasy all-female cabinet was sufficiently ethnically diverse.) At a very basic level, what are you trying to achieve and how can you achieve it - and do you have the will and discipline to do what it takes? Remember that it was Parliament, stuffed with Remainers, that voted itself 6 weeks off when it could have been plotting against Leave. Parliament failed, says Vernon Bogdanor. And largely because it did not properly plan.
Another example: I read that “Cummings is trying to goad Grieve and co - he says the more they appear babbling on TV, the stronger the support in focus groups for the prime minister to end the nightmare on October 31”. Absolutely. Dominic Grieve is the Remainer-Remoaner from central casting: "the son of Percy Grieve, QC (the MP for Solihull 1964–83), and of an Anglo-French mother, Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain (d. 1991), maternal granddaughter of Sir George Roberts, 1st and last baronet. He was educated at the Lycée français Charles de Gaulle ..., Colet Court ... and Westminster School. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford .... He was the President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1977 ... Queen's Counsel in 2008". You can't make this stuff up: Evelyn Raymonde Louise Mijouain - descended from a baronet - went to more posh schools than most Leave voters can even name? He is Jacob Rees-Mogg without the charm! He gives TV interviews from his holiday house in France! Just as David Cameron was (rightly, from the point of view of Remain) keen to make Farage the face of Leave, making the face of Remain be a bunch of people like Grieve who get worked up about proroguing Parliament rather than anything of any concrete concern to real people is just what Leave needs.
(To digress for a moment: what was the right response to the famous bus with £350m a week and the NHS on it? As I understand it, the canonical response from Remain is (a) it's not £350m a week, it's really about £250m and (b) even if you were to eliminate the net payments to the EU budget then that money would not be available for the NHS because the overall reduction in the UK's GDP as a result of leaving the EU would result in a reduced tax-take in excess of the savings from the budget contributions. Did you even stay awake to the end of that?
How about this reaction instead:
- this £350m figure is rubbish and they know it
- but this campaign has shown divisions in the country that we in Remain want to deal with
- as we have been telling you, EU membership is really profitable for the country, particularly the City of London
- so, the day after the referendum, there will be an extra £500m a week for the NHS paid for by a new tax on the City - the EU Membership Dividend Tax!
- that money will disappear if we vote to Leave
- and that is real money, not the phantom money that Leave is promising you?
At least it would have been an offer to the voters. Leave had offers and Remain had nothing but threats.)
Anyway, back to Cummings. The people that Cummings reads are interesting, e.g. Slate Star Codex, perhaps the single most consistently interesting thing on the internet. This guy has also spotted that fact: worth a read for someone who understands where Cummings is coming from and yet disagrees with him on his own terms. (But yet he considers small blips in GDP growth to be equivalent to head-on car crashes ...)
Cummings = Varoufakis? There is something to this too.
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