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When Dominic Cummings, Grand Vizier to Boris Johnson’s Sultan of Sleaze, was unceremoniously defenestrated from Number 10 in November 2020, many assumed that this would mark the end of his political career.
In the years that followed, Cummings seemed to be consigned to the margins of British political life, condemned to hurling embittered jeremiads from his Substack blog at the political class that had failed to recognise his genius and stymied his efforts to remodel the UK state into a technocracy administered by the “weirdos and misfits” that were its only hope of salvation.
But it’s clear now that the man whom David Cameron described as a “career psychopath” does not see his mission as by any means over. And, in Elon Musk, he has found a weirdo of world-historical proportions with the means and motivation to help him accomplish it.
To readers of Cummings’ blog, this alliance does not come out of the blue. Cummings has often written admiringly of Musk, and in a characteristically verbose post in September 2021, headed “Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley – start a project NOW to write the plan for the next GOP candidate”, he outlined a blueprint for Musk and the tech-bros to take control of the US Government.
In this, Cummings made it clear that the object should not simply be to reform a US governmental system that he sees (in the same way as he sees our own) as hopelessly dysfunctional, but to completely smash it and replace it with “a government that actually controls the government”. Key to this would be “a tiny and cheap (<$2-3 million) project – independent-for-now of any candidate” that would “start now to figure out how a GOP candidate could win, how they could actually control the government after they win, and who the candidate should be.”
For Cummings in 2021, this candidate should not be Trump, whom he saw as incompetent and lacking “a CEO mindset or skillset in the Bezos/Gates/Jobs/Musk sense of being able to execute at scale and speed”. In this sense Trump resembled Boris Johnson (“the shopping trolley”, as Cummings now calls him): “His insecurities mean he can’t face his lack of skills and trust/empower anyone to build the team to run the administration for him.”
What would the sort of president Cummings envisaged, or their appointed tech-bro factotum, actually do? He explains that their first job would be to shut down various key departments of government, including the Pentagon, and replace these with “start-ups” operating on “completely different legal and management principles and staffed by completely different sorts of people”. Those appointed to run these departments should not be constrained by the “insane rules” that had plagued Cummings in Number 10, where he claims that his plans were far too often ruled out as “UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND ILLEGAL” (Cummings’ caps).
Any resistance put up by the liberal establishment to the blitzkrieg imposition of this new order would. Cummings anticipates, “crumble when faced with people who know what they’re doing and do not play by the normal rules”.
From the perspective of 2025, it’s clear that the programme Cummings sketched out almost four years ago is now about to implemented in the US under the guise of “Project 2025”. But there is, of course, one way in which this unfolding reality differs from Cummings’ vision: Trump was chosen as the GOP candidate and went on to win.
Cummings had failed to realise just how completely the MAGA cult had taken over the Republican Party. There was never any realistic chance that it would pick any other Republican candidate, even after Trump was charged with multiple felonies.
Although Cummings and the tech-bros who eventually gave their backing to Trump might have preferred a younger and less obviously deranged figurehead (the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would have been an obvious choice), Trump’s running mate and soon-to-be Vice President J. D. Vance is a man who owes his political position entirely to Silicon Valley backers, principally the far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. And Musk, without whose money and social media support Trump might well have lost, has been rewarded with the role of co-lead – along with Ramaswamy – at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – the agency charged with drastically cutting back government in ways that closely match Cummings’ prescription.
Cummings has long wanted to push through a similar “regime change” in the UK, and saw the Brexit referendum as an opportunity to make this happen. But things didn’t go entirely to plan, as he explained in an interview with Silicon Valley podcaster Dwarkesh Patel in November 2023:
“The whole Brexit thing was such an incredible missed opportunity. Winning the referendum. The chaos that that created. The collapse of both the old parties in 2019. One of the parties coming to us, begging for us to save them. Us going into Number 10. Having the majority. We kind of manoeuvred the system into such a place that we could actually then transform one of the old parties into the new thing that we wanted to build.”
Or so it had seemed in 2019. But both the Civil Service and the Conservative Party – and Boris Johnson in particular – proved to be more resistant to letting Cummings have complete control than he had hoped. As he was later to write: “It would have been a different story if Boris-Carrie had enjoyed themselves smashing champagne bottles off boats while VL [Vote Leave] ran No10 and used the 80 seat majority to do the VL plan.”
The triumph of the Trump-Musk duumvirate, with their path to power and political programme closely resembling those he set out in 2021, has revitalised Cummings’ ambitions. So how does he think his plan to destroy and remake the British state might still come to fruition?
The rough outlines of how this might work began to emerge in a blog post of August 2023, headed “The Startup Party: Time to Build from September and replace the Tories?” This made it abundantly clear that Cummings no longer regards the Conservative Party as a suitable partner in such a venture, despite (he says) overtures from Tory MPs and donors: “NO. Plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt,” he declaims, after listing what he sees as the irredeemable faults (“no grip on power…no message… no political strategy”) that mean it will never be prepared to take the truly radical measures needed. As he puts it: “The Vote Leave attempted-but-only-partially-successful-coup was the last chance for an almost normal rebirth of an old party. Now there’s probably only the startup path.”
Curiously, nowhere in this very long post does Cummings mention Nigel Farage’s relatively new and supposedly anti-establishment party, Reform UK. There are several reasons why Cummings’ aversion to Farage runs deep, one of which is the animosity between the two men that developed when they were running parallel Brexit campaigns. Cummings resented the way that Farage was seen as Mr Brexit, when the heavy lifting for the referendum was done by Vote Leave rather than Farage’s Leave.EU.
Beyond that, Cummings and Farage have fundamentally different understandings of what politics is about. Cummings believes (correctly, in my view) that Farage does not have any serious political programme beyond self-aggrandisement. As he told YouTube influencer Chris Williamson in July 2024:
“Farage is basically like Tory MPs at heart. His goal is just to be on the stupid Today programme on the BBC, you know. He’s not actually there to get anything done. So he’s there to profit from being upset with the system but he doesn’t have real answers for what to do. And he always surrounds himself with useless characters who can’t build anything, so the party itself isn’t really going anywhere. It tops out at roughly 15%, 15% of the country who pretty much like Farage and hate everybody else.”
That said, many of the policies that Cummings sketches out for a “Startup Party” are very clearly to the right or far right of the political spectrum and similar to those espoused by Reform – and indeed by much of the Tory Party: much tougher action to stop immigration, withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, opposition to trans healthcare, ending support for Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia, lower tax and fewer regulations on business, an end to green subsidies…
The differences are more in tone – Cummings frames these policies as part of a dynamic modernisation programme rather than in the sort of beerily nostalgic language favoured by Farage. And the success of the sort of party that Cummings is envisaging will be driven not by Farage-style media antics but by the most advanced voter manipulation technology available:
“The success of GPT and LLMs [large language models] generally and the incredible growth of this ecosystem not only has profound implications for the economy, security and the deep state — they represent a massive opportunity for a new political force. Something approaching [Carole] Cadwalladr’s worst nightmare — what she thought happened in 2016 but did not — is now technically feasible: effective automated personalised communication at scale.”
Cummings musings on setting up a new political party to contest the 2024 election did not lead to any practical action. It may be that he was unable to secure the funding needed for this venture. Or it may be that he concluded it would be helpful for his plan if the Tories’ main rivals were given an opportunity to prove their inability to govern effectively before Cummings stepped forward as a Man of Destiny. Indeed, he hinted at this when he wrote that he’d be “happy to gamble on Starmer having a Blair-like majority if it means the replacement of the perpetual rotten Tory horrorshow”.
For Cummings, an essential precondition for a “coup” or “regime change” operation of the sort he envisages is chaos. As he tells Dwarkesh Patel: “You certainly can’t say now that democracy has proved to work. I would say the one thing you see in history is regimes are constantly changing and everyone thinks in their own time that we’re not going to change. What we’ve got is going to persist. But it’s always wrong. The most that things persist is a few generations, and then there’s always chaos and then there’s always a change.”
This is the context in which to understand the Mail on Sunday story, based on “government sources”, about Musk and Cummings being in a “plot to sabotage UK politics”. There is every reason to believe that, as the Mail on Sunday quotes an unnamed “ally of Musk” as saying, the two men “are talking about smaller government and the end of the traditional party system,” and that “Dom is in constant contact with major Silicon Valley figures, who are becoming increasingly anti-woke.” And it’s more than plausible that Cummings has been advising Musk on the content of his incendiary tweets.
From Cummings’ point of view, the main way at present that Musk can advance his “regime change” project is as a chaos agent of unprecedented power and reach, capable of stirring rage and hatred on a massive scale. But it is not at all clear that Musk sees Cummings as the best far-right horse to back in the UK, and the volatile billionaire is now reported to be feeling “a bit contrite” about tweeting that “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Nigel Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”
I suspect that this tweet expresses Cummings’ opinion of the Reform leader more than that of Musk himself – and that it may also reflect a reassessment by Cummings of the potential of Reform as a political vehicle for his own project. With Reform now polling at 25%, only one point behind Labour, his earlier dismissal of its electoral potential now looks premature.
Will Cummings move ahead with his “Startup Party”? My own guess is that it’s more likely that he’s now thinking more in terms of helping Musk to shape Reform into a party capable of taking full advantage of the sort of technologically assisted voter manipulation at which Cummings is so proficient. He may also have concluded that his role in a far-right “regime change” is not as the leader of a new political party but as the strategist who puts Reform into power and drives a radical remodelling of the British state once it gets there.
It remains to be seen whether an accommodation is possible between two such rival and contrasting far-right egotists as Cummings and Farage. But the limitless financial resources of Elon Musk could prove a decisive factor in helping to broker such an alliance.
In the meantime, Musk’s continual hate-mongering suits them both just fine.