When it first emerged that
Dominic Cummings was going to be made
Boris Johnson’s chief of staff in 10 Downing Street, it didn’t take long for one particular choice quote to re-emerge.
In an article earlier this year, Cummings said the
European Research Group, of which around 80 Tory MPs are members, “should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic”.
Cummings ran
Vote Leave, and during the referendum campaign said that senior figures in the ERG had been too busy “obsessing over the 8.10 slot on the Today programme” or “shooting, skiing or chasing girls to do any actual work”.
Remainers don’t like the ERG, and so these words, now spiked with the new reality that they’d been said by the No 10 chief of staff, caused no shortage of delight.
But Remainers might find they have a lot more in common with the ERG than they do with Cummings.
Fundamentally, the beef between Cummings and the Tory party’s veteran Eurosceptics was simple. They felt they had been at it for years, they knew how to do it, knew all the arguments about sovereignty. They wanted to rerun the old campaigns, about “Global Britain”, about “out, out and into the world”. Cummings was, not wholly unreasonably, aware that all these campaigns had failed, and so he demanded to do things his way. He got his way. He did things his way. He won.
But his way – and no one should be in any doubt about this at all – was a straightforward, amoral disgrace. Cummings’ way was to use social media and data analytics to relentlessly target voters who micro-profiling told them would be susceptible to what can only be described as racist messaging.
Cummings’ way was shadowy footprints, sneaking into Britain’s back door, under the straightforward lie of a headline:
“Turkey is joining the EU.”
And it was even more cynical than that. Turkey is not joining the EU: the UK has a veto. But it was at the peak of the migrant crisis, in which Turkey played a crucial role. And Michael Gove, as a member of the Privy Council, knew that Turkey had a crucial security relationship with the UK, which meant that David Cameron was prevented from stating publicly that he would always veto Turkish accession to the EU.
The loathing between Cummings and the ERG leadership is mutual. Senior ERG figures, several of whom played key roles inside Vote Leave, will happily confide in private that they were utterly appalled when Vote Leave moved into the blatantly Islamophobic phase of its campaign.
Whether these tactics were necessary to win is a question that cannot be answered. They were used, and they did win.
And three years later, where are we? At the weekend, a police medic was
filmed being attacked by a protester on a
Tommy Robinson march. Robinson is in prison for seeking to collapse the trial of Muslim grooming gangs, for no greater reason than to boost his own profile.
Anyone who has even the vaguest social link to actual, working-class communities knows beyond doubt that Britain was radicalised by its EU referendum. Robinson and his ilk – the far right – have never had a recruiting sergeant like it. Cummings is far too clever not to know this, not to know the stunningly inevitable consequences of his actions. But he went ahead and did it all the same.
