Deranged Dom Cummings buys into Farage's 'deep state' story

In his entertaining and terrifying “non-fiction thriller” What If Reform Wins, Times journalist Peter Chappell sketches a scenario in which, the party having scored a general election victory, Dominic Cummings joins Nigel Farage’s No 10 operation as chief of staff.

It might seem unlikely on the face of it: in an example of a broken clock being right twice a day Farage once called Cummings a “horrible little man”, while Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign beat Farage’s Grassroots Out to be the official Eurosceptic campaign during the Brexit campaign.

But in December 2024, this gruesome twosome had a secret dinner where they discussed, in Cummings’s words, “the core problems that we have a broken Whitehall, a disgraceful and shattered Tory party clogging up the party system, how to shake it all up most effectively”.

Suggested Reading

Farage emerges… to headline a crypto-backed conference

Rats in a Sack

Now Cummings has popped up in Michael Gove’s increasingly loopy Spectator, where his wife Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor, to declare that all Farage’s current woes are down to a deep state conspiracy, rather than the Reform leader having a well-documented fondness for freebies.

In a transcript of a podcast from January that few picked up at the time because its content was so risible, Cummings claims the shadowy elite is “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, by fair means and foul.’ They will leak medical records. They will leak tax records. They will bug his phone and leak that. They will do anything that they need to.”

Suggested Reading

All roll up for the Reform conference – tickets just £6,000

Rats in a Sack

Bizarrely suggesting that the likes of journalist Carole Cadwalladr, former Tory minister Rory Stewart and the New World’s editor-at-large Alastair Campbell were having “conferences by Lake Como to discuss how to do it”, Cummings went on to warn that: “There’s going to be an all-out attempt to decapitate Farage. His tax returns, his medical information: they will use the intelligence services and leak a bunch of shit that they would not normally do.

“Overall, the big picture is going to be a big push to rejoin the EU, and there’s going to be a big push for censorship. The whole lesson of the past 10 years is that the system will never admit failure. The system will not change direction. It will only keep going. Everyone is racist. So: rejoin, censorship, and change the electoral system.”

Classic Dom! Boris Johnson’s former right-hand man famously drove to Barnard Castle in lockdown in 2020 to test his hindsight. Before he gets hitched to Farage and is allowed to wreak his unique brand of havoc in Downing Street again, might it be time he got his head looked at? And could he get a two-for-one with whoever it was at the Spectator who approvingly resuscitated this paranoid guff?