Cummings a Tory rebel? The Covid cronyism shows he’s just another insider | Owen Jones
Revelations about government contracts make a mockery of his carefully cultivated anti-elite image
Dominic Cummings is the perfect totem for rightwing populism. You can see it in his careful cultivation of outsider status, from his theatrical bickering with the press pack camped outside his home (he pretends to find it all slightly irritating, but you can tell he’s really enjoying it), to his final exit from the front door of No 10, which was as dramatic as it was contrived. Likewise, his choice of casual attire suggests that he is a man who supposedly does not care what the world thinks of him, although the fact that one of Cummings’ previous blogs was edited in mid-April to make it look as though he predicted the pandemic tells us otherwise.
That Cummings has never joined a political party, and privately believes the Tories are too wedded to the establishment, helps him cling on to this outsider status. But as the willing servant of an Old Etonian Conservative prime minister who sought power for its own sake, Cummings’ career in government tells a rather different story. While he expressed contempt for the British media ecosystem, he fed tasty morsels to favoured journalists who haplessly danced to his tune. When he declared that the public were right to believe that “Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people”, he wanted the world to know he was different. But as the second most powerful figure in a government whose mismanagement of the pandemic has had a terrible consequences for the lives of the poor, he was not.
Read the original article at The Guardian