Evening Standard comment: The clock is ticking on Britain’s anti-elite elite

There’s supposed to be a rule in British politics that the adviser must never become the story. It’s nonsense.

The right-hand men and women of prime ministers, from Professor Lindemann and Marcia Falkender to Alastair Campbell and Steve Hilton, are the centre of attention and fascination.

Dominic Cummings, with his swaggering unkempt walks up Downing Street every morning, and now his press conference in the garden behind it, is just the latest Svengali who does not want to remain in the shadows.

Indeed, much to his private delight, he’s already been played by a Hollywood A-lister. There’s a scene in the TV drama The Uncivil War when Benedict Cumberbatch, aka Mr Cummings, goes to a notoriously run-down estate in Essex called Jaywick and meets one of the millions of ordinary families that the political elites are supposed to have forgotten about.

The actor gets down on the road, his ear pressed to the tarmac, and hears the tremors of the popular tsunami that is about to sweep away the governing classes.

This, we are told, sums up the man who is now the second most powerful man in the country: eccentric, irreverent, dismissive of MPs, and with a preternatural ability to read the undercurrents of public opinion and harness them to his causes — destroying the established institutions of the country, leaving the EU, and keeping Boris Johnson in Downing Street (in that order).

These days Mr Cumberbatch would be more careful about lying down in the middle of the street in case the real Mr Cummings was driving along it, testing his eyesight.

The fate of Boris Johnson’s adviser still hangs very much in the balance today, after a long weekend dominated by news that he had broken the lockdown rules.

The resignation of a junior minister this morning blows apart the exhaustive attempts yesterday by the Prime Minister, Mr Cummings and the inner core of the old Vote Leave team to draw a line.

If this were any member of the Cabinet, they would be gone by now — on the orders of Mr Cummings himself. None of them in the Johnson regnum yet have their own powerbase strong enough to protect them; and all are much more dispensable to Mr Johnson than Mr Cummings, who has given his premiership a purpose beyond that of simply fulfilling a lifelong ambition.

But in the end, there’s one person more important to the Prime Minister than even Mr Cummings: and that’s Boris Johnson.

Mediocre performance

Much is at stake for him personally.

The at-best mediocre performance of Britain in the Covid crisis has been in part overlooked by the country because they feel that at least “we’ve all been in it together”, as a result of the Prime Minister’s own time in intensive care.

If the mood now turns, then more focus will be thrown on the Government’s competence. Conservative MPs, most of whom feel excluded from the Brexiteer clique that took control and have never seen Mr Johnson as one of them, will not be forgiving.

For all this is happening at a time when Labour has returned to the real world, with a credible leader, bringing to end a wholly unreal five years when the Tories could get almost anything wrong and be forgiven.

Whether Mr Cummings goes or not depends now on the ­opinion polls and impact that has on the state of Tory parliamentary opinion.

We have yet to see whether this story, like most, has completely passed by those ordinary families that Mr Cummings tells us we should listen to; or whether instead it confirms their worst suspicions: that this lot of rulers are just like the others, and set rules for the rest of the country that they themselves ignore.

This incident will add force to lasting change in this administration that the whole crisis is bringing about.

The tight hold of the Vote Leave veterans is disappearing; Cabinet members are emerging as future contenders for the crown; Labour is building a serious alternative.

In short, the clock is ticking on the self-­appointed anti-elite elite.