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What I learned from doorstepping Dominic Cummings

<span>Photograph: Stringer/Reuters</span>
Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

Things came to a head on Dominic Cummings’s doorstep on 11 February. “The night-time is the right time to fight crime,” he told waiting reporters, before going on to recommend PJ Masks for jobs in the cabinet. PJ Masks are children’s TV characters. The question had been about HS2. Pressed for more detail, the “maverick” replied: “I can’t think of a rhyme.”

It was no more or less sophisticated than the two fingers it represented; meaningless and silly, it was intended, one assumes, to put the journalists in their place. “I have not authorised this conversation, therefore this conversation is null, void, a string of noises disguised as words.”

You can actually – I believe – track his thought process. Some days before, a reporter from ITV caught Cummings exiting a restaurant, just as the UK exited the EU. He asked a series of admittedly banal questions: “How do you plan to bring the country back together?” “You’ve worked so hard to this moment, does the real work begin now?” And Cummings’s reply, couched in irritable hectoring, like a horrible headteacher, was: “Are you going to walk along asking inane questions? Is that your best move?” Since then, he has been studiedly inane in his interactions. “Two can play at that game,” must be his reasoning, though an eager public awaits his 10,000-word blog on the subject.

So is doorstepping Cummings a fruitful exercise, if these are its ground rules? Or does it merely underscore his immense power, the absolute carelessness for reputation and respectability it has brought with it, and fill the airwaves with the swill of his disregard? Are these journalists just making us all depressed, or are they performing the valuable service of holding him to account? They certainly think the latter.

None of these reporters or camera people wanted to be identified or quoted, which I understood. You’ll just have to accept that they said what I say they did. I realise this is unfamiliar in a low-trust environment, but there it is.

Dominic Cummings took time out to give a book recommendation.
Dominic Cummings took time out to give a book recommendation. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters

They’re not there every day – on Monday 17, it was just me, hiding behind a tree. On Tuesday, the pack arrives, though there aren’t as many of them as you might suppose: one solitary photographer, a camera person with a producer, and a journalist whose pay grade this gig is unfathomably below. To be standing outside a big-boned north London house at 7.20 in the morning, this person’s crusade must, on some level, be personal: a battle against the unaccountability of modern politics everywhere. Someone should definitely write a novel about him. “This is the second most important man in the country,” the journalist – let’s call them the Crusader – says. “But where do we get to question him? When does he appear in parliament to explain himself?”

The photographer attached to him is a freelancer, working constantly, for newspapers and news agencies, five years out of university, in what I suggest might be his dream job. “Well, yes, until you have to start doing it. I just hope he comes out before the parking starts.”

The TV team, producer and camera person are pooling their clips, so these will eventually go out on Sky and ITV, too, even though they’re from the BBC. The story on Tuesday was the resignation of Andrew Sabisky, forced to stand aside following the unearthing of racist, misogynistic and eugenicist remarks.

The conversation on the doorstep while we waited was wide-ranging and interesting: we discussed other eugenicists of note (Jeffrey Epstein, apparently); the nature of UK politics now, which has become very stage-managed – pre-briefings and briefings, information fed to one or two preselected journalists – and a declining, almost moribund, tradition of finding things out for yourself by going to a place and asking a human being.

A black cab lurks 20 metres away with its engine off. At about 7.50am, it creeps towards the house. Two minutes after that, Cleo Watson pegs up the street and jumps into it. “You’re late today,” the BBC producer says. “It’s recess,” she replies briskly. “The world is still turning,” says the Crusader. “She’s Cummings’s Spad,” the cameraperson says and everyone laughs – it’s a grim procedural joke, since advisers don’t get their own advisers, like Russian dolls – except in, you know, authoritarian regimes.

The cab rigmarole leaves little room for error – Cummings is plainly coming out any minute – but we’ve reckoned without the bin man. “If you were outside my house, I throw a bucket of water over you.” “What have you got to hide?” I asked, and he said: “Nothing. It’s just incredibly annoying,” and splashed me with bin juice, though in a lighthearted way. “It’s not a very nice thing to do to somebody,” the photographer had already volunteered. Somewhere in the morality of the doorstep is a reality about politics; this is something you would only do in a time of low transparency and high conflict. So that’s what it reveals. The words themselves, not so much.

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Cummings comes out of the side door, with a diffident gait but grumpy, chin-out face. The Crusader asks neutrally whether he regrets the Sabisky appointment. The BBC producer asks whether he’s a fan of eugenics, then: “Have you got any more weirdos?” This is a reference to the famous job ad that yielded the candidate in the first place. It is to the last question that Cummings mumbles an answer, which ends “… instead of political pundits who don’t know what they’re talking about”. He jumps in the cab with Watson and we watch it back on the pavement. I can make out the words superforecasters, but we all conclude that what came before was gibberish. By the time it appears on Sky, two hours later, is perfectly audible: “Read Philip Tetlock’s superforecasters, instead of political pundits who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Has this reference to a favoured political scientist added to our understanding of the Downing Street machine? It is, after all, still gibberish, even when you can hear it. Sabisky isn’t a superforecaster, he’s a half-baked incel who can’t even be bothered to read the science behind the poisonous new world order he espoused (tl;dr: eugenics doesn’t work on humans. Only apples, sometimes horses). Have we held Cummings to account? What would that even look like, bar his resignation? Would the discourse be any less rich if this moment hadn’t happened? We may not have known for certain that Cummings thinks he and his ilk have superpowers and the rest of us don’t know anything, but we probably could have guessed.

And yet I find I have a new respect for the principle. He holds a huge amount of power, and accepts none of the responsibilities of transparency, persuasion and, actually, courtesy that go along with that. To see this and ignore it fosters a sense of impotence, even nihilism. When there are no longer people prepared to wait outside his house at 7am, we’ll really be in trouble.