This is mission control to Dominic Cummings: you have a problem

Another universe-beating week for the government, as Matt Hancock unveils Operation Moon Shot, and Dominic Cummings cuts the ribbon on a new “Nasa-style mission control”. I love how hard these guys are for galactic talk, which means so much more coming from a government whose cock-ups can now be seen even from space. Could Cummings bring a damaged lunar exploration craft back down to Earth in 45 hours without loss of astronaut life? Babe, he can’t even bring your sister back from the Algarve without three days of confused hokey cokey.

Still, we fight on. Summer has ended and Boris Johnson’s Downing Street gang has got back to doing what it does best: centralising power in an ever-decreasing number of people’s hands, no matter how many times those people prove they can’t wield the power they already have without diurnal U-turns and/or broken promises. Is it too much to expect a government of superforecasters to make predictions even Mystic Meg could manage? “Luck wears blue stripes while Pluto challenges finances, but appointing Tony Abbott is going to be an unmitigated shitshow.”

The good news is that Hancock’s plan to test 500,000 people a day by the end of October is the latest much-vaunted “game-changer”, just like the “game-changing” antibody test Johnson announced back in March, or the “game-changing” NHS contact-tracing app announced shortly afterwards – both of which seem to have gone down somewhere over the government’s extensive Bermuda Triangle.

Falling by the wayside too, alas, is another of Cummings’ misfits/weirdos, as Whitehall loses another of the unconventional data experts lured in with the promise of free girlfriends (I slightly paraphrase the remuneration package). The first one we ever heard about had to go after his eugenicist leanings were revealed; now some guy who tweeted about using live rounds on Black Lives Matter protesters has “parted ways” with the Cabinet Office. Honestly, what are the chances?

It’s good news for weirdos and misfits who haven’t been racist yet, though, as some of them have begun moving over to Cummings’ new operational command centre, where he will play a brilliant and charismatic genius in charge of a futuristic government. I very much enjoyed various newspapers’ entirely speculative graphic representations of how this open-plan nerve centre might look, which have a distinct “not actual game footage” vibe.

Even so, there does seem to be a strong cargo cult element to it all. Perhaps if Cummings builds some vaguely inspired-by version of Nasa mission control, this government will seem even vaguely in control of its mission.

Yet reports that the walls will be covered in screens showing real-time data suggest more of a stage set where the production designer has been charged with creating a “mission control-type room”. As has been pointed out, the whole screens-on-the-wall look dates back to the time when people didn’t have a variety of personal screens everywhere from their desk to their pocket. Hold on to your hats, because I am told that in the future, a gaggle of brilliant men in shirtsleeves and tie clips will not actually have to gather round a big telly and think laterally about how to get their government’s off-course agenda back down to Earth.

Of course, there is always cosplaying in politics. Guys in government love to think they’re guys in the movies. When a British defence attache was kidnapped by Colombian criminals in 1995, MP David Davis chaired a Cobra meeting that he ended with the grimly determined warning: “Failure is not an option.” The movie Apollo 13, in which the Nasa flight director played by Ed Harris does the same, was in cinemas at the time. But I expect Davis thought he’d got away with passing it off as his own.

Cummings continues to get away with similar posturing, forever affecting a sort of cinematic cool that is regrettably just a few hundred thousand miles beyond the reach of a spad in trackie bums and Reactolite glasses. Yet no one tells him. Cummings says he wants a challenging and unconventional work environment where there are no sacred cows, but what he really wants is what he’s got: a room of people so completely beaten that no one openly laughs at him when he says stuff like “a hard rain is coming”. No one is anywhere near insolent enough to ask the obvious question: “Please may we know why are you are speaking like Jason Statham?”

If Cummings had any normal, non-elite friends, the piss would have been taken out of him absolutely relentlessly for this stuff. Instead, he has proved himself so entirely unsackable that he is as feared as you would expect of a man for whom the prime minister is merely a meat puppet.

As for that PM, there are increasing mutterings about his use-by date, which makes the relentless hectoring on how ordinary Britons should be doing their jobs all the more dicey. Look, I enjoy all the hot, exclusive content I get in the Daily Telegraph – Boris Johnson’s OnlyFans – which last week trailed the government’s plan to threaten people back into commuting to the office.

But is the increasingly hysterical insistence that people should get “back to work” quite the way they want to play it? I don’t mean to teach these geniuses how to suck eggs, but it does feel likely that at some point a lot of Britons will get pissed off at being continually told they’re not doing any work, when what is meant is that they are not working in an office. Many are working harder than they ever have.

What the government really seems to mean is that they should get back into the big city centres, particularly London’s. Does it in turn follow that the government’s supposedly absolutely central “levelling-up” agenda – which involves devolving power, and pushing people and resources away from London – can itself only end up a future casualty of the Bermuda Triangle? One for Mystic Meg to unravel, perhaps.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist