Cummings and Goings
Q. Who is at the heart of government?......Dominic Cummings.
Who is……Dominic Cummings?
On the day prime minister (sic) Johnson entered 10 Downing
Street, staff lined the hallway applauding their new boss. One man, however,
stood alone in the corner, dressed in jeans and a T shirt, making no attempt to
acknowledge the pageant taking place before him; that man of course was Dominic
Cummings.
Such insouciance would seem to suggest an outsider, a man
unconcerned to acknowledge or accept the norms and customs of any given
situation. At a superficial level such a conclusion appears logical but, if one
looks a little deeper, it is perhaps more apposite to describe his attitude as
infantile and, huge brain’ or no, more like the behaviour of a recalcitrant
teen-ager. An example of this can be gleaned from his refusal to attend a
summons from the
The House of Commons
committee of privileges when requested to do so. One can imagine a
parent wanting to take a child to task for some misdemeanour or other and the
child in turn responding with the age old teen-age response, ‘shan’t’, before
retreating to his/her room and refusing to communicate further.
How, therefore, to make sense of Mr Cummings’s raison
d’etre? The evidence suggests that this is no easy task. It is reported that Mr
Cummings has a hatred of private schooling, which he believes propels
mediocrities into positions of great power and influence. Simultaneously, as
reported by Finn Redmond writing on Reaction News web-site, “Mr Cummings is so
bogged down by his loathing of a privileged set, educated in humanities and
unfit for government, that his priorities became skewed”.
The irony of these statements is that Mr Cummings was privately
educated at Durham School, graduated
from Oxford with a 1st class honours in Ancient and Modern
History and later married into the aristocracy – albeit at the lower
end of the ‘scale’. So what to make of this? It would appear that Mr Cummings is
precisely one of those that he professes to loath or despise for their
privilege and concomitant mediocrity. Such seeming contra indicators might be
explained using Melanie Klein’s theory of ‘Projection and Projective
Identification, in which a person projects onto the ‘other’ that which he/she
denies in his/herself.
This contradiction is, one assumes, full of personal
tensions and discomfort. It suggests a level of self-loathing which in the
above terms is projected to others or institutions and potentially explains his
anger, rage and desire to demean and destroy those people and institutions who
represent the bad ‘other’.
Dominic Cummings, therefore, a man of contradictions and one
for whom rage and loathing for others and the world spur him to action. He is
like Don Quixote with attitude - and what attitude - for whom there will always
be another windmill to attack and destroy; and of course, in this scenario
prime minister Johnson is his servant Sancho riding gamely on a donkey
following ‘His Master’s Voice’.
One final word of advice for young Master Cummings however,
the Establishment doesn’t always win but, in the end, it never loses.
AND ANOTHER THING…
A poem for our times:-
No Man is an Island.
John Donne – 1624
Meditation 17
No man is an island entire of itself;
every man
is a piece of the continent, a part
of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe
is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or
of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes
me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for
whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Olde English Version
No man is an Iland, intire of
itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part
of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea,
Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a
Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or
of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes
me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for
whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne
