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 1^st 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