Dominic Cummings

From the New York Review of Books: “Cummings, while individually odd, is in many ways a familiar political archetype. The annals of politics are replete with advisers who seemed to be impregnable and uniquely insightful until, just like that, they fell out of favor—often pushed by their own hubris. In that sense, if not ideologically, the Bannon comparison is perhaps apt. In TV drama terms, Cummings came to resemble less Sherlock Holmes than Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor from the British political satire The Thick of It whose Machiavellian reign of terror eventually petered out into impotence. As Darren Lilleker, a professor of political communication, wrote last year, the depiction of Cummings as a Svengali is part of a discourse that pervades British politics, one that “allows the political leader to be portrayed as the innocent at the mercy of their gurus.” But this itself, Lilleker noted, “is essentially a piece of spin.””