One of Dominic Cummings’ biggest successes, so far, has been convincing so many people he’s a political original. In important ways, he isn’t.
A decade ago, David Cameron’s government also featured a professional iconoclast who strode around Whitehall in ostentatiously casual clothes, demanding that the British state undergo drastic surgery. Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy, left Downing Street after two years, frustrated at his lack of progress. He now makes a living defending Donald Trump on Fox News.
Yet the radical prime ministerial aide whom Cummings most interestingly resembles is a less remembered but more influential figure. John Hoskyns was head of the Downing Street policy unit during the formative years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Before then, he was a crucial adviser to her in opposition. He identified the issue – reducing the power of unions – that got her elected. And he did much to create her style of government: confrontational, but also cannily step-by-step.
Hoskyns died in 2014. But Cummings remains an admirer. In 2015 he wrote: “The best book I have read by someone who has worked in No 10 … is John Hoskyns’ [memoir] Just In Time. Extremely unusually for someone in a senior position in No 10, Hoskyns both had an intellectual understanding of complex systems and was a successful manager.” Understanding Hoskyns – his mindset, political methods and impact – is a way of understanding Cummings, and what he wants to do to Whitehall and the country.
Yet there are also differences between the two men, and their political trajectories. These show us how much Conservatism and British politics have changed, and in some ways degenerated, since Thatcherism’s early days.
Like Cummings, Hoskyns was a restless, hugely self-confident autodidact who believed that modern technology and management systems were the way to wake up sleepy old Britain. Unlike Cummings, he had arrived at this conclusion through experience as much as reading. Hoskyns didn’t get involved in politics until middle age, first serving as an army officer and then founding one of Britain’s earliest successful computer companies. In 1974 he distilled his state-of-the-nation thoughts into a diagram of the entire economy, showing its troubled workings as a tangled flow chart. When the Labour government of the day wasn’t interested in his insights or solutions, he took them to the Conservatives.
Thatcher, like Boris Johnson, was a new leader in need of ideas. Hoskyns increased his appeal by being an unusually charming policy wonk. A handsome man in a well-cut suit – the sort of man Thatcher liked – he spoke and wrote in clipped sentences that switched smoothly between emollience and lethal candour. He described one of his many moderate Tory enemies, the employment minister Jim Prior, as both “friendly and reasonable” and “terribly fickle”.
It’s hard to imagine Cummings being so judicious. In today’s more blunt, less gentlemanly political culture, his open contempt for most politicians, civil servants and journalists hasn’t hurt him. At least, not so far. When and if he next makes a big blunder, his multiplying enemies may pounce more decisively than they did after his Durham lockdown trip.
Like Cummings, Hoskyns relished the battles of his first year in Downing Street. “You’d say to people, ‘We’re going to fight ’til we die to save this bloody country!’” he told me in 2011. But sometimes he was disappointed by the gap between his grand schemes and the reality of governing. Working with civil servants, he claimed, was “like pushing on a piece of string”.
Swings between optimism and pessimism also seem to affect Cummings. In January he wrote excitedly on his blog about being part of “a new government with a significant majority and little need to worry about short-term unpopularity”. Yet in the same post he described “profound problems” in “how the British state makes decisions”.
Creating melodrama is a necessary skill for a Downing Street radical. Unless you can sometimes warn convincingly that a great governing project is in jeopardy, sympathisers in the media, Westminster and Whitehall won’t rally round it. But the process can become wearying. In 1981, at a low point in the Thatcher government’s popularity and performance, Hoskyns sent her a memo titled Your Political Survival. “You lack management competence,” he wrote. “You … are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.” It’s easy to imagine Cummings writing the same to Johnson.
Thatcher didn’t sack Hoskyns – he was too valuable – but their relationship never quite recovered. The following year, he resigned. She begged him to stay, offering him an even bigger Downing Street role, but he was convinced he had shaken up Whitehall as much as he could. He went back to the business world, from where he made sporadic political interventions, often speeches against the EU.
Will something similar happen with Cummings? His approach to reforming government seems more hurried and haphazard than Hoskyns’ – perhaps a sign of a more impatient age. But he also has more power, and that may keep him in Downing Street longer.
Yet his dominance is really a sign of current Conservatism’s underlying weakness. The Johnson government, unlike Thatcher’s, doesn’t contain many able politicians or fresh thinkers. Conservatism is no longer the rising movement it was in the 80s.
At some point, the irresistible force of Cummings will meet an immovable object: the widespread scepticism, among voters as much as civil servants, that Britain needs yet more disruptive rightwing government. There may be fireworks, or the frustration of his plans may be quieter. But it’s unlikely he’ll leave Downing Street a contented man.
• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
