A year after his forced departure from Downing Street, a box of files under his arm and looking bad, Dominic Cummings, the former right-hand man of Boris Johnson, is enjoying his revenge. For the conductor of the Brexit referendum campaign, the moment is even delicious. If the Conservative Party does finally get rid of the man who gave them an outright majority in December 2019, in the last general election, Cummings will hope all eyes will turn to him, ‘Boris-killer’. Because that’s how he wants to be known.
For more than a year, the former damned soul of Boris Johnson has done everything to hasten the fall of his former boss. He pours out all kinds of revelations, sharing confidential e-mails and documents – and even his private WhatsApp with “BoJo”, when his office faced that of the Prime Minister. At the time, no one could access Boris Johnson without his approval. His accusations are many, but his favorites against Johnson boil down to “incompetence” and “immorality”.
Last May, while testifying before a parliamentary committee during the public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic, Cummings said: “The government’s pandemic plan? Half disastrous, half non-existent.” He knows something about it, he was there. It shows texts from the Prime Minister accusing his Minister of Health, Matt Hancock, of being “a good for nothing”, and denounces the scandal of juicy medical contracts awarded to people close to the government. He continues the statements against Boris Johnson, like this one, to the BBC: “We just put him there because we needed him to solve a problem, not because he was the right person to govern the country. ”
Boris Johnson’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, on May 4, 2021, in London.
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The scandal of drunken parties in Downing Street in violation of confinement rules allows him to intensify his attacks. Distilling his venom on Twitter and on his blog (to which he charges 12 euros per month for access), Cummings reveals in dribs and drabs the details of evenings not yet known to the media. On December 9, he warned journalists: “Beware of the trap. There was no party on November 27 […]. Focus instead on November 13, the Prime Minister had a party in his apartments.” A special kind of Tom Thumb, Cummings scatters his clues like poison.
On January 18, the former adviser decides to strike a blow: “Boris Johnson is lying when he says he believed that the evening of May 20, 2020 was a work meeting.” Cummings claims to have warned Johnson that he was breaking the rules, even asking him to cancel the evening. But Johnson would have ignored it. “I am ready to testify under oath, he adds. I have many witnesses.” Since then, he has been heard by Sue Gray, the senior civil servant responsible for writing a report on these famous working evenings in Downing Street during the various confinements of the country. And he warned, in the form of a threat: “There are many photographs of these evenings which have not yet leaked.”
For British political scientists like Peter Walker, “just because Cummings wants Johnson down doesn’t mean he’s not telling the truth.” Here we have, he says, “two notoriously devious individuals engaged in a race for the truth.” Still, on the question of these drunken evenings “everything that Cummings has said and revealed has, so far, been corroborated by the facts.”
“For the love of God, go!”
A knowledge of the classics and the theater is always useful for observers of British political life. It is also with a historic quote that David Davis, former ally and Brexit minister of Boris Johnson, called on the Prime Minister to resign, declaring in the middle of the House of Commons “For the love of God, leave!”. He was referring to the injunction made by Oliver Cromwell to corrupt parliamentarians in 1653, a formula repeated in 1940 against Neville Chamberlain, resigning the next day to make way for Winston Churchill.
In England, the theater pervades everything, from human and social relations to political life and its rituals, alternately dramatic, comical, epic, comic or tragic. The descent into hell of Boris Johnson, the first “queen’s jester” in the contemporary history of the kingdom, can indeed be told theatrically. It is enough to study the configuration of the House of Commons to take the measure of this scene where the great hours of the nation are played out. The cramped and rectangular space, where 650 elected officials huddle together on uncomfortable benches facing each other, encourages confrontation. Here, we are far from the airy hemicycles of our republics. The din that reigns in the Commons, punctuated by Order ! from Speaker and traditional boos and cheers from each side, heightens the dramatic tension a little more. As for the silence which sometimes falls suddenly, it adds its touch of solemnity.
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For academic Kate Maltby, a specialist in Elizabethan theatre, “we are now in the midst of revenge tragedy“, this dramatic genre of the end of the Elizabethan era and the beginning of the Jacobean era. According to her, the Cummings-Johnson duel respects all the springs. “The vigilante, isolated and vulnerable, achieves heroic greatness by becoming the instrument of revenge.” But how does it usually end? “With everyone lying on stage in pools of blood!, answers the academic in a burst of laughter. It should not be forgotten that in the revenge tragedies everyone is corrupt, and no one can hope to emerge unscathed from a revenge scheme. Your weaknesses always end up undoing you…”
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