How did you enjoy Thursday night’s Downing Street address by Prime Minister Smirky McSmirkface? Boris Johnson began by describing his morning: “I was at the nuclear fusion labs in Culham.” Please say a freak accident befell you there, causing you to emerge, if not with superpowers, then at least as tenuously adequate.
Alas not. Johnson’s tight-framed, air-jabbing, fist-banging, weirdly emphasised delivery is still like that of a Bloomberg pundit trying to make the currency markets sound scandalously interesting. Soon, he won’t have to.
But it was the climax of his speech that caught the attention, as the PM stared right down the lens and declared: “I want this country to be … the greatest place to bring up your kids.” The greatest place to do what, sorry? “The greatest place to bring up your kids.” OK babe – but you have to do it too.
I mean … I keep reading about the galaxy brains Johnson’s surrounded himself with – and we’ll come to the galaxiest of them all in due course. But can it honestly be that not one of them thought to cross out this particular line, on the basis that not only will the prime minister not even say how many kids he has, but he doesn’t bring at least one of them up?
Alastair Campbell famously protected Tony Blair from himself by interrupting an interviewer’s question about faith with the words: “We don’t do God.” In Johnson’s inner circle, you would think that there might be someone who could take a look at his speeches before they’re read out, and go, “Yeah, we don’t do kids, because it draws attention to the prime minister’s serial inability either to wear a condom or to take full responsibility for not.”
And so to the man whose job title is apparently assistant to the prime minister, but who is currently getting pre-title billing. Poor Johnson. Imagine waiting your whole life for it, and then not even being the antihero of your own administration, let alone the person in it people thought was the cleverest. Whatever happened to Baby Boris? He used to be such a thing.
Still, the spotlight is fickle. This week it was mostly shining on Dominic Cummings, a sort of skinny Cartman who really wants you to know he’s got the highest score on Call of Duty: SW1. Every photo of Cummings going into Downing Street sees him shiftily meeting the camera’s gaze with the same defensive sneer you’d see on the proprietor of a holiday caravan park who has just been released on police bail after a fatal gas explosion thought to have been caused by poor maintenance. Britain really is the land of crap Rasputins, each one dragging us one step further back towards the primordial soup, like some grim Descent of Man. Hilton, Timothy, Cummings … What’s the next term in this sequence? Milne? Chuckle? Sutcliffe? It could go one of several ways.
Naturally, Dominic regards himself as rather better than that. To get some idea of the level of pretension we’re dealing with, his former Twitter handle (for the account he admitted to) was @OdysseanProject. His bio? “Physicist Gell-Mann said we need an Odyssean education.”
Cummings still has his blog, where he posts 20,000-word … essays, is it? His is a writing style I call Briar Rose, on account of the requirement to take your sword and hack your way through the densest thicket of impenetrable prose this side of a Jordan Peterson integrated theory of his mother. A few thousand words into one of Dominic’s blogs, it is very easy to become disheartened. You find yourself asking: is there an incredibly hot princess of meaning lying asleep in the middle of all these branches of history, or am I basically just doing some lazy castle-owner’s gardening for free?
Yet his attempts to cast himself as Whitehall’s Minotaur have been bizarrely successful. Cummings appears to have been specifically engineered to appeal to that particular media demographic which reckons British politics is just like Westeros. Guys, just because you ejaculate during the title sequence of both Game of Thrones and Politics Live, doesn’t mean they’re the same.
This week, a lot of people went nuts over a brief clip of Cummings smirkingly getting into a car saying things like: “I don’t think I’m arrogant. I don’t know much.” Pretty sure we’ve heard that one before, albeit in a thick Portuguese accent. “Please don’t call me arrogant, because what I’m saying is true. I think I am a Special One.”
Maybe that’s why Dominic is putting Boris in the shade. People always used to say José Mourinho was such a genius for protecting his star players by acting like a maniac himself. I can’t remember whether we were still supposed to think it by the time Mourinho was gouging a rival coach’s eye, or whether by that stage it was OK to conclude that Mourinho was simply a complete … but no. It’s too simple. It must be “mind games”.
Thus, Cummings is not a rejected 1990s David Mamet character, but a master strategist who schedules 7.55am meetings. This feels like an even more extreme version of the bit in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when Maggie Smith’s teacher is summoned to the headmistress’s office at 4.15, and sniffs: “Not four, not 4.30, but 4.15. Hm. She thinks to intimidate me by use of quarter hours?” No doubt Cummings would say that the no-five-minutes-spared look is an important part of his messaging. And the message many of us are getting is: he’s a prick. Physicist Gell-Mann said they needed a supercomputer down at Los Alamos that was capable of calculating how much of a prick he is, but they couldn’t even build one, because something something systems and red teams, something something Darpa and the Santa Fe Institute.
In what would surely be a historic instance of bathos, then, it seems all this high-blown theory might be leading to a general election on 1 November, hours after we have left the EU automatically, but hours before the chaos of no deal would properly have kicked in. Michael Gove has even floated the idea of 1 November being a bank holiday. You can’t have turmoil on the financial markets if the banks are shut, amirite?
So yes, let’s be hugely encouraged that Johnson’s team is treating the general election at the most critical moment in the UK’s postwar history like a bank heist, where the window of opportunity to steal this thing will be incredibly small. Instead of having to work in the two minutes when the security cameras are pointing the other way, and the security guards are changing over or passing that one blind spot on the ground level, the masterminds need to pull off this job just after Britain has left the EU, but just before the collective bed begins to get shat.
The main thing is to picture Cummings as the T-shirted Danny Ocean of the left-behind, telling his crew: “I don’t need a sensible Brexit, or a safe Brexit, or even a medicines-first Brexit. I just need 15 perfect hours on polling day. Après that, le déluge.”
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
