Whether you like him or loathe him Dominic Cummings is an interesting character to say the least. Here we have a man who has been at the heart of government, believes that Britain is better off out of the European Union but who has seen and is prepared to speak about, many of the abject systems failures in the way that we are governed.

In a recent post on Mr Cummings Substack blog, he took aim at the Boris Johnson government and dished out some very serious criticism of the way that it is operating. In a piece entitled ‘The fish rots from the head’, Mr Cummings painted a picture of Boris Johnson as a man not in control of his own government, who cannot reform Whitehall nor build effective relationships in government. Mr Cummings also claims that Boris Johnson ‘does not understand how his own power in Whitehall works and cannot do the job and cannot trust anyone else to do much of his job for him.’ Mr Cummings also touched on a matter that has concerned many Britons who are interested in politics and that is the influence, the unelected and unaccountable influence that is, of the new Mrs Johnson, Carrie. Mr Cummings seems to think that she has had a malign influence on relationships in government and blamed her for ‘sabotaging’ various government plans. Mr Cummings said ‘last year his girlfriend persuaded him to sabotage his own government by ignoring advice then destroying his own operation, this year she’s persuaded him to sabotage himself further by destroying relations with his Chancellor.’.

All in all Mr Cummings paints a worrying picture of what has been happening inside Britain’s government with Mrs Johnson having undue influence over a weak Prime Minister who is unable to create a ‘government that controls the government’. If Mr Cummings is to be believed then what we have at the heart of government is not a well oiled administrative and political machine but instead utter chaos where the politicians who should be in charge are not and instead we are governed by a man who is not strong enough to stamp his view on Whitehall.

Mr Cummings predicts that Boris Johnson’s decision to increase National Insurance rates in order to pay for social care for the elderly is going to be a vote loser. Although I’m going to do a more fuller article about this plan, at this point I will merely say that Mr Cummings is probably correct here. It’s going to be a disaster and will be seen as an unnecessary extra imposition on employers and also as grossly unfair as the burden will fall on the low paid who pay NI but not affect those who are wealthy and get most of their income from investments or other sources.

In normal times where there are a governing and opposition party that are both equally trusted by the electorate to run the country and not run it into the ground, funding Britain’s admittedly lamentable social care system might have been done via cutting waste rather than raising taxes. The trouble is Britain doesn’t have a credible opposition party in the form of Labour and its leader Sir Keir Starmer. Therefore Boris Johnson can get away with an incredibly bad decision knowing that they face little current threat from a Labour Party that nobody in their right mind would trust to govern Britain.