And … relax. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Super Dom! At a time of heightened worries about national security, who better than Dominic Cummings to shine a light on the murky world of spying?
The man who turned a drive to Barnard Castle into an advert for SpecSavers. The man who gave us Brexit. Which one of us didn’t vote for a 4% hit to GDP? The man who gave us Boris Johnson. Truly, Dom has enriched us all over the past 10 years.
Here’s what Dom knows about Dom. Not to put too fine a point on it, Dom knows that Dom is a genius. The cleverest man in every room in which he finds himself. Though some might argue he should try finding some other rooms. He is the master of the double-double bluff. The man with the infallible strategy for winning at Traitors. Come the evening’s roundtable, vote for yourself to be banished. That’s the last thing anyone would expect a Traitor to do. Eat your hearts out Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr. Mere amateurs.
So when Dom speaks, it falls on all of us to listen. Even if he has yet to take personal responsibility for anything he has done. And after giving an interview to the Times on all things Chinese early in the week, Cummings has followed this up by appearing on Robert Peston’s Talking Politics podcast. Here he goes into greater detail of lapses in national security.
You can’t help but appreciate the irony in this. Because during the Brexit years and his time as chief aide to Boris, there was no one more leaky than Dom. At times he would virtually simulcast private meetings in real time to his trusted sources. Almost as if he was dictating the news agenda for the coming week. Still, you can’t argue that he doesn’t know whereof he speaks, I suppose. And better that one sinner repenteth, and all that.
We begin in a bunker deep below Downing Street early in 2020. Dom is sprawled in a chair wearing his filthy trackie bottoms while Boris is on to his fourth cheese sandwich of the morning. An ashen faced cabinet secretary walks in with some terrifying news. He has just discovered that the networks used by the British security services to send top secret information around the world have, for the past few years, been operated by the Chinese-owned Global Switch. Every piece of intelligence we have sent is potentially compromised.
Dom admits to being flabbergasted. Boris is so astonished he helps himself to yet another cheese sandwich and decides to do … absolutely nothing. For Dom this isn’t just another sign of Johnson’s inherent laziness. It’s a sign that Johnson and the whole of government have become unwitting spies for the Chinese. As must be Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. They are all hopelessly compromised. Because they have done nothing to change the system by which intelligence is transmitted.
At this point, you can’t help but wonder why Dom decided to keep all this to himself for the last five years. He has been privy to information he believes affects national security but has chosen to allow the Chinese to potentially gobble up all our secrets. We have been compromised for years but Dom kept stumm. Had it slipped his mind? Perhaps it’s a double-double-double bluff and Dom has also been working for the Chinese all along. Having spent years leaking secrets, he chose to keep to himself the one thing that could have protected the country. For the first time in his life, he could have done us all a favour. But no. I guess he’s too much of a genius for that.
Or could it be that this was all a fever dream? Dom has seldom passed up an opportunity to put himself centre stage of a conspiracy theory of his own making. Let’s think this through. It took MI5 and MI6 several years to realise that Global Switch was owned by the Chinese. Hmm. I’m not sure it would have taken the intelligence services that long to discover information that was readily available to everyone. Perhaps they had decided it was a risk worth taking. After all it wasn’t as if our embassies were talking to one another on open networks. Everything they were sending was encrypted. Just because the Chinese potentially had access to our messages it didn’t follow they could decipher them.
Next we were deep into another bunker. The one due to be built under the Chinese mega-embassy. A bunker so deep it could interfere with the London tube network. Dom wanted us to know that the Chinese were planning to spy on us even more than they already were. He said this as if it were in some way surprising rather than a statement of the obvious. We’ve known that for years. And we are also spying on them. It’s what countries that don’t fully trust one another do. Come to think of it we are probably also keeping tabs on the French and the Americans.
Last, Dom had some unique insights into the recently collapsed Chinese spy trial. Dom is of the view that the prime minister regularly nobbles the director of public prosecutions and the only trials that go ahead are the ones the government has okayed. So for this case to have been dropped was a sure sign of interference. Dom personally knew everyone involved and Starmer was definitely a China stooge. Just like every other prime minister before him. The UK was basically an overseas province of Beijing.
Spare a thought for Keir at this point. Only on Thursday, he was accused of being a China stooge by Tory MPs because he had failed to nobble the DPP. He can’t win. Yet another double-double-double-double bluff. One that only Dom has the genius to see. It was time for him to slip back into the shadows. One day he would rise again. To be a light in an increasingly murky world. Let’s just hope he’s tested his eyesight.
