Boris Johnson’s ex chief of staff is plotting a startup political party to take on the Conservatives in the election after next.
Dominic Cummings has said it is “time to build a startup” to “replace the rotten Tories and win in 2028”.
But a Tory critic dismissed the plan, telling The Times it was “yet more mad ramblings from a narcissistic egomaniac who is thankfully becoming increasingly irrelevant”.
Mr Cummings, who was Mr Johnson’s most senior advisor, said Rishi Sunak is the hardest-working MP with the highest IQ, but has “no grip of power, no governing plan, no message and no political strategy worth spit”.
Writing for subscribers to his blog, Mr Cummings said he is already receiving messages from MPs and donors asking how to rebuild the party.
“This is the time to start building the replacement so that from 2200 on election night in October-December 2024 the old Party is buried and a new set of people with new ideas start talking to the country and can take over in 2028 and give voters the sort of government they want and deserve,” Mr Cummings said.
His agenda is similar to the agenda he wanted to pursue in Downing Street with Mr Johnson, being “tougher” on crime, security and immigration and pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
It would also freeze or cut taxes for working people, reduce the size of the state and close tax loopholes which benefit the wealthy.
Even in that short list, he’s contradicted himself. A state that’s ‘“tougher” on crime’ needs more police, more judges and more prison guards. It needs more equipment, more cells and more office space. It needs more support staff and office staff to help all of that actually work. It cannot also be a smaller state, unless you radically shrink other areas of the state.
I mean, it totally can be a smaller state and do that. The spending that these people want more of are things like law enforcement and defence - which are big budgets in £ terms, but do not account for particularly large %s of public spending relative to things like health and social care, education, pensions and benefits, etc.
These people believe they can shrink the state dramatically whilst still spending a lot more on their pet issues. When you look at the size of the various budgets, they’re not wrong factually. So I’d focus your fire on the ways in which they’re wrong morally and philosophically.