This long read piece in the New Statesman tells one almost more than one needs to know about Dominic Cummings and his intellectual formation. Two things stand out: that at Oxford, he was a pupil of Norman Stone, who was a clever, radical Tory anarchist, who was also a well-known drunk, which could perhaps help to explain Cummings’ tendency to wander round the Commons with a glass in his hand and always arrive at work so late and so disheveled. The second thing is the amount of time he spent in Russia in the mid-1990s, where he will have witnessed at first hand and perhaps enjoyed the breakdown of civil society and the way it could benefit a small number of oligarchs who later helped to bankroll his Vote Leave campaign. Clever, undoubtedly, but corrupt as well.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/09/dominic-cummings-machiavel-downing-street
This makes very depressing reading. I hadn’t realised that Gove, by some way the most able man in the Cabinet, and Cummings were so close.
Or that Cummings was so devious and shrewd. Stupid of me.
This writer agrees with you.
https://theconversation.com/pathological-power-the-danger-of-governments-led-by-narcissists-and-psychopaths-123118?utm_medium=ampfacebook&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0AHlpQFEqzlkjYVLTrjcsIXaCs_sZ8e2q6_MRVQMQa0R7nc-Lr7OZR7-0