Having watched the Dominic Cummings interview (or grilling) by Laura Kuenssberg last night, I have found the commentary on it this morning curiously disappointing. Of course, it is easy, and no doubt tempting, to dismiss him as a swivel-eyed lunatic, now consumed by his own self-deluding arrogance and narcissism. But this is someone who worked as the right-hand man and fixer for Michael Gove over a long period of time, was, by all accounts, the intellectual architect and manager of Brexit, and was hired and given extraordinary powers by Boris Johnson when he became Prime Minister. So, it is surely worth treating his analysis seriously, not least because he is interested in political ideas, and, unusually for a political activist, was successful in implementing what he wanted to happen. And it seemed to me that it is worth giving his own analysis of events some credence: that the British political system is so soft and torpid that it is open to a form of entryism by a small group of ideologically motivated fanatics with their own agenda and in which it proved possible for them to manipulate and co-opt an intellectually slovenly, but personally ambitious proto-Prime Minister for their own purposes. Hence Brexit. I don’t really see anything to dispute in this analysis.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
It was indeed interesting. But what I found most depressing was the interviewer’s American radio tactics: 1) not actually listening to what he was saying, 2) all the fake indignation on behalf of supposedly maligned “elected officials”, 3) the persistent cant that always implies the prevailing system – the one whose dysfunctions were actually under discussion – is somehow ideal…not to mention those po-faced “that’s a VERY serious accusation”s… all the while milking every word. So much of the BBC has dwindled into an insecure, controversy-chasing mess.
Dear Cyndy, I thought she was pretty good actually, but, as you say, focusing on fake shock, not real analysis and, in an odd way, not really treating him seriously which is presumably the Downing Street agenda, of which she is a habitual, institutionalised proponent – well, it’s her job.