Dominic Cummings: Who’s Boris Johnson’s senior adviser?

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Dominic Cummings: Who’s Boris Johnson’s senior adviser?

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Dominic CummingsPicture copyright
Yui Mok/PA Wire

Dominic Cummings has made a profession out of defying typical knowledge and making an attempt to upset the established order.

Boris Johnson’s closest political adviser has been in and across the higher reaches of presidency and the Conservative Occasion for practically 20 years however made his title because the mastermind of the profitable 2016 Vote Go away marketing campaign to take Britain out of the European Union.

It was Mr Cummings who got here up with the marketing campaign’s “take again management” slogan and spent most of its funds on knowledge evaluation and focused social media adverts.

He has by no means been a member of the Conservative Occasion and has little time for what he sees as a number of the time-servers and publicity addicts that populate the Commons benches.

He has a equally dismissive angle to the media or a minimum of these whose job it’s to “doorstep” individuals outdoors their houses. In latest weeks, he has delighted in giving surreal solutions to their earnest questions.

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Media captionCummings: “We’d like PJ Masks on the job”

A longstanding Eurosceptic who minimize his campaigning tooth as a director of the anti-euro Enterprise for Sterling group, Mr Cummings’s different ardour is altering the best way authorities operates.

He grabbed headlines final month when he posted an advert on his personal blog for “weirdos and misfits with odd abilities” to work in authorities.

The profession civil servants and “public faculty bluffers” in Whitehall are singularly unwell geared up to take choices about complicated points, he has argued at nice size on his weblog.

As a substitute, he believes, mathematicians and knowledge scientists must be given a far greater function – and he has made an effort to coach himself in these fields.

It has been reported his WhatsApp profile lists his priorities as “Get Brexit Carried out, then Arpa”.

It is a reference to the Superior Analysis Tasks Company set by the US in 1958 that led to the creation of Silicon Valley.

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AFP

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The Vote Go away bus was one in all its most notable marketing campaign ways

Mr Cummings is a local of Durham, within the north-east of England. His father, Robert, was an oil rig engineer and his mom, Morag, a instructor and behavioural specialist.

He went to a state main faculty and was then privately educated at Durham Faculty. He graduated from Oxford College with a first-class diploma in fashionable historical past and spent a while in Russia, the place he was concerned with an unwell fated try to launch an airline, amongst different tasks.

After a stint as marketing campaign director for Enterprise for Sterling, he spent eight months as chief technique adviser to then Conservative chief Iain Duncan Smith.

He performed a key function within the 2004 marketing campaign in opposition to an elected regional meeting in his native North East.

In what turned out to be a dry run for the Brexit marketing campaign, the North East Says No crew received the referendum with a mixture of eye-catching stunts – together with an inflatable white elephant – and snappy slogans that tapped into the rising anti-politics temper among the many public.

He’s then stated to have retreated to his father’s farm, in County Durham, the place he spent his time studying science and historical past books in an effort to realize a greater understanding of the world.

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Channel 4/Home Productions

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Benedict Cumberbatch was broadly praised for his portrayal of Dominic Cummings in Brexit: The Uncivil Conflict

He re-emerged in 2007 as a particular adviser to then schooling secretary Michael Gove, who turned out to be one thing of a kindred spirit. The pair would rail in opposition to what they referred to as “the blob” – the casual alliance of senior civil servants and academics’ unions that sought, in his opinion, to frustrate his makes an attempt at reform.

He left of his personal accord to arrange a free faculty, having rubbed a variety of individuals within the ministry and within the Conservative Occasion up the flawed manner.

He as soon as described Brexit Secretary David Davis as “thick as mince” and as “lazy as a toad” and so irritated David Cameron the previous prime minister referred to as him a “profession psychopath”.

His appointment as head of the Vote Go away marketing campaign – dramatised final yr in Channel Four drama Brexit; The Uncivil Conflict – was seen as a danger value taking by these placing the marketing campaign collectively however he left a controversial legacy.

Vote Go away was discovered to have damaged electoral legislation over spending limits by the Electoral Fee and Mr Cummings was held…



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