Why Brexit, Dom? Theory 2: you’re a communist
One explanation for Dominic Cummings’ support for Brexit suggests he knew exactly how much damage it would do – and that damaging the UK was the whole point
Why Brexit, Dom? Theory 1: you’re a Nazi
Now that we’re fairly sure your backing of Brexit didn’t come from a far-right place, let’s examine the opposite possibility.
The virtue of this theory is that it’s one of the few that credits you with some intelligence, since it suggests you knew exactly how much damage leaving the EU would do to the UK … and that damaging the UK was the whole point, because you are working for its enemies. (When I say communist, I don’t, of course, mean communist in the sense of believing in shared ownership of the means of production, but in the sense of an ally of the successors of the Soviet Union.)
The drawback is that it sounds silly.
It is, not, however, entirely without basis, so in the interests of thoroughness, let’s go over the evidence that you’re a traitor and a spy.
First, as we’ve established, “patriot” likely isn’t the first word we’d see on your Grindr profile. Unlike Farage and co, you’ve never falsely bragged about how much you love your country, and to be fair to you, your country’s given you few reasons to love it. Bullied at school, ignored at university, a virgin until some time after your child’s third birthday … One of your favourite ways to boost your maverick mythos is to boast how little you care that people don’t like you. Of course, the only people who ever say that are people who’ve never been liked.
You’ve made clear on countless occasions the depth of the contempt in which you hold your fellow Britons, dumbing your referendum campaign down to breast-beating, big numbers and dog whistles, slagging off the “biased liberal media”, universities, civil servants, judges and experts of all stripes, and even tearing a strip off your nominal allies, calling Boris Johnson “mad” and “a joke”, David Davis “thick as mince”, the European Research Group “useful idiots” and “a tumour that needs to be excised”, and Tory ministers “useful fuckpigs” and “morons”.
Can we really expect someone to act in the best interests of their country when they despise most of its inhabitants?
Second, Oxford and Cambridge universities have famously been fertile espionage recruiting grounds for generations. MI5 and MI6 still yoink a disproportionate number of their spooks from the quads – you and I both know people who had the tap on the shoulder – and the baddies got David Floyd, Jenifer Hart, Bernard Floud, Philby, Maclean and co, and Lord knows how many more whose files aren’t declassified yet.
Third, even though your undergraduate degree was in history, you spent much of your time learning Russian on the side. When I asked you why, you said “for fun”. One of your tutors there was Norman Stone, a radical thinker and an eminently blackmailable violent alcoholic womaniser who was so enamoured with Britain that he spent his twilight years in Turkey.
Fourth, immediately after graduating, you left the UK for an adventure on the balmy shores of … Samara, in south-western Russia, where you supposedly spent three years trying and failing to set up an airline, but supporting evidence for this beyond your own testimony is hard to come by. And what did you do the moment you came home? Throw yourself into the campaign to keep the UK out of the euro – the precursor, in terms of personnel, world-view and methods, to the Brexit campaign.
Fifth, your campaigning methods – and by that I mean the logical fallacies you like to use in your “arguments”: ad hominem, tu quoque, straw men, appeals to emotion, hyperbole, red herrings – are all lifted straight from the Kremlin playbook. If you do curl out a response these posts, I will be exceedingly surprised if it contains anything more than whataboutery and squeals of “liberal bias”.
And sixth, you could barely insert a sheet of tracing paper between your views and Vladimir Putin’s on a range of issues. You’re in complete alignment on the “menace” posed by the EU, the failures of liberalism, and the need for the west to abandon Ukraine. Like your programmer, Norman Stone, you have a soft spot in that leathery carapace for strong, charismatic and ruthless leaders: Sun Tzu, Pericles, Bismarck, Oppenheimer, Steve Jobs. And if you’ve ever said a kind word about NATO, I can’t find it.
When I put most of this to you on Twitter in 2017, you replied, “Don’t be ridiculous.” That’s settled, then!
I grant you, though, that there are counterarguments, the most obvious of which is the timing.
At the height of your Slavic infatuation, glasnost and perestroika were still in full swing. Russia was, if not an ally of the west, safely out of enemy territory. Surely Red Square wouldn’t have been recruiting at a time of reform, reconciliation and hope?
Well. While the immediate threat of thermonuclear armageddon receded in the 90s, for our respective intelligence agencies, the cold war never ended. And when you returned to the UK with your tail between your legs, Putin, who had already set his mind on restoring Russia to its post-WW2 glory days, was only a year away from becoming head of the FSB.
There remains the question of motive. Spies tend to be wooed in three ways: beliefs, bribery and blackmail. We can instantly discount the idea that you palled up with Putin for ideological reasons, since Putin doesn’t have an ideology, unless you count staying in power for as long as possible.
I’m not sure quite how wealthy you are, although that Islington town house is a bit fancy for a drifting fixer and a rentabollocks Spectator hack. But it bears mentioning in passing that Russia has long been famous for its “Kompromat hotels”, where people the Kremlin wanted to control or bring down were enticed into participating in depraved acts, and subsequently shown the tapes.
The main hillock upon which this theory stumbles is that if you were a Russian asset, surely, surely, the UK’s vaunted intelligence services would have raised a flag at some point. This is not, of course, necessarily the case; MIs 5 and 6 are far from infallible and have been compromised more than once. Moreover, while civil servants and senior politicians are thoroughly vetted, Spads (advisers, for those not in the know) such as yourself are subject to much less rigorous background checks.
Still. My faith in HMSS – and my reluctance to believe that I lived adjacent to a John Le Carre villain for a year – are sufficient to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Makes you think, though.
Next time: FOR BRITAIN!