Britain | Bagehot

Cummings v the blob

The prime minister’s special adviser faces a tough adversary

FOR A MAN widely regarded as a cross between Machiavelli and Rasputin, Dominic Cummings has lost a lot of battles lately. The prime minister’s special adviser opposed both Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s 5G networks and the HS2 rail network (which he labelled “a disaster zone”). Boris Johnson has given the green light to the first and is shortly expected to approve the second. Mr Cummings’s plan to cut the size of the cabinet and create a super-department of business has been ditched. So have his schemes to turn Downing Street into a NASA-style mission-control centre and to ship Conservative Party headquarters to the north of the country.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Cummings v the blob”

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