World News – GB – Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief aide, resigns

The life expectancy of Downing Street visions is short. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s mentor, who was walking around his boss’s office barefoot, resigned in March 2012, after 22 months of clashing with his colleagues. Nick Timothy, one of Theresa May’s Chief of Staff, whose slick beard and racy demeanor give him a passing resemblance to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has resigned after 11 months after a failed general election campaign. Now Dominic Cummings, perhaps the most famous of the trio, is on his way out, too. Boris Johnson’s decision to appoint him as his senior aide and the driving force of his administration in the summer of 2019 shocked the Conservative Party, and has stirred controversy ever since..

Mr Cummings told the BBC on 12 November that he intends to leave his post by the end of this year.. Pictures of him leaving Number 10 the next day carrying a large cardboard box with reports of him leaving Forever.. Lee Caine, Mr. Johnson’s communications chief and close ally of Mr. Cummings, who resigned two days ago after a brief power struggle, has also passed.

Mr. Cummings became better known than most of Mr. Johnson’s cabinet ministers, and arguably the most talented and aggressive political militant of his generation in Britain.. After advising then Secretary of Education Michael Gove in the Cameron administration, he pioneered the Brexit campaign, which won Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union.. He changed the arrogant issue of British skepticism toward the European Union by combining Silicon Valley rhetoric with anti-immigration populist rhetoric.. Cummings believed that Britain could become a world leader in science and research, backed by massive state-funded investment in high-stakes projects, bureaucracy and immigration loosening aimed at attracting prominent mathematicians and engineers. . However, his campaigns also warned Britain that staying in the European Union would mean a wave of immigration from Turkey, and threaten the National Health Service dear to the British.. .

His exit does not increase the likelihood that Mr Johnson will seek an agreement with the European Union. The negotiations enter their final weeks before the end of the British « transition » period at the end of the year. Cummings was no tougher than the rest of Johnson’s constituency and the bulk of the Conservative Parliament. However, his exit and that of Mr. Kabil may indicate a shift in tone, and a more consensual approach to Parliament and the media.. Johnson, keen to form a good relationship with President-elect Joe Biden, wants Britain to be known abroad for its tackling climate change rather than Brexit. .

Like his predecessors, Cummings would not be around to lead the revolution he sought. Cummings saw leaving the European Union as a way to exploit new regulatory freedoms and strip what he saw as the red tape that undermines growth. So far, the government has provided little indication of what this strategy might look like in practice, and Cummings is bypassing the opportunity to pull the cranes.. Although a group of senior officials had been left under Johnson’s term, little was achieved by the structural and institutional reforms of the civil service envisioned by Cummings.. Although many senior officers denounced anti-newspaper briefings, they also agreed with his hope to make the civil service better at managing projects and manipulating data, so that it would be less bureaucratic and less disrupted by hiring disruption.. .

Mr. Cummings’ tenure at Downing Street coincided with a period of chaos and turns of the kind that mocked Mr. Cameron and Mrs. May.. He became a notorious figure among the British after he broke lockdown rules in the spring, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. Labor has seized on the quarrel in recent days as evidence of a government without a rudder, and the exit of electoral leave staff risks leaving the Johnson administration more ambiguous in its course as it faces the dual challenge of COVID-19 and Brexit. Cummings once noted of the Cameron government that many imagined Downing Street to be like James Bond’s den, with a door behind a quiet center of control, « where there are ninjas who already know what they’re doing. ». But he said, « There is no ninja. There is no door.

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Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, 10 Downing Street, Tory, Brexit