One of Westminster’s most controversial figures is making every possible attempt to get back to the centre of British politics, POLITICO reports.
Former Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings convened focus groups to gauge public opinion on a potential new anti-establishment party.
It marks a ramping up of the top Brexit campaigner’s plotting for what he’s called a “credibly anti-insider” party to “replace the Tories.”
Focus groups are already running across the UK as he considers creating a new right-wing party if the Conservatives are defeated in the general election.
Cummings – the architect of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, who later advised Johnson before spectacularly falling out with him – has often spoken of creating a new populist party since being ousted from 10 Downing Street in 2020.
In August 2023, in an email to Substack, he shared plans that he wanted to create a new party that would tackle issues such as cutting immigration, closing tax loopholes for the “1 per cent”, investing in public services and fundamentally reforming the civil service.
The party is tentatively called The Startup Party (TSP) and Cummings wants it to include entrepreneurs, NHS workers and military veterans.
He wrote that he needed to have a plan “immediately after the exit polls are live on election night 2024” to “divert energy and money away from “how to revive the Tories” to “how to replace the Tories.” Current polling suggests the Conservatives are on course for a hefty defeat on election night.
Cummings became a household name in 2020 after breaking COVID UK rules during the first lockdown.
The political strategist managed to stay in his job despite immense pressure after he held a press conference in a Downing Street garden to justify his actions – an unprecedented move for an unelected councillor.
However, he was eventually sacked after just five months and soon launched a public vendetta against Johnson, which included a series of revealing revelations about how the pandemic had been handled.
Foreign Secretary David Cameron once called him a “career psychopath” and it was known that, as an adviser at the Department for Education, he had entered Whitehall departments as “Osama bin Laden”. However, his close circle of allies describe him as a brilliant political strategist.
One senior Tory Brexit MP, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, predicted that Cummings’ divisive reputation meant the party could never get back on its feet. He said:
A political party actually needs to be collegiate. Who would want to stand for election for his party? Almost everyone who has ever worked with Dominic Cummings has come away saying awful things about him.
