Dominic Cummings was in my Uni posse of ‘wastrels’ – I can’t believe they let him so close to power

Arrogant, provocative and awkward is how Lebby Eyres remembers the man who once had the ear of the prime minister during one of the biggest crises the country has ever faced. So not much has changed since the student days of the ‘rambler-in-chief’ then...

Dominic Cummings when he was campaign director at Business for Sterling in 2001 ( David Levenson/Getty)

When Dominic Cummings became Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in the summer of 2019, I was horrified. Having known him well at Oxford University where I was studying classics and he was studying ancient and modern history in the early 1990s, I could not quite believe that anyone would allow him so close to the corridors of power. And anyone who listened to his evidence at the Covid inquiry yesterday will fully understand why.

The inquiry is no laughing matter. Yet I did allow myself a wry smile when Hugo Keith KC opened his line of questioning by apologising for the coarse language we were about to hear, listing some of the insults Cummings levelled at cabinet ministers: “Useless f***pigs, morons, c***s.”

It took me straight back to the days when Dom was part of my circle at Exeter College. Once a loner who would often be seen on the Freshers’ staircase wearing an outre silver bomber jacket, he was taken under the wing by a mutual friend, a fellow historian.

The former chief adviser to Boris Johnson during the Covid inquiry (Covid inquiry/YouTube)

She started to bring him to the pub with our group of friends – the “Exeter Posse” as we dubbed ourselves – and soon Dom became a regular figure on both nights out and evenings at our Cowley Road digs. While the women felt a bit wary, the men welcomed him into their inner sanctum, a male-only group called the Wastrels.

We all got used to his rambling rants about historical battles and government, and his predilection for foul language, which I always felt was rather performative. “Pacifist b****,” he once snarled at a pal, for wearing a white poppy on Remembrance Day. On another occasion, I got into a drunken row with him about the acceptability of men making misogynistic jokes. As I recall, his position was that women should take them on the chin, but possibly for the purpose of winding me up, which he liked to do to faint-hearted liberals who he considered intellectually inferior.

Those who challenged him in a debate usually came off worse, and patronage by controversial academic Norman Stone did not improve his manner. If anything, he became increasingly arrogant and provocative as time went on, albeit with his trademark awkwardness still intact.

For years, our friends, still a tight-knit group, have followed his progress via first an email chain called Dom Watch and then a WhatsApp group.

So it was with a sense of schadenfreude that I listened to Hugo Keith upbraiding Dom as he gave his evidence. “Slow down! Be succinct! Be more concise!” he advised, reprimanding the rambler-in-chief when his evidence started to spiral into an out-of-control rant delivered at high speed in his trademark soft Durham tones.

But for the most part Dom – whose favourite slogan while at uni was the Hunter S Thompson line: “There were no rules, fear was unknown and sleep was out of the question” – was on his best behaviour as he answered questions first about the set up at Downing Street, Cabinet Office and wider government, and then about the events leading up to the start of the pandemic, revealing his version of the truth about the chaos behind the scenes.

If you cast your mind back to the summer of 2019, you’ll remember that when Dom first started as the prime minister’s special adviser he was viewed by half the country as a maverick genius and the other half as an evil monster. The truth is that he is neither.

Those who challenged him in a debate usually came off worse (Getty)

For years, our friends, still a tight-knit group, have followed his progress via first an email chain called Dom Watch and then a WhatsApp group. Despite his rants, we’d had little indication that he’d become involved in front line politics, which he seemed to despise more than anything.

We were bemused then to see his unexpected rise – first as Iain Duncan Smith’s dishevelled special adviser, then Michael Gove’s and finally Johnson’s. Men are drawn to him because he empowers them, but that can also create a toxic environment, as we heard yesterday.

When Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed him in Brexit: The Uncivil War, a pal quipped that Robert Carlyle (Begbie in Trainspotting) would have been a better choice to portray the undercurrent of barely controlled aggression which is usually evident with Dom. Certainly yesterday we saw him lob metaphorical pint glasses at most people he interacted with during his time at No 10.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings in ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’ (PA)

These periods in the limelight have always been punctuated by out-of-favour moments when he would return to his “bunker” back at his parents’ farm in Northumberland and resume his blog-writing, chess-playing and whisky-drinking, reappearing for the occasional reunion or milestone birthday. Mystifyingly to those of us at uni with him, he maintained a series of well-to-do brunette girlfriends before marrying upper-crust journalist Mary Wakefield.

When he joined Johnson’s team in 2019, I reflected: “Whether he survives [at Downing Street] depends on whether Boris can ignore the increasingly loud and insistent voices telling him Dom will be his downfall – that he’s not, after all, a master strategist but an impulsive bungler.”

Of course, Dom did not survive and he more than played his part in Boris Johnson’s downfall. And right now, what we are seeing is an attempt to show it was not he who was the impulsive bungler, but his boss – “the trolley” – and the reason he could not put a master strategy in place was because the necessary infrastructure was non-existent.

Dominic Cummings’s ‘violent and misogynistic’ messages have been shown to the Covid inquiry (PA)

Bereaved families will hope the inquiry prevents politicians and their advisers from rewriting history, but what we saw yesterday was Dom trying to do just that. In his questioning, Hugo Keith noted that there had been a mysterious drop in communications during the period of 14-24 February (which “coincidentally was half term”) – just as Covid started its rampage in northern Italy and ski resorts.

Dom defended himself by saying that 13-14 February looked very different to 28 February: Covid was not seen as an imminent crisis. Latterly, much was made by Johnson of Keir Starmer being Captain Hindsight, yet what is clear is that Johnson’s government had no foresight.

Anyone who’d been on holiday to Europe that week could see what was coming. A freelance journalist at the time, I was already searching for Covid-related stories, interviewing C-list celebs like Lizzie Cundy, who’d been at Milan Fashion Week, then the European epicentre of the virus. Most grasped the seriousness of the situation – that returning holidaymakers might seed the virus in the UK – but not seemingly those in charge in No 10.

Later on, while Johnson and his sidekicks like PPS Martin “Party Marty” Reynolds were having bring-a-bottle parties in No 10, the rest of the country was suffering. In my current role as CEO of The Health Lottery, a regional lottery that raises money to help address health inequality in Britain, I’ve heard numerous stories of how those most vulnerable members of society were disproportionately affected.

Lebby Eyres at Exter College in Oxford (Supplied)

We help fund hundreds of charities up and down the country, many of them supporting the elderly and the most in need. People like Mary from MyBUS community transport, whose volunteers tirelessly delivered shopping and prescriptions to those shielding through lockdown, or Hugh at The Bingham Blether newsletter in Scotland, which helped reach isolated local residents and keep them informed when local community centres were shut.

These charities and the volunteers who help them turned up for duty and they have been picking up the pieces in devastated communities since. In a deprived rural community in Wales, the Cymer Afan Community Library has been trying to coax isolated residents back to coffee mornings – people like Sheila who, terrified, had to cope with breast cancer alone during lockdown.

Meanwhile, in August 2020 Dominic Cummings was firing off WhatsApps to Lee Cain, another senior government adviser, that said things like: “If i have to come back to Helen’s bullshit with PET [propriety and ethics team] designed to waste huge amounts of my time so i cant spend it on other stuff – I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I dont care how it is done but that woman must be out of our hair – we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the british state while dodging stilettos from that c***.

The last time I saw Dom was at a friend’s 40th a few years ago. But if I saw him now I would tell him what I really think: that the moment has come to hold your hands up.

As I noted when Dom was grilled at the select committee in 2021, he has cast himself as Chief Martin Brody in Jaws, the man who tried to stop the carnage from happening. But maybe, just maybe, he needs to accept that he was just an ineffectual sidekick to Boris Johnson’s mayor – and even worse, the one who got him into power in the first place. Families are waiting for an apology for the chaos No 10 created, and they should get one.

Lebby Eyres, CEO of The Health Lottery