Dominic Cummings’ legacy will permeate society for years to come – unless Labour stops relying on spin

The adviser’s influence is not easily undone. What is needed from Keir Starmer is substance, not a repeat of café culture or regeneration masterplans, writes Ed Dorrell

(Getty Images)

If you’re in any doubt about how it feels to live in the afterburn of a Dominic Cummings revolution, go and talk to your nearest teacher.

They would point out that while he might have only worked as an adviser to Michael Gove in the Department for Education for three years, the consequences of Cummings’ slash and burn approach to making policy are still being felt long after his boss was given the heave by David Cameron.

Six years later, teachers and heads are even now trying to make sense of a raft of reforms to school structures, exams, curriculum and funding. Whether these changes were a good idea or not remains a hot debate (in my opinion, there’s a strong case to be made for a good few of them), but what isn’t contested is whether they were substantive.

This was a revolutionary reordering of the established way of doing things, in a way not really seen by any department of state since Thatcher’s era.

My point, to bring this brief history lesson bang up to date, is that what Cummings does is not easily undone. And so, as it was with the education sector, it will prove for the rest of the country.

Most obviously – and tragically – is Brexit, which will, despite the best efforts of much of the British political and judicial establishment, surely reach its final resolution in a few short weeks.

Which brings us to “levelling up” and the policy response to the crumbling of the Red Wall. Since news broke that Cummings’ tempestuous tenure in Downing Street had come to a close, commentators have lined up to predict that the Tories would respond by reverting to their comfort zone in the south and, intentionally or not, take their focus off the millions of disenchanted voters who lent them their support last December.

This may indeed happen (although it would be disastrous for the Conservative Party – there isn’t an alternative viable electoral coalition available), but that doesn’t mean that the north will be once again relegated to a backwater.

Cummings’ legacy is that the North will need to be won back. Keir Starmer cannot assume that the burghers of Redcar, Blyth and the Don Valley will simply jump back into bed with their old political flame. They will instead demand to know what Labour will do for them.

Once you’ve been electorally dumped by a group of voters, it’s very, very hard to win them back. Just ask those leading the pitiful remnants of the once-great Scottish Labour party.

Spin will not do anymore, what is needed is substance. I am not talking about Tony Blair’s café culture or John Prescott’s grand-standing “architect-envisioned” regeneration masterplans; I am talking about detailed proposals for state aid to nurture new industries, transformative education policies targeting communities who have experienced inter-generational under-achievement, plans for reigniting the vibrant high streets that towns so desperately miss.

These are the battlefields on which the next election will be won or lost – and Labour really needs to get its house in order. There are many who think it has forgotten how to speak to the voters in its old heartlands – those who it took for granted for far too long. It’s time for Starmer and Co to prove these nay-sayers wrong.

Cummings’ name might be poison to just about everyone in the centre or on the left of British politics, but for this centrist, getting Labour to start thinking properly about how it responds to some of our country’s most intractable economic problems is not a bad legacy at all.  

Ed Dorrell is director of Public First