Have we seen the last of Dominic Cummings?

Most were pleasantly surprised to see the back of him, but his charming, intelligent and imaginative performance yesterday might force the nation to revise its opinion of Dominic Cummings, writes Sean O’Grady

Cummings arrives at Portcullis House to give evidence to the Science and Technology Committee (EPA)

The prime minister’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, admires original thinking, despises needless bureaucracy and has a reputation for unpredictability, of which there was a great deal on display in his testimony to the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee. It gave the MPs and the viewing public alike a rare insight into life in Downing Street in the Cummings era.

The biggest surprise was that Cummings turned up at all. He remains in contempt of parliament for refusing to attend a previous select committee hearing two years ago. That was about the Vote Leave referendum campaign that Cummings had run. Cummings was arrogant enough to demand that MPs swear an oath, if that was what he was required to do.

A good deal has changed since then, and Cummings was charm itself as he dilated on some of his favourite topics and explained the thinking behind the new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria). This will be Cummings’s “other legacy”, aside from his lockdown busting last summer and his summary dismissal before Christmas.

Read more:

• Dominic Cummings wants to turn the UK into the ‘home of science’ – but ignored all the scientists about lockdown

Cummings was more predictable in how he sees his £800 million “baby” growing up. It should have a tiny group of five running it, comprising a chair or director plus four hands-on trustees. There should be “very odd people in charge”, as you’d expect. A high rate of failure is a sign of success in such an adventurous world, and to succeed Aria will need “extreme freedom”. The recruitment should be of young, brilliant people, latter-day Newtons, Darwins and Turings. Obviously the new entity would need to be exempt from most of the usual constraints on procurement, civil service pay grades, ministerial direction, Treasury-approved “business cases”, HR rules and anything else that might constrain the skunkworks.

He added that he need have nothing to do with it provided it is set up with sufficient authority and liberty. Millions can be expended on the basis of a casual chat and a handshake. The ideal, as he has said before, would look something like the early years of America’s DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – a set-up which was responsible for major breakthroughs in the fields of space and the internet with little political or bureaucratic interference. For Cummings it could only happen outside the EU, and indeed largely outside Whitehall.

As for cronyism, Cummings argues that the traditional methods of procurement sponsor cronyism and waste, with disastrous results. The MPs, who’d presumably have little oversight of the skunkworks, would also be told to keep out. Cummings’s 18 months in government only served to convince him that email chains and meetings, even with prime ministerial authority behind him, stopped him from reforming the system. The “smoking ruin” of the Department of Health and the convention-busting vaccine taskforce were the twin symbols of failure and success in the Covid crisis, the lessons obvious to those who wish to learn.

What should Aria be for? The idea is that comparatively small investments could in a few cases yield huge returns. Again the paradigm is the development of the web in the 1960s and 1970s – a few million bucks eventually returning tens of trillions of dollars in added value globally.

In the UK’s case, Aria and a wider push to invest in research and development would be the way to help solve Britain’s historic problem of low productivity. Most economists of any persuasion would endorse that general proposition. That improvement in productivity would, in turn, make the UK economy more competitive and able to earn a living in the world. To some degree it is an antidote to the idea of growth through austerity: Cummings’s disdain for David Cameron and George Osborne is palpable.

The MPs, even the no-nonsense types such as Rebecca Long-Bailey, Carol Monaghan and Katherine Fletcher, seemed starstruck on the other end of a Zoom call with the prime minister’s svengali. No one mentioned Barnard Castle, and they listened like homeschooling kids in rapt attention as the master of the universe spun his World Wide Web of acronyms and revealed how he’d stated his terms of employment to Boris Johnson, who had simply replied “Deal”. Ex-Remainer cabinet minister, Greg Clark, the very epitome of the tired, hide-bound dullard political hack quietly despised by Cummings, looked like he was in love.

Johnson, as Dom told it, had plainly been under the spell of Cummings; as we saw, so was the select committee. The nation, upon further exposure to this charming, intelligent and imaginative man with his soft north-country accent, might even come to revise its opinion of him. He even offered to come back to the committee and spill some more beans about life in Downing Street in the grip of multiple crises. A man of surprises, then. Classic Dom.