Dominic Cummings’s ‘mission control’ Cabinet Office is complete. But it’s serving a government of distracted chimpanzees

After a disastrous Prime Minister’s Questions, it’s hard to believe adviser’s set-up will withstand the incompetence of this talentless administration

You don’t have to have read any of Dominic Cummings’s favourite self-help manuals to have come across an old line about the definition of insanity – that of continually doing the same thing and expecting different results.

It is often wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, who would never have been foolish enough to say such a thing.

Boris Johnson does the same thing at Prime Minister’s Questions every week. Which is to say he sashays around all of the questions asked of him with all the fleet-footedness of a pissed rhino, before then blaming Keir Starmer for not being “supportive” enough of the government, when it is his constitutionally prescribed job to oppose it. And every week he watches his own poll ratings plummet and Starmer’s rise, to the point at which they are now neck and neck.

But he doesn’t do this because he is insane. He does it because he is useless. When he’s asked, over and over again, when exactly he knew that the A-level results algorithm wasn’t going to work, and why he then didn’t do anything about it, it’s for the reason that he can only reply by accusing Starmer of “going around, undermining confidence, spreading doubt”.

It’s also because he’s got absolutely nothing else to offer, and it is becoming ever harder to ignore. The Sun and the Daily Mail are becoming increasingly hostile. Those who do continue to back him seem to be of the view that Prime Minister’s Questions will be fine when the Tory MPs are let back in, so that Johnson’s luminous inadequacy can be brayed away.

At one point, not long after Johnson had been asked, again, when he knew about the algorithm not being fit for purpose, and he replied by accusing Starmer of being an IRA sympathiser, the speaker had to intervene to remind the prime minister that he had to make some attempt to answer the question.

I cannot recall this happening ever before. Not once even in three whole years were Theresa May’s non-answers deemed so inadequate that the speaker had to get involved.

(Starmer did remind him that he had spent several years prosecuting IRA terrorists, so the charge was somewhat thin.)

As all this was occurring, Cummings was tucking his feet under his new desk at the bridge of his new “mission control”-style office next door to Downing Street. Artistic reconstructions of this new office, with its desks, and its big screens, have been produced in most of the newspapers, and it does look rather like, well, an office.

It’s best not to dwell too long on the sad fact that the creation of this little hub in Downing Street is Cummings’s entire life goal, and the ruination of his country at the hands of a carefully and deliberately stoked whirlwind of hate has been deemed worth it to get there.

Poor Dom. In the end, it turned out that the only way to get the mission control up and running was to purge all the astronauts and replace them with chimpanzees – but he was in too deep by that point. Too late to get back.

The nerve centre is built. Over the wrong end of the synapses you’ll find Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel, Johnson and the rest, but can’t worry about that now. Needs must.

The whole thing is like watching a precocious eight-year-old at Christmas, one seeking to put on some sort of absurdly ambitious theatrical production for the grown-ups, and who simply won’t allow his production values to be compromised by the mere fact that none of the rest of the cast and crew are a day older than three and they also couldn’t care less.

It’s all fully dystopian, but then it has been for some time. But then, maybe we’re all wrong. Maybe, just maybe, with the right data guru sitting in the right place, the Cummings machine can be so finely tuned as to not actually matter that it serves the most talentless government ever to be assembled, quite possibly anywhere.

And if it doesn’t, well, we can all just carry on hoping for the best, hoping things might get better. It doesn’t make you insane when there’s absolutely nothing else you can do.