The circus around Cummings distracts from far more important stories

As the general election powerfully demonstrated, the preoccupations of pundits aren’t always shared by the public, writes Rivkah Brown

It’s possible that the attention Cummings receives is what keeps this government alive (Getty)

The history of the world,” said the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle in 1840, “is but the biography of great men.” That’s certainly the impression you’d get from my inbox. A significant number of the pieces I’m pitched promise to chronicle the life and times of a single great man: Dominic Cummings. Did he have a hand in this or that prime ministerial blunder? What can we divine from his latest cryptic comments? Has he finally found a pair of trousers that will cover his arse? I’ve no idea, I think – pray, enlighten me.

It’s not hard to see why Cummings is catnip to journalists. As a political performer, he offers a variety show: comedy to speed up a slow news day; tragedy straight out of Shakespeare; intrigue of Poirotian proportions. Cummings is that rare beast – “the messenger who has stepped out of the shadows” – and commentators cannot keep their paws off him. This attention, many believe, could be his undoing. Last week, former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke warned that Cummings will not survive No 10 in the spotlight. Yet the opposite may be true – it’s possible that Cummings and the attention he receives are the one thing keeping this government alive.

Take his hiring of the misfit, weirdo and possible eugenicist Andrew Sabisky. The incident was incendiary, far more so than the slower but far more “seismic” changes the government plans for the rest of the civil service (among them, scrapping the culture department). Then again, at least in that case, the personal was clearly political; Sabisky’s recruitment was a parable of the government’s increasing accommodation of the far right. How exactly PJ Masks became a national news event on the same day the government greenlit its biggest ever infrastructure project, however, I will never understand. The press’s proclivity for distraction, and the government’s eagerness to supply them with one, are in toxic symbiosis.

Yet as the election powerfully demonstrated, the preoccupations of pundits aren’t always shared by the public they supposedly speak to. For while Twitter may give the impression that Dominic Cummings is the alpha and omega of political discourse, Google tells a different story. The search engine’s trend-mapping tool suggests that over the past eight months Johnson and Cummings have been in power, British people have taken a far keener interest in policy issues than in the great men driving them. It’s a fact I find reassuring – and one I’ll be bearing in mind as I continue to commission pieces that look beyond the man in the ill-fitting jeans.

Yours,

Rivkah Brown

Senior commissioning editor, Voices