Cummings and Carole’s Substack Showdown

Dominic Cummings’s Substack fan club certainly kept him busy over the weekend. So far, he’s received over 400 questions and sent 100 replies on topics varying from Corbyn and the culture wars, to Biden and border policy. Guido’s collated the best material below…

The most entertaining exchange was with Carole Cadwalladr, who forked out the £10 fan club fee to fire off a five-paragraph diatribe of her five-year-old political grievances, lambasting Cummings on everything from Vote Leave campaign spending to his involvement in Boris’s election. The latter of which she adds: “by your own reckoning, this has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths”…

Cummings responded in equal length; on Cadwalladr’s claims that the Electoral Commission [EC] acted “unlawfully“, Cummings accuses it of being “an incompetent and confused entity”:

“Remember: the EC literally refused repeatedly to take evidence from the key 6 people involved!! […] Yes they came to [those] findings but the most extraordinary thing was they literally hired lawyers to fight lawyers hired by the crucial 6 to try to force them to take evidence from us.”

In response to allegations of Vote Leave’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica, Cummings added:

“Remember: CA had nothing to do with us, we never had the infamous Facebook data your mate Wylie had, there was no conspiracy!”

Turning to Carole’s ongoing campaign to spuriously ruin Darren Grimes’s life, Dom has pointed out the failure of the Electoral Commission to interview key witness during their biased investigation, which was “of course partly why the courts threw out the Grimes case, cos the EC had totally botched it… Also NB. the courts threw out Grimes case but this got no coverage cos of covid!” Carole is yet to respond…

Read the rest of Cummings’s views below:

On Biden: “Easy to spend loads of money & to win media applause for trite things / not being trump – but much harder to do real things. Good to see such investments in science but again seems like $ going to same institutions while science really needs greater diversity – not the bullshit identity type ‘diversity’ but meaningful diversity”

On Boris making models of buses: “You don’t know Boris! This was not a cunning SEO plan, honestly…”

On Boris’s character: “He’s a much more complex character than he seems, behind the mask is … another mask..”

On Brexit & Scottish Independence: “If I’m right re EU & the parties adapt in a healthy way, in 10 years this debate will be totally different – Scots won’t want to give away control to Brussels.”

On Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie: “Zero influence, all fake news from Observer. Wylie pitched his snake oil to me, I told him to get lost. He then pretended I’d done it! It’s been interesting to see how easily educated people have been duped about all this.”

On Civil Service Reform: Question: “Do you risk introducing more of a revolving door between civil service and private sector by doing this?
Cummings: “That’s not a risk, that’s the goal!”

On Corbyn’s 2019 loss: “Rubbish leader, no strategy, brains misled by listening to media nonsense for 3 years instead of focusing outside m25.”

On Culture Wars: “Culture wars tends to be dummies throwing rocks at each other to no end…”

On Gove: “But Gove does not, he does not ‘run’ the CABOFF nor is he even told much about what it’s doing. One of the myths of the media is ‘Gove is a key player in Downing Street’ – it just isn’t true… 28 year old private secretaries you’ve never heard of have more influence than most ministers most of the time. And in many ways this is better for decisions…”

On Net Zero: “I’m not convinced that everything collapses by 2035 cos of climate change as you describe – and if that turns out to be true then surely the priority now rationally ought to be adaptation, not net zero?!”

On NHS reform: “NHS won’t significantly improve until someone is serious about all the incentives that drive such terrible behaviour. I don’t see Tories doing it, will prob need a Labour PM but of course they’d be under huge pressure to preserve status quo…”

On Open Borders: “The block on a serious border policy has always been the PM trying to keep the Telegraph happy, neither Hancock or Patel or anybody else can reasonably be blamed.”

On Peter Hitchens: “Hitchens’s nickname is ‘bonkers’ for a reason.”

On Starmer: “Starmer seems just another not great lawyer who thinks politics is about watching the media all day. He’s very much in tune with modern Commons. Content to fail in all the usual ways rather than shake anything up. Similar to Cameron.”

On the lack of Select committee evidence re Hancock claims: “More to come…”

On XR: “Lots of green stuff seems to me quasi-religious, like much that motivates the educated classes in the west, it’s ephemeral emotional fads. This is dangerous. Also much of ER type stuff risks convincing a majority that the whole thing is dangerous nonsense.”