Dominic Cummings is a rare beast. In politics and in government, advisers are mostly institutionalised loyalists.

This is not meant remotely disrespectfully – I know and am friendly with government advisers to both the UK and Scottish administrations, and they are dedicated, intelligent, thoughtful people who are working longer hours for less money that they could attract outside the world of government.

But Dominic Cummings isn’t like them. He is neither institutionalised nor a loyalist (a fact which he appears unbothered about concealing), because he is not a Tory. It is that fact – that he is not and never has been a member of the party he advised in government – which needs to be understood by anyone trying to analyse his recent behaviour.

I don’t know Dominic Cummings, and as far as I can recall I’ve never met him. I must say, however, that I have been fascinated by him since long before the word Brexit entered our lexicon. I first heard of him around 20 years ago when he was strategy director for then Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and I worked for David McLetchie, then leader of the Tories in Holyrood.

He left after mere months, claiming that his brief to modernise the Conservatives was made impossible by the party’s unwillingness to take the medicine. I forgot about him until later in that decade, by which point I had come to my own realisation that the Scottish party was in need not just of modernisation, but of replacement, and he was ruffling every feather to be found in the Department for Education, working for Michael Gove.

It had become his view that the same old identikit Conservatives and the same old identikit civil service were stale, bereft of ideas and failing the country. It was ironic, therefore, that his defenestration came in part at the hands of then Prime Minister David Cameron, a man whose background and outlook was precisely what Mr Cummings had in mind when critiquing the ills of the party and the country.

Less than two years later, in the chaotic aftermath of the Brexit referendum, it was clear which of the DCs had the last laugh.

When I think of Dominic Cummings, I think of the famous Albert Einstein quote: if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

It was perhaps Mr Cummings’s ‘normal’ background which instilled in him a deep scepticism towards accepting received wisdom, and a fierce unwillingness to accept institutionalised underperformance.

And it is not hyperbolic to suggest that, had it not been for Mr Cummings’s remoteness from the self-affirming politics of London, and his remoteness from the lives of many of the people who ran (and still run) the show, the course of British history would be fundamentally different.

Without revisiting the Brexit referendum and the 2019 General Election in any depth, it is reasonable to presume that the former would not have been won, and the latter would not have been won by any meaningful margin, had Mr Cummings chosen a different career path.

I voted Remain in 2016, and regularly winced as Mr Cummings dissected the metropolitan moral superiority which characterised his opponents’ campaign. I voted Tory in 2019 purely to register a vote against Jeremy Corbyn, but Mr Cummings’ victory was about something far wider than stopping one dangerous man. He changed the face of Conservative party voting patterns, and we may continue to see the consequences for decades to come.

Love him or hate him, he is a genius.

All of this is a precursor to my central learning point from the recent testimonies and interviews by Mr Cummings: that anyone who has studied the man, his thoughts and his actions, should not be remotely surprised by what he is doing now.

He has no loyalty to the Prime Minister, nor to the Conservative party. He has loyalty only to his own ideas.

It is that loyalty to his ideas which led to him running the Brexit referendum, believing that a UK free from European regulation could advance its progress in the disciplines he felt would determine its future success, primarily those related to technology.

It is that loyalty to his ideas which led him to select Mr Johnson as his vehicle for entering Downing Street, from where he could rip up the civil service and rebuild a machine which would be able to speed up, rather than slow down, Britain’s progress.

Not for the first time, his leader was a deep disappointment to him, and the result is that he has placed him on the operating table in front of the world, cut him open on live television.

None of this is a defence of the actions of Dominic Cummings, but it may serve as an explanation for them.

At some point, over the remainder of this year, the dust will settle. When it does, I hope there will be some reflection on the role of Mr Cummings, or at the very least on the role of someone like him.

Because, I believe, governments north and south of the border need another Dominic Cummings or, even better, several of them. Government needs disruptors just like private industry needs disruptors. Government needs people to question the unquestionable in key public services such as the NHS and the education system, to ensure that we have good reason to be proud of them rather than simply being meekly grateful for their existence. Government needs people who refuse to accept mediocrity from people who have never experienced anything other than it. It needs people to break the cycle.

Mr Cummings’s political career has peaked. His currency in the media has probably peaked, too – the more dirty laundry one hangs up in public, the less people tend to look.

But I for one hope his legacy lives on. I would not suggest that the government advisers of the future emulate his exit strategy, but I do hope they emulate his unwavering unwillingness to consider good enough to be good enough.

The country would be better for it.

Andy Maciver is director of Message Matters.

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