Hints and tips:
...And I said to him, you know, you could be Dominic Cummings sitting there. And he said, well, some of the things that Dominic Cummings says is sensible....
...Plus, political editor George Parker joins the pod to chew over his recent interview with Tony Blair, and the fallout from allegations of Chinese espionage in Westminster....
...Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, had similar ideas, trying to recruit “weirdos” and tech nerds into the heart of government. “Some of what he says is sensible,” said Blair....
...Tony Blair is not done with Britain. His vehicle of influence is his ideas factory-cum-consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change....
...Tony Blair complained of the impossibility of public sector reform. Sir Iain Duncan Smith’s advisers blamed officials for the troubled implementation of universal credit....
...But Cummings was keen to keep Levido on board, promising to put him in charge of the election campaign that followed in December that year....
...As coincidence would have it, Wakefield is Dominic Cummings’ father in-law. It’s perhaps no surprise that Mullin is indulgent of Cummings’ much-publicised breach of Covid lockdown rules....
...Keeping ministers in post for longer, as Tony Blair and David Cameron did, improves the odds. The Raab saga indicates that Whitehall has become more overtly disrespectful....
...Hannah WhiteWe have often agreed with Dominic Cummings in his analysis of the problems. We don’t always agree with him on his solutions....
...(Even some in Westminster wrote him off as a cipher of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings when he was appointed as chancellor.)...
...That campaign was the first success of a young Dominic Cummings, the political strategist who would later mastermind the Vote Leave campaign....
...The No campaign was advised by Dominic Cummings, who went on to run the 2016 Leave campaign in the Brexit vote....
...Tony Blair and Gordon Brown famously feuded in the New Labour government, but some say the Johnson/Sunak rift became as bad....
...During the 2016 referendum, he teamed up with his former aide Dominic Cummings to argue the case for Leave....
...There were lots of babies born in Kosovo in the years after called Tony, and there are Tony Blair streets in Kosovo....
...In 1998, 26-year-old Dominic Cummings became campaign director of Business for Sterling, a group that opposed Tony Blair’s plans to join the euro. Hannan’s project had found its master communicator....
...Dominic Cummings’ seven-hour testimony last year on exactly how bad Johnson had been at exercising power had little effect on his popularity....
...The individual now most associated with Brexit is Boris Johnson, a man who arrived more than fashionably late to the cause, and after him Dominic Cummings....
...The prime minister still hopes to build what Dominic Cummings, his former adviser, called “the world’s most stupid tunnel to Ireland”....
...The proportion of women attending cabinet — 27 per cent — is lower now than when Tony Blair left office in 2007. The reshuffle does explode the myth that Johnson ignores public pressure....
...Johnson’s popularity took a significant knock in May 2020 after another lockdown scandal involving a former key aide, Dominic Cummings, only for his ratings to pick up again within a few months....
...Tony Blair, David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher had such teams, a mix of gifted senior aides and politicians, wise heads who co-owned the government’s project....
...His former chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, promised a “hard rain” would fall on Whitehall, while allies drew up hit lists of leading officials....
...There is no one in Downing Street with the stature of Charles Powell or Jonathan Powell, key advisers to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, or Jeremy Heywood, the late cabinet secretary....
...His now-spurned adviser Dominic Cummings memorably compared his former boss to a wonky “shopping trolley”, veering this way and that, avoiding tough decisions and personal confrontations, partly as a device...
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