The day Dominic Cummings offered to make Jeremy Corbyn PM

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1. On January 7 2019, Matt Zarb-Cousin, an Essex Boy recovering from a draining year as Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman, was scrolling through Twitter. Though no longer employed by the Labour Party, he continued to make his profane and lively case for socialism online.

   Messages from admirers — and detractors — came readily. Another landed. The sender said they admired Zarb-Cousin’s work. Then they claimed to be Dominic Cummings, the man who had made Brexit happen. They asked to meet him. Zarb-Cousin turned to his wife. “This is a stitch-up,” he said. “I might get whacked.”
   Just what, after all, could Dominic Cummings want from a Corbynite? His Vote Leave campaign had divided Labour against itself. His politics — that bracing brand of anarchic, right-wing populism — were everything that Corbyn defined himself against.

   David Cameron, tormented by Cummings as prime minister, had called him “a career psychopath”. He looked like one, too: wild-eyed and dishevelled. His business was destroying the left, not helping its leaders. So what did Cummings want from this Corbynite? And what could a Corbynite possibly want from Cummings?

   But the two men did meet, for dinner at Dishoom, an Indian restaurant in Shoreditch, four miles but a world away from Westminster. They were joined by James Schneider, who still worked in the office that Zarb-Cousin had left.

   Cummings wanted his life’s work, Brexit, to be saved by Corbyn from the grinding jaws of parliamentary process. Conservative MPs refused to back their government’s Brexit deal. So too did Starmer, who as shadow Brexit secretary had been as obstructive as any Tory Eurosceptic.

   Progressives rallied around the banner of the People’s Vote campaign. All that Vote Leave had fought for seemed lost. Only Corbyn could save them now. Cummings explained how, if Labour whipped its MPs to vote for Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, it would pass the Commons. The Tories would split and May would resign.

   No longer hamstrung by his own party’s divisions on Europe, Corbyn — promising to fund the NHS and public services — might win the general election that would surely follow. At this moment of deadlock and uncertainty it no longer mattered that Cummings thought Corbyn’s socialism was deranged. Through his Labour Party ran the most straightforward escape from Brussels.

   In power, the radical left might do what Cummings most wanted, dismantle the civil service establishment, and take a sledgehammer to the old ways of Whitehall. Cummings was willing to help them do it. Schneider listened with interest. Corbyn’s inner circle was as hostile to a second referendum — and to Starmer, its chief advocate within the Labour Party — as Cummings.

   Schneider referred the proposal to his superiors. He recalls now: “I wanted Brexit to pass, the Tories to split, us to run a left-populist insurgent campaign, have a proper operation to do that, and therefore win.”

   The plan proceeded. Cummings drew Corbyn’s road map to power in a text to Zarb-Cousin. “Thanks for dinner comrade! You get Brexit through, [People’s Vote] f***ed … high chance of Govt collapse and election pre-August but Tory civil war guaranteed for years in any scenario …”

   From focus groups in Labour’s battleground seats in the West Midlands, Cummings had learnt that Corbyn could not afford to decline his offer. With uncanny prescience, he wrote: “My view has been strengthened that 2REF = crackup for both parties, it will be a messy race to see which party collapses fastest under the pressure. Jeremy on the same side as Blair and Chuka [Umunna] when a tidal wave of hate is unleashed outside the M25 wd be disaster for him in marginal seats but ditto for Tories.”

   He went on: “Long-term strategic danger for LAB is the crackup gives Tories a big strategic advantage with working classes for years to come, after they re-form as a clearly Brexit party … and they brand Labour as ‘against working-class people on Brexit and immigration, and Labour doesn’t respect democracy’.”

   Cummings was right. The Corbynites knew he was right. Over the ensuing months he kept sending his messages, promising electoral riches and warning of disaster if the left did not claim them.

   As May announced her resignation, he crowed: “The destruction of the Tories proceeds apace, comrade. Boris is their last gasp at ignoring reality. When that fails … kaboom.”

   Eventually, however, Corbyn did endorse a second referendum. And Cummings went to work for Johnson. He did for Boris what he might have done for Jeremy. The Tories were remade as a party of Brexit. Johnson read the lines that had been written for Corbyn — get Brexit done, Labour don’t respect democracy — and annihilated him. The unlikely beneficiary was the man responsible for the party’s position, the man Cummings derided as a “central casting London Remain beta-brain lawyer”: Keir Starmer.

2. This is what revisionists try to deny. Corbyn wanted the hardest of Brexits. It’s why 2019 was putin at his finest, the choices we had were ridiculous. We will be paying the price for that for decades

3. I’m fairly ambivalent on Brexit but I struggle to think of a more odious, pathetic, repugnant creature than Cummings.

4. Thank God we ended up with Boris bankrupting the country instead. Phew! What a close call!

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