Second Cumming

Welcome to Perspective’s newsletter, our view on what’s been happening over the past week. This Sunday, Rowan talks to Dominic Cummings and Peter says the Trump jurors returned the right verdict. (If this email has been forwarded, you can subscribe here).

Second Cumming

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are many things, but few would reach for “interesting” as their first adjective. Neither man has said a memorable thing for decades. Of course, there’s a strong counter-argument that charismatic politicians take countries in unwelcome directions and have a habit of surrounding themselves with all-too-interesting advisers, like Alastair Campbell and Dominic Cummings. I confess I’ve become increasingly intrigued by “Dom” in recent years, after signing up to the free version of his Substack newsletter and finding much of what he had to say (on politics, history, maths, literature, the deteriorating state of our nukes and a new “Start-Up Party” to replace the Tories), yup, interesting. I don’t always agree with his POV, but was surprised by how often his ideas resonated or, at least, had me scurrying off to do further research. What intrigues me about Cummings is that he’s not a Conservative, or any form of party animal, so much as someone who has certain key objectives, which he clearly believes will improve the state of the UK. He uses whatever means he has at his disposal (politics, newsletters, tech, clever data nerds, Boris Johnson) to try and achieve them. 

So, I wrote to DC asking if I could interview him for Perspective, as I do when I find people in public life interesting and possessed of genuine conviction: previous interviewees include Rory Stewart, Jess Phillips, Sadiq Khan and Dominic Dyer, aka the guy who airlifted animals out of Afghanistan. I was amazed when Cummings emailed back saying yes. Several Remainer friends promptly told me they would never read the resulting article and a veteran BBC reporter barked, “Dreadful, quite dreadful.” I have some sympathy with that fierceness, as someone who marched to stay in the EU before the Brexit vote. Would Vote Leave have been as successful without Dom running the show? I doubt it. But that’s also what’s so compelling: his ability to get things done and to accumulate enemies like fungal infections. When we finally met, our conversation was invigorating, funny, provoking and littered with profanities. I can’t tell you how often I leave an interview in despair because the subject would rather take hemlock than say one thing of note (cf Jack Straw circa 2001). But you will be the better judge: read the full interview on our website. And if anyone can procure me Angela Rayner for a chat, I’ll give them a lifetime’s sub.

Class act

Our new “Class Cocktail” issue has landed, running the full gamut of UK society, from an earl to a gamekeeper’s daughter. I have a lifelong obsession with the topic of social class, triggered by my own confusion about my rung on life’s ladder. Dad was a working-class tenant publican who left school at fourteen, while mum’s parents were newly-arrived members of the middle classes. Meaning I was confused when my Mitford-loving grandmother told me, aged seven, it was better to say “bog, water closet or shithouse” than to utter the dread word “toilet”. Ever since then I’ve been fascinated by the covert, ever-shifting, unwritten rules that allow one person to be snooty – or an inverted snob – about another. Like author and MP Alan Clark declaring of fellow Tory Michael Heseltine that he was the kind of person “who bought his own furniture” (rather than inheriting a castle full of it, like a normal grandee). If you monitor this kind of nuance, you’ll love our cover story on the joy of snobbery by the ever-brilliant Philip Hensher.

We also take a long hard look at social mobility. When you live in a country where 30 out of the 57 Prime Ministers to date were educated at Oxford, and 20 at Eton, you are forced to detect a major problem. Extensive research by KPMG in 2022 found that the single biggest indicator of whether a person was destined for success was what their highest-earning parent was doing aged fourteen. Everyone seems to have an opinion on the topic and our political leaders are out on the election trail at the moment, doing their damnedest to appeal to Waitrose Woman, Essex Man and Lidl Lefties. It’s important to remember, amidst the urgent need for change, that social privilege is by no means synonymous with happiness. This issue also carries an important and moving interview with the historian, Earl Spencer, by Joanna Grochowicz about the appalling abuse he suffered at his prep school, Maidwell Hall, in the 1970s.

“Bomb them all,” says my husband – of public schools – having undergone almost as grim experiences at both institutions he attended. I got off lightly mucking around in the daisy-strewn playing field of Ide Hill CoE primary. It’s important to note there are distinct upsides to being born a bit of a pleb.

The age of inquiry

Inspired as they were by a time of war, tyranny and revolution, both technical and political, William Blake’s written works have renewed resonance in our own age of upheaval. Take his declaration that “Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better, especially when it comes to saving life, or some pain!” I mean, that’s the framework statement of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry in a nutshell, right there.

It's a shame, then, that the inquiry seems to have forgone any notion of amplifying the benefit of hindsight to achieve some foresight, which might help next time around. Instead, it’s become an exercise in catharsis, the real purpose of which is obfuscation, and a gravy train for lawyers, staff and hangers-on. Twenty-six million pounds have been spent on legal fees and eighteen million on staff costs in the last financial year alone. Indeed, two years in, the initial cost estimate of £100m is all but spent. The revised estimate of almost £200m will make it another world-beating record by the Johnson government: the most expensive statutory inquiry by total cost and on a per day basis. And – god help us – it hasn’t even got to Module 3: “the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems” (due to commence in September), let alone Module 4, which will look at “vaccines, therapeutics and anti-viral treatment across the UK”. Two pretty fundamental aspects you might think, given how we discussed little else over zoom during lockdown. Incidentally, the vaccine review has been put back to January 2025, perhaps in the assumption that another national disaster will have overtaken us by then, allowing it to be swept permanently under the carpet.

Of course, we heard early doors what we already knew, that – in the words of England's former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies – the NHS was already seriously “divested” at the time of the outbreak and had fewer doctors, nurses, beds and ventilators than comparable countries. As academics Clare Bambra and Sir Michael Marmot reported, poorer areas and minorities were disproportionally affected, following a decade of austerity that ripped our public services to shreds. Sadly, my recent eleven-hour wait in A&E suggests there has been nothing but deterioration in both respects.

This inquiry is just the latest of what, since the Inquiries Act of 2005, has become an art form in burying government failings in plain sight. According to the National Audit Office, of the 80 inquiries launched since 1990, less than half their collective recommendations have been agreed by legislators, and even less have made it into policy. So any worthwhile recommendations that do finally emerge are likely to disappear into the vast bureaucratic cosmos.

Public inquiries are meant to answer three things – what happened? Why (including who’s to blame)? And how can we prevent it recurring? The pandemic, and the response to it, affected every one of us. We’re all aware of its toll, in lost loved ones, lost days, lost opportunities, and the impact on our own and our children’s mental health. We clapped for workers on the front line and despaired as evidence of our shambolic lack of preparedness emerged. We lauded the philanthropy of some businesses and were outraged at the flagrant profiteering of others (especially those close to the executive).  We laughed darkly at the millions wasted on Test & Trace, and as time went on wondered privately whether the lock-down cure was doing more harm than good. While some of us applauded the rapidity of our vaccine roll-out, others were distressed by the increasingly draconian efforts to ensure compliance, and by the suppression of rational scientific discussion.

So, let’s put some meat on the bones, sure, but a proper inquest should ensure recommendations are incorporated into policy within months, not years. The situation seems less inspired by Blake’s words of wisdom, than by his paintings of hell. In short, our most expensive inquiry ever seems set to take longer than the pandemic itself, and is in danger of being overtaken by the next one.

The importance of conviction

Believe me – my editor doesn’t – I hate writing about Donald Trump. But it’s hard to avoid the man, given that he’s just become a convicted felon 34 times over but is still set to become the Republican candidate for US president. Whatever the motivations of the DA bringing the case (the politicised nature of such officials has long been a flaw of US democracy), the jury unanimously convicted him on all counts in record time. It would have taken just one juror to get him off the hook, for the time being at least, and given the statistical likelihood that three or four of them voted for Trump in the last election, it seems his guilt was overwhelming.

Good. The man’s a crook, and for all its resemblance to a rather dull circus, the trial was a not insignificant example of the rich and powerful being held to account, for something at least. The response by Trump was predictable. Rather than meaningfully protest his innocence, he went on the attack with his usual litany of grievances against the judge, the jury and the “rigged” system that is “a scam”. As worrying as it is to have a candidate for president actively undermining its public institutions in this way, there’s no longer any shock value in it. Far more concerning is the spinelessness of senior Republicans who have forsaken the principles of their party to become acolytes of MAGA. It would only take one of them to have the courage of their convictions and call time on Trump’s candidacy. If that happened, it wouldn’t just be Stormy Daniels who’d get to see the would-be emperor without his clothes.

Read more about reactions to Trump’s criminal convictions:

Book of the Week

Naked Portrait:
A memoir of Lucian Freud
By Rose Boyt
(397pp, Picador, £22, hb)
Reviewed by Belinda Bamber

Rose Boyt wasn’t the only one of Lucian Freud’s daughters that the artist painted naked, but her pose is famously the most unsettling. She’s depicted lying with her legs splayed on the couch, the artist’s easel placed just beyond her feet. In her memoir of their father-daughter relationship, Naked Portrait, Boyt remembers dissuading him from naming the painting Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, which would have made explicit the suggestion of incest. It is called, simply, Rose (1976-7). The book makes it clear their relationship wasn’t sexual, although he did talk to her about his sex life whenever she sat for him, and embarked on relationships with her friends.

Boyt describes an insecure, disruptive childhood in which she lived on a boat at sea for a while with her mother’s predatory, abusive boyfriend. When Rose was painted, she was only seventeen and had already left home; the painting betrays her youthful vulnerability as well as her strength. Clearly, Freud failed to provide boundaries in the studio as well as in her life: he was an absent, gambling father and his obsession with beauty and surfaces fuelled her insecurities. Yet that first portrait was the start of greater closeness between them and out of the fourteen children he acknowledged as his own, it was Boyt whom Freud chose as executor of his estate. As an adult she lived near Freud and, wanting to be indispensable, regularly sat for him and cleaned his studio. Based on her detailed diaries, this memoir can make you feel uncomfortably like a voyeur on her therapy process, yet it’s impossible to look away. In writing as in life, Boyt doesn’t baulk at self-exposure, nor of describing her beloved, brilliant, impossible father in all his nose-picking reality. This her naked portrait of their troubled yet touching relationship.