Before taking on the role of ‘Brexit mastermind’ Dominic Cummings in a television drama, actor Benedict Cumberbatch decided to get to know his subject.
The Hollywood star duly spent an evening last summer at the North London home of the political strategist and Vote Leave guru. After dining on a vegan pie, the pair sat up into the wee hours, chatting and drinking wine.
A few months later, while publicising Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, Cumberbatch was asked by an interviewer if anything about his encounter with the famously prickly 47-year-old Cummings had surprised him.
To some, that may sound like faint praise. Yet such is the hostility that Dominic Cummings generates, that friends took the remark as a compliment.
Yesterday, following the announcement of Cummings’s appointment as one of Boris Johnson’s most senior advisers, hostility was one of several emotions in evidence.
Remain-supporting MPs were outraged to learn that he is joining No. 10 in a ‘chief executive’ role, charged with getting Brexit over the line and running Mr Johnson’s domestic policy.
Former Tory MP Sarah Wollaston called it an ‘appalling error of judgment’.
But it also led to rumblings of discontent from hardline Tory Brexiteers who fell out with Mr Cummings during the Brexit referendum and whom he has since described as a ‘cancer’ on British politics.
Friends defended the appointment, saying Mr Cummings was ‘amazingly talented’ and would ‘drive’ Mr Johnson’s agenda.
‘The chances of Brexit happening just went up, sharply,’ one added. Whatever the truth, Cummings is one of Westminster’s great eccentrics.
Balding and scruffy, with a personality that has been variously described as ‘mad professor’ and ‘evil genius’, he’s feared across Whitehall for his combustible nature, abrasive manner and contempt for officialdom.
Appointed to run the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum, he earned wider notoriety as the data-mining arch-Brexiteer played by Cumberbatch, whose controversial and, many opponents insist, legally wonky dark arts delivered a narrow victory for Brexit.
It was Cummings who coined the ingenious winning slogan ‘Take Back Control’, inspired by polling which suggested that a silent majority of Britons felt left behind by political elites.
It was also Cummings who presided over the highly contentious decision to stick disputed figures about EU funding and the NHS (Brexit would mean ‘£350m more a week’) on the side of a bus.
Cummings has been upsetting the Westminster establishment for years. In 2014, the usually mild-mannered David Cameron branded him a ‘career psychopath’.
That particular remark, in a speech, came after Cummings had given an outrageously frank newspaper interview about a three-year stint he’d just spent as an adviser at the Department for Education.