Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…Conventionally, you are seen as, or thought of as combative. I mean, in this interview you’ve been very polite and pleasant, but does the fact that you’re seen as combative, does that help you maybe get your way when you’re in government or something? And is it calculated? It’s not calculated. I don’t know if combative is the right word. I think the fact that people inside the system know that I actually do have priorities and I do actually care about them and I don’t care what the media says, and I have an extremely high tolerance for everyone going crazy in order to actually get what I want definitely, obviously, has an effect, because people will think, “Well, maybe we should do a deal with him. He cares a lot about blah, maybe we should just let him do blah and see if we can persuade him.” We’ll help you with this, and maybe you could help us with something else. Having priorities, actual priorities, is incredibly rare in politics. Almost no MPs have them all. Practically by definition. Not worrying what the media says and not worrying about everyone hating you, I think, is a very powerful advantage. All the way through the referendum and all the way through Number 10, the insiders constantly said — These people are just completely crazy. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s all going to fall down on their heads. That definitely was an advantage because it just means that they constantly fooled themselves and undermined what they were doing. And they didn’t learn from 2016. The mistakes they made in 2016, they just totally repeated in 2019. And in a system where people don’t have priorities, don’t actually care about policy, somebody who does has got to seem strange to them in their world. Okay, final question. What does pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will mean to you?…

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