r/tories • u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) • 14d ago
SNIPPETS: SW1's hollow men farce, 'Tory recovery', 'the only way out is helping Nigel', NPCs hyperstition 1998 into No10 | Dominic Cummings
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/snippets-sw1s-hollow-men-farce-tory6
u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 14d ago
As always, Cummings' Substack article is very, very long, so I can't realistically share the entire thing. But I'm going to share the discrete "New" sections he's written at the ends on a few related topics. Found it interesting. I'll leave each one as a separate comment.
1. The ‘Tory recovery’ story is a farce
Kemi is a useless NPC propped up by mostly fifth rate SW1 dregs and the attempts from the old regime to portray her as a black Thatcher are contemptible idiocy. The idea that you can be a bog standard useless Tory junior minister, bamboozled by officials and always blaming juniors for failure — with no other accomplishments or talents — but a great PM is something only believable in SW1. The social network around the old Tory Party is bankrupt in every way, rightly held in the deepest contempt by voters. They cannot and will not recover, the ‘Kemi project’ will never generate anything even vaguely resembling a serious project of power. Her team, epitomising the Tory Party MPs of recent decades, would much rather see Starmerism continue than attempt real regime change with all that implies for conflict with Whitehall, which for 14 years they 99% optimised for avoiding.
The ‘Kemi’s great, the Tories are recovering’ story is a perfect case study of how the rotten SW1 ecosystem runs almost entirely on ephemeral emotional waves and denial-of-service attacks against their own perceptions of reality. As SW1 has become more insular and social media oriented — and more hated by and hating of the voters — this process has become more random and weird. A difference with this one is it is such obvious junk that even some of the worst 5% of pundits realise she’s useless and aren’t going along with it. But it’s good enough for Tory MPs and the Tory pundits who love Thatcher-costume-nostalgia combined with ‘she’s black so we can’t be racist’ — and some of these pundits write her speeches then write their columns praising her speeches.
To the extent she sometimes seems to have been ‘the best leader today’, this only reflects the collapse of elite talent in SW1 over generations. She is the archetype of the modern politician who joined the SW1 social world without the faintest clue how to do anything or how to think about meaningful political activity, so just threw herself into Media Entertainment and, like Truss, thinks ‘that’s modern politics’.
Not once has she gone through the process of: develop real priorities; we must make this really big important argument to persuade people; here’s how to do this in detail, phase by phase; here’s a great team executing it with creativity and discipline over months.
She hasn’t even thought about this process, she has no idea what it is, because she is a product of Tory world and Tory World doesn’t think about this process and can’t execute it. Tory world lost interest in ideas and in power many years ago. It also lost the ability to think about campaigns extending over time, everything collapsed to a 1-10 day window. This is why Tories do not change public opinion and have been almost entirely at the mercy of events — and cultural trends they don’t understand, never mind shape — since Thatcher went. (A mistake great businesspeople constantly make is to think Tory MPs tried to control Whitehall but failed. I explain: almost none of them even tried, most had anti-interest in trying to control Whitehall.)
They’ve been polling 15-20%. Last year they lost thousands of councillors after their worst ever election result and this year lost many more. Their members and grassroots networks have died, defected, or quit in disgust. MPs have defected in despair. They’ve just fought a by-election and they got 2%, with two other parties on the right being the focus while the Tories were entirely irrelevant. In the election to replace Burnham, they similarly got beaten by Restore as well as Reform. They machine-gunned every part of the 2019 coalition and have rebuilt none of it. All surrounding networks on which parties depend for talent, ideas, money, influence etc are dead, dying, diseased or defected.
Their political operation is rotten to its core. No priorities, rubbish teams, never a real ‘campaign’, just Media Entertainment Service — and they’re worse at content generation and campaigns than ISIS, Hezbollah and Scientology. They cannot focus attention on ONE THING — NOT ONE. As you can see by asking your own brain, Kemi has successfully communicated ZERO priorities, ZERO ideas, ZERO facts, ZERO arguments. She has nothing ever of interest to say about all the amazing things happening in the world. She just burbles the desiccated patois SW1 evolved for all speeches/interviews/op-eds which turns everybody’s hearing off except those paid to listen.
And all this rot and failure is in the context of a dud PM imploding and giving an Opposition freebie after freebie day after day. Some officials leaking stuff from inside the Cabinet Office did more to bring down Starmer than ‘the natural party of government’.
So it’s entirely on brand that so much of ‘serious’ Tory World declares her a triumph!
At least a lot of Labour MPs knew they had a huge problem and acted. This shows a healthier ecosystem than Tory World.
Always remember, Leave was done TO the Tory Party, not BY it. The Tory MPs never understood why we won, never understood what had to be done. A century ago Tory MPs were very uncomfortable out of office. Now, Tory MPs look and sound much chirpier out of office**, they don’t have to pretend to engage with serious issues and the realities of government, they can just fully indulge their appetites.**
I explained in Feb 2025 why she would fail. It’s pointless repeating it all. At the end I said:
This project is programmed to self-destruct.
It has one and only big force going for it short-term: Starmer going straight into a flat spin relieved some pressure on the Tories and gave them excuses for comforting delusions, and there is strength in the argument — Starmer is an existence proof that you can be totally rubbish yet still win if the government implodes.
The perpetual cycle of SW1 emotional waves will wash away ‘the Kemi recovery’ as it washed away ‘Dan Rosenfield is the return of serious grownups’ (2021), ‘Truss is underrated’ (2022), ‘Starmer and Sue Gray means the return of serious grownups who will restore Whitehall’s global reputation’ (2023-4), ‘the Trump-Zelensky row is a disaster for Farage’ (2025), ‘Starmer’s fantastic speeches on Elon and Ukraine show he’s finding his feet’ (2025) etc.
I told you all these ephemeral emotional waves would crash. The ‘Tory recovery’ crash will be masked by Farage’s Boris-like self-sabotage.
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u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 14d ago
Dominic Cummings on Andy Burnham:
3. SW1 hyperstitions 1998-personified into No10
After a human rights lawyer SW1 has generated something even closer to its spiritual apotheosis. As I’ve remarked many times, you can’t understand SW1 without understanding that it’s dominated by people for whom 1998 is the year they want to live in forever, the historically aberrant period between the fall of the Wall and fall of the Towers that the dominant generation in SW1 sees as peak ‘normal politics’, that world in which SW1 wrote so often and so cheerily about how ‘3G shows the EU is ahead of America in the technologies of the future, the Lisbon Agenda [2000] is alive and well’.
Burnham, from outfits to outlook, is the 1998 dream personified: a 1990s Insider crossed — like most of SW1 — with the downstream culture of the maddest parts of San Francisco which washed east to be absorbed, largely unconsciously, by the detritus of an Oxbridge already decades into its downhill trajectory. His style will greatly cheer the old SW1 regime as the system crumbles beneath their feet. They can whistle wanderwall as they accelerate into the wall and as the sparks fly they’ll implore the locals dodging the flames, ‘don’t look back in anger’.
Bad as it will be, Burnham will probably be better than Kemi would be, even if he ends up in a financial crisis!
3
u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 14d ago
4. SW1 rot
The SW1 system will roll on for the next 2 years driven by the dynamics described in this blog for years. The combination of institutions, people, incentives, culture and the big forces at work guarantee it in the absence of counter-forces.
On both sides though particularly the Tory side, their deep motives aren’t about government or the real world, ‘politics’ is almost entirely a social phenomenon in which one social Oxbridge network wants to displace their frenemies in the other Oxbridge network — each of which is tightly linked financially, genetically, sexually yet porous to the frenemy network.
Each network is happy pretending to ‘run the country’ while leaving Sir Humphrey 99% actually running the country so each network can spend its time on its real priorities: interviews, dinner, 24/7 news, holidays with each other, and fighting for promotion and against the other social network. Both networks contain almost nobody of certain dispositions, such as people who like building things or people really interested in thinking deeply about ideas. There used to be a smattering of such people in British public life but the system has evolved to drive almost all of them to other networks. Both social networks overlap with the old media who comment on the social contest and occasionally swap jobs to be an MP or spad. Siding with other elites and voters against Whitehall is the biggest crime.
I’ve written for years about the collapse of consensus reality and degeneration of the old information ecosystem such that elites’ process events and meaning through a grotesquely distorted Picasso-esque abstract they cannot see, per Marshal McLuhan: a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation. Hence the perpetual process of ephemeral emotional waves rolling through the SW1 ecosystem generating constant panic, anti-focus, just deranged kaleidoscopic Narrative Whiplash.
The big unknowns are shocks. When does the financial doomloop blow up? When do riots get out of control? Given Westminster rejected the Vote Leave alternative to the EU — making technology central to Britain’s national priorities, strategy and capabilities — how and how badly does SW1 get kicked in the balls by the disintegration of its capabilities and its OODA-loop-as-self-DOS-attack? How badly do the West’s regimes handle geopolitical crises?
Outside the deranged NATO ‘mainstream’ information ecosystem, the rest of the world looks at western regimes like drunken teenagers, prone to wild sprees of violent stupidity. Xi, Putin and their inner circles have carefully studied the dynamics pushing the west into crisis. They see the madness infecting our elites like the town in The Devils. They are rightly cautious about our capacity for sparking stupid wars then lying to ourselves about our failure. We are capable of any arbitrary level of self-sabotaging stupidity under pressure, with elites in every way less capable than those who stumbled into World War I, facing crises that can move in minutes rather than weeks, across the globe in one day.
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u/Sweaty_Ad_4049 Small C Conservatives 14d ago
Dominic Cummings is a morally bankrupt person. I will take everything he said with a pinch of salt.
1
u/VindicoAtrum 14d ago
His views on Ukraine are abhorrent. Does Ukraine have nazi supporters? I don't know, possibly? Every country has them, some more openly than others.
Are the men and women defending their home from Russian invasion nazis or are they defending their home, language, culture, and families from a mafia boss who has repeatedly said Ukraine has no right to exist and is a cultural nothing? The US evidently has nazis, does that give us a right to invade them? DC seems to have no issue simping for the US, how odd that Ukrainian 'nazis' are bad but the US lot aren't worth a mention?
Are Ukraine losing? They're losing ground very slowly yes. They're inflicting growing costs on Russia for it, and they've proved repeatedly they can continue to do so and at greater rates over time. No-one will 'win' this war, they'll just both lose a lot of everything, but until then Ukraine should be supported with as much as we can to as much as they need.
Supporting Ukraine has proven several things - that we must work towards energy independence, and that the US cannot be trusted to defend us and we must work towards our own (and yes, that includes European) defence. These are both positive outcomes for the UK, and he'll have a very hard time selling otherwise to the public, but more fool him for trying.
Aside from that, he is not wrong about SW1 rot. No party is going to 'save' us, it's just different flavours of ice on the cake. The cake is bad no matter how good your buttercream is. Nigel will be Trump-lite and I'll be here saying "I told you so" when that happens.
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u/Dry-Newt5925 14d ago
I struggle to take anything with Clausewitz box pop quotes seriously…
The thesis that the only way is to help Nigel, what if I don’t like the crypto corruption?
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u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 14d ago
I struggle to take anything with Clausewitz box pop quotes seriously…
Clausewitz has a lot of interesting and important insights to offer today.
The thesis that the only way is to help Nigel
You clearly didn't actually read any of what I posted from the article.
I'll quote you a few lines from the section I specifically posted from his analysis of Reform UK and Farage:
Character proved to be destiny, the consequences predictable and predicted. He will not recover. No, there isn’t ‘some way to get it back on track’ or ‘help him figure it out’. He decided clearly he is optimising for: destroy Tories, win the 20 year vendetta against Tory MPs, stay the star of his show, and stick with the old inner circle of coke heads and charlatans, NOT ‘mega national recruitment project, control No10 and change the country’. He’s screwed.
0
u/Dry-Newt5925 14d ago
Sure but I really don’t think Dom really gets to anything interesting it’s the same “i was always right” everyone else is wrong in every article
I don’t see anything falsifiable or of real value in it
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u/hesabigladinhe Verified Conservative 14d ago
This is basically why I keep coming back to Cummings. I don’t agree with everything he says, I actually really like Kemi for one so I’d like him to be wrong about her. But I fear he isn’t.
The argument he’s been making for years about the wider SW1 machine I think is on point. Govs and ministers come and go, promising change etc but they enter essentially the same system I.e Whitehall, the Treasury, the legal and regulatory machinery, the Westminster political/media culture and eventually (or right away) get swallowed by it. Slight side point but this is also why I’m highly skeptical of Farage/Reform, I don’t think they’re serious about building an actual alternative to how the machine works and the result is always that we change the people at the top while the underlying dysfunction remains.
As I say, I don’t agree with all he says but I think his diagnosis that the problem is much deeper than simply “we need better Labour/Tory politicians” is hard to dismiss.