Leave ideologue Dominic Cummings and Corbyn’s firebrand Seumas Milne: The twin powers pulling the strings

Dominic Cummings and Seumas Milne
PA/Getty
Martha Gill5 September 2019
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The name Dominic Cummings, spat across the Commons by sacked Tory MP Margot James yesterday, has of late dominated Westminster conversations - not least because he was discovered wandering Parliament’s corridors on Tuesday night, glass of red wine in hand, searching for a journalist’s offices.

Boris Johnson’s “attack dog” - his special adviser to the Government - is credited with orchestrating all his recent radical decisions: proroguing Parliament and the unprecedented purge of Tory veterans and ex-ministers who voted against their party.

“Advisers advise, ministers decide,” James said darkly, invoking Margaret Thatcher. But Cummings, 47, is not one of a kind - in fact he bears a striking resemblance to Labour’s own enforcer, Seumas Milne, aged 61.

The strategy and communications director is one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most trusted advisers. Since 2015, when he left his associate editor job at The Guardian to work for Labour, he is said to have pulled the strings. Here is how they measure up:

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Stealth privilege

They may style themselves as outsiders but Milne and Cummings both come from backgrounds that placed them among the elite early.

Milne’s father, Alasdair Milne, was BBC director-general; Cummings’s father was a wealthy project manager for oil rigs - his mother was a special needs teacher.

Both went to ancient schools (Milne’s Winchester College inching out Cummings’s Durham School, an independent founded in 1414), and to Oxford, Milne reading PPE at Balliol and Cummings getting a first in ancient and modern history from Exeter College.

Russian roulette

Both are rather keen on Russia.

Cummings speaks the language and loves Dostoevsky. He spent three years there after university, helping set up an airline - a venture that attracted threats from the KGB.

In recent years he is said to have become fond of a phrase by Lenin: “The worse the better.”

Milne, meanwhile, is more interested in the politics.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Seamas Milne
PA Archive/PA Images

While associate editor at The Guardian he attended the Valdai forum, a Moscow-based discussion group closely linked with Vladimir Putin, described as “a testing ground for the Kremlin’s foreign policy initiatives.”

His interests were well known at The Guardian — once, as he reached for his ringing phone, a colleague quipped: “You should get that, it’ll be the Kremlin,” leading to a furious showdown in the newsroom.

Attack dogs

Each believes in going for what they want by the shortest route possible.

For Milne, by all accounts, this is literal. At The Guardian he was notorious for refusing to stand aside in corridors, forcing people to dart out of his way.

At one point a 6ft colleague made a stand: the two crashed, sending Milne, who is of slight build, flying and scattering papers.

In his current role Milne is known as The Thin Controller, getting what he wants by smashing it though: allegedly threatening Labour MPs with deselection should they not support Jeremy Corbyn.

Cummings presents arguments with the look of a man on the verge of exploding with anger.

Dominic Cummings
AFP/Getty Images

It was he who engineered the dramatic kicking out of 21 MPs from the Tory Party after they voted against the Government on Tuesday.

Ken Clarke, one of those sacked, said of him afterwards: “[The party has] been taken over by rather a knockabout sort of character who’s got this bizarre crash-it-through philosophy.”

Outsider state of mind

Neither is seen as a true believer within their party.

Milne is far more Left-wing than the majority of Labour MPs - “Marxist” is the usual description - while Cummings has claimed not to be a member of any party and is suspected of never having voted Tory.

He has not always spoken kindly of the party — in 2017, he said: “People think, and by the way I think most people are right, ‘The Tory Party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me.’”

Both have a level of enthusiasm that risks undermining their own leaders.

Milne is seen as “Corbyn’s brain”, having taken it over parasite-style; Johnson had to clarify Cummings was carrying out his orders — his adviser was him “in a latex mask”, the PM said — not the other way round.

Courting controversy

While comment editor at The Guardian, Milne took part of a speech by Osama bin Laden and ran it as a column, bylined as Bin Laden.

Cummings, meanwhile, details his out-there thoughts in long, rambling blogs — in one, he wrote that after Brexit, Britain should think about teaming up with tycoon Jeff Bezos to build a moon base, the better to establish international co-operation.

While working for Michael Gove at the Department of Education, Cummings wrote his boss a very long paper arguing that a child’s future is predominantly determined by their genetics, and Labour’s Sure Start programme for pre-schoolers was therefore capable of “no real gains”.

His claim that 70 per cent of performance is gene-related was mainly taken from work by a single geneticist.

‘Maverick Geniuses’

Neither seems to particularly like politicians or journalists, or indeed the rules and traditions that connect the two.

Milne — the Labour Party’s director of strategy and communication - largely ignores queries from hacks, and when he does brief the lobby he prefers to do so as a “Labour source” rather than by name - often contradicting the lines already put out by senior ministers in the process.

Seumas Milne
Getty Images

Cummings has talked contemptuously of the “babbling of the commentariat” and the politicians who care about what journalists think.

Each of them has held the position of “maverick genius” in their parties: Milne is able to talk in great detail about foreign policy, “mesmerising” colleagues by rattling off all the jihadi groups by name; Cummings has a reputation for making the correct calls and “not giving a f***” what anyone thinks of him, in contrast to the courtiers that surround the party’s top brass.

House style

Milne now dresses in fairly unremarkable suits but when he met his then-wife, Italian-born Cristina Montanari, at Oxford, he impressed her with his white chinos and black polo-necks - she is said to have thought he looked like the characters in TV spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Further back, there was even greater commitment to style:college contemporaries recall him wearing a Mao jacket and talking with a Palestinian accent.

He and Montanari have two children and are now separated.

In 2017 he was spotted in a clinch with Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer who is defending Julian Assange. He is said to eat the same Pret lunch every day.

Cummings has his own brand of “disruptor chic”, preferring clothes that look like he has slept in them for several days: severely creased linen shirt, Vote Leave tote, black gilet.

'Close circle': Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s strategy director, and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell
Bloomberg via Getty Images

As Johnson entered No 10, Cummings was pictured lurking in the hall in an old T-shirt.

A day or two of this might look like carelessness, a lifetime suggests he is cultivating a brand.

He was also recently spotted in his own clinch: kissing his wife, The Spectator’s deputy editor Mary Wakefield, in Green Park on Tuesday, in a break from the parliamentary turmoil.

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