Professor Norman Stone, Michael Gove & Dominic Cummings: ruling class combatants
Dominic Cummings attack on Boris Johnson is not perhaps a surprise given what is known of his background.
Cummings was taught by the late Professor Norman Stone at Oxford and emerged with a first-class history degree. Stone was summed up by Otto English (Byline Times January 2020)
Stone was an arch manipulator who specialised in malice, abuse and dismissiveness of those with whom he disagreed. He was a man lost in his own self-absorbed myth, who had an over-arching belief in his intellectual prowess over those of others.
Cummings clearly learnt well as his time running the Vote Leave campaign underlined.
His ability to promote his own ideas while attacking those he worked for goes back well before that. When Gove was Education Secretary he planned to introduce a new history curriculum. Gove’s special advisor was Cummings. Even Tory historians like Niall Ferguson (also taught by Norman Stone) rejected Gove’s plans as unworkable gibberish.
Cummings visited a noted critic, Richard J Evans (who was no friend of Stone either)and as he wrote in the London Review of Books, promptly proceeded to attack Gove.
(Niall) Ferguson had stated in one of his early articles in defence of Gove that it was safe to say I wouldn’t be among those consulted about the new curriculum. But he was wrong. Gove sent his special political adviser to see me. A slim, balding, casually dressed, youngish man came into my Cambridge office and flopped into an armchair. ‘Well’, he said, ‘we’ve fucked up, haven’t we?’ It was Dominic Cummings.
This wasn’t quite what I’d expected. Special political advisers usually dress fairly formally and don’t use that kind of language about the policies favoured by their political masters. But I couldn’t help agreeing with him. History, I said, had among other things the aim of producing independent-minded adults who could read critically and think for themselves. ‘I’ll buy that,’ Cummings said. We plunged into a lively discussion that went on for an hour or more. I formed the impression that he was someone who pursued his own line of thought irrespective of what convention dictated. He had, after all, I realised, studied history at university himself.
Richard J Evans, London Review of Books 12th September 2019
The latest Cummings attack, this time on Johnson, does underline the case that Johnson simply does not do his homework. Shouldn’t he have been aware of Cummings track record of attacking those who employ him?
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