Kmflett's Blog

When Dominic Cummings apologised about Gove’s history curriculum

Dominic Cummings has a history of ‘apologies’. Below is an extract from a review Prof Richard J Evans wrote of a 2019 biography of Michael Gove. He refers to a meeting with Cummings, then a special advisor to Gove, where Cummings apologised for Gove’s botched attempt at a new history curriculum.

Cummings worked as Gove’s special advisor from 2007 until 2014 so its reasonable to infer he didn’t tell his boss that he had criticised him.

(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.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n17/richard-j.-evans/the-demented-dalek

Richard J Evans review of biography of Michael Gove London Review of Books 12^th September 2019