Who is popular today?

The press – and opponents within and without the Tory party – have brought Dominic Cummings to heel. But his mission remains the pursuit of polarising politics.
Dominic Cummings, the chief special adviser to the prime minister, thinks the answer to Britain’s problems is hiring brilliant people to work outside of bureaucratic constraints. He may be right, but not if one of his first hires as a “weirdo and misfit” to join him in No 10 is anything to go by. Andrew Sabisky quit after it emerged he was not a wunderkind but a rightwing provocateur who promoted ideas about eugenics cloaked in the sham argument that this is hard science. Mr Sabisky, 27, had no academic research of note to his name. From a well-off family, he hardly fit Mr Cummings’ call for “true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole”.
It speaks volumes about the arrogance of Downing Street that Boris Johnson did not immediately dump Mr Sabisky – or even disassociate himself from his views which are routinely found in the darker, damper recesses of the internet. You cannot have such people in government unless you mean to give the impression that you agree with them. But someone in No 10 thought better. Mr Johnson’s team had gone out of its way to back Mr Sabisky. When the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said Mr Sabisky’s comments were “not my views and those are not the views of the government” he was slapped down by Downing Street’s press operation. Continue reading...