Dominic Cummings has forecast that Nigel Farage will be the UK’s next Prime Minister if he can build the right team around him.
Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former right-hand man, says the Reform UK leader will succeed if he can extend his reach beyond being a ‘one man band with an iPhone’ to bringing in ‘genuinely talented people’.
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Johnson’s former Chief Adviser, whose spectacular fall from grace at the end of 2020 led to a bitter war of words with his former boss said he would even vote for Farage if he managed to do that.
‘I think it’s mainly in his hands. If by the time of the local elections next year he’s built the team that the country wants to see, then you have to say that he’s the favourite at that point, for sure.
If he builds a team and no one else does anything, then I’d vote for him, yeah. Why not?’
But he warned that if he failed to create the right team, he would ‘implode’ on contact with Whitehall.
In a no-holds-barred interview, Cummings also slammed PM Sir Keir Starmer as ‘completely rubbish at politics’ and even dubbed him an ‘NPC PM’. NPC – a gaming term for a non-player character – is a popular Gen Z insult for someone who is a complete bystander to the action.
Cummings, credited with masterminding Johnson’s spectacular 2019 landslide victory and even winning the Brexit referendum, prophesied that Starmer would be gone by next year, possibly replaced by Ed Miliband or even Angela Rayner.
Dominic Cummings has forecast that Nigel Farage will be the UK’s next Prime Minister
Cummings said the Reform UK leader will succeed if he can build the right team around him
And he tore into Tory leader Kemi Badenoch as a ‘disaster’ who would be out of a job come the May elections, writing off her party as ‘already past the event horizon’ and facing extinction.
Meanwhile he prolonged his enmity with Johnson, saying there was no chance of a comeback for him – ‘100 per cent – it’s impossible’ as he talked about how he helped to bring down the then PM with a series of leaks which led to the infamous ‘Partygate’ scandal.
Heavily critical of Labour’s handling of the migrant crisis and the economy, Cummings also warned that the ‘British state is broken’ and said in an expletive-laden rant:
‘The way to stop the f***ing stupid boat dinghies’ is to deploy the Royal Navy in the English Channel.’
He said the approach to the public finances, particularly the empowerment of the Office for Budget Responsibility, was ‘completely insane’ and needed to be ripped up and suggested someone should ‘take a chainsaw to the old Northcote-Trevelyan system [the basis of the civil service] at the foundations’, abolishing the Cabinet Office in the process.
In an interview with The Times, he said he now preferred spending time at home with his family and said he would not return to politics.
‘No one wants me back and I don’t want to go back,’ he said.
