When Boris Johnson first approached Dominic Cummings during the Conservative leadership election, the former Vote Leave mastermind played hard to get.
“He said he needed to be in charge of everything,” one source privy to the discussions at the time said.
They were, he joked, his “terrorist demands” of a prime minister-in-waiting who badly needed a heavyweight enforcer. It took several meetings before the men could agree terms.
But despite the promise since Mr Johnson’s emphatic election victory two months ago, ministers have ruefully noted that Mr Cummings has been on the losing side of the most significant domestic arguments that have landed on the prime minister’s desk.
He vehemently opposed giving the go-ahead to the HS2 rail network that he described as a “disaster zone” and was a hawk on allowing the Chinese tech giant Huawei access to the UK’s 5G networks. Yesterday Mr Cummings was pictured entering Downing Street carrying a book called Chinese Spies on the growth of Beijing’s intelligence network.
Meanwhile, his radical plan to slim down the cabinet and create a trade and business ministry has also been ditched.
The civil service, well used to political zealots, has also seen off his attempts to bring “weirdos and misfits” into Whitehall, pointing out — respectfully — that even the prime minister’s chief of staff could not recruit civil servants.
He even failed in his more modest proposal to rearrange the Downing Street office space when Mr Johnson decided that he didn’t want to leave his study to become part of a Nasa-style mission control centre.
It has led those, who at first feared Mr Cummings as an almost Rasputin-like power behind Mr Johnson’s throne, to question just how far his writ runs.
As one senior government figure put it: “Whenever you get a new team of aides in Downing Street they want to exert their influence. But after a while things always settle down and the normal structures of government reassert themselves.”
Each of the decisions that has gone against Mr Cummings has had a different rationale but they speak to a broader issue that faces prime ministers who are urged to support radical reform.
In the case of HS2 Mr Johnson was persuaded to support the scheme over Mr Cummings’s objections for several reasons.
He was under intense lobbying pressure from Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands who is facing re-election in May. Then a series of big businesses, including HSBC, which had relocated large parts of its operations to Birmingham on the promise of the line, threatened to speak out if the plug were pulled.
Meanwhile Savid Javid, the chancellor, warned that pulling the project would cost billions of pounds in sunk costs and could not be easily replaced by smaller, more effective rail projects. The decision has yet to be announced — but Mr Cummings’s objections have been over-ruled.
Political considerations also torpedoed Mr Cummings’s plans to reshape Whitehall.
He wanted to reduce the size of the cabinet as well as abolishing the culture and international development departments and merging the business and trade portfolios under one minister.
But the original proposal has now been massively scaled back after whips warned Mr Johnson that a smaller cabinet would reduce his power of patronage and create unnecessary enemies from sacked cabinet ministers on the back benches.
At the same time when Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, established a high-powered team of civil servants to work through Mr Cummings’s “machinery of government changes” the plan was swiftly reassessed.
“It quickly became clear that all our energy was going to be spent moving people around rather than getting on and doing things,” said one adviser.
Other eye-catching initiatives have also fallen flat.
A leaked proposal to move Tory HQ to the north of England was disowned and a ban on ministers from the “people’s government” sipping “champagne with billionaires” at Davos was ignored by Mr Javid. Plans to force the House of Lords to relocate to York have also gone quiet.
At the same time Mr Cummings has got much of the blame for Downing Street’s aggressive media strategy in which ministers have been banned from Today on BBC Radio 4 and newspaper journalists barred from official briefings.
His handling — and the subsequent briefing — of the sacking of the government’s climate tsar Claire O’Neill is also seen to have badly misfired. She chose to use Today to take her revenge, accusing Mr Johnson of “not getting” climate change on the day the prime minister was due to launch COP26.
Some ministerial aides have speculated that, with Brexit now done, the frustrations of government may sooner rather than later cause Mr Cummings to reassess his position.
But those close to him deny this. They say his reforming zeal is undimmed even if it is not always shared by his boss.
They point to his time in the Department for Education working for Michael Gove when he was never happier than engaging in trench warfare with the parts of the media, the educational establishment and quite often Downing Street.
As one put it, in the kind of emotive language favoured by Mr Cummings himself: “Whitehall is littered with the bodies of those who have underestimated Dom.”
Chinese whispers
Mr Cummings has told advisers to read books by Silicon Valley tech bosses. Now weeks after Mr Johnson gave the go-ahead to Huawei to take a stake in Britain’s 5G network he appears to have espionage on his mind.
He walked into Downing Street yesterday with a copy of Chinese Spies — a book on Beijing’s intelligence services by Roger Faligot. But Mr Cummings — who opposed the Huawei decision — may find solace in its conclusions. A Times review suggested it showed China’s spies were too devious for their own good. “In their constant quest to discover the imagined layers of meaning . . . the spooks may be tying themselves in knots,” Roger Boyes wrote.