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Few people have had as much influence on British politics over the past two decades as Dominic Cummings. The history of Britain’s relationship with Europe may well have been very different
without him. He is one of those rare individuals who has bent the arc of history. When Tony Blair was prime minister and at the height of his powers, Mr Cummings went to work for Business
for Sterling, the group opposed to Britain joining the single currency. His strategy raised the political price of trying to jettison the pound at a time when the Tories struggled to provide
any opposition to Mr Blair at Westminster. Mr Cummings always had his eye on a bigger prize, though: a referendum on EU membership. One of the reasons he was determined to run the campaign
against a regional assembly in his native northeast in 2004 was to test out tactics. In a foretaste of 2016, Mr Cummings succeeded in a Labour heartland with an insurgent, anti-establishment
campaign. Despite this, he was initially hesitant about getting involved. He knew that organising Eurosceptics was like herding cats, but the lure of taking Britain out of the EU was too
much to resist. He set about devising a brilliant, maverick campaign. Rather than making it all about sovereignty and global free trade — traditional Eurosceptic themes — he turned it into a
debate about control, summed up by the campaign slogan “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”. Many Tory MPs resented the way Mr Cummings ran the operation and how
he did not disguise his contempt for them. A group of them tried, and failed, to remove him. The victory in that referendum might have come to very little if Mr Cummings had not returned to
the fray last year. After much cajoling, he moved to No 10 with Boris Johnson. There he provided a brutal clarity. Under his watch, the Tory party expelled “Brexit blocker” MPs, reached an
agreement with the EU and then fought a general election campaign on its “oven-ready deal” that wrong-footed the Labour Party and delivered an 80 seat majority. Advertisement For all his
campaigning success, Mr Cummings had long been more interested in how government works. His attempt to put his theories into practice has undoubtedly been disrupted by the pandemic, which
has consumed much of his energies in the past few months. The lateral flow Covid tests, which may offer Britain a quicker route back to normality, are very much his project. But with Mr
Cummings so focused on mass testing, other bits of domestic policy have slipped through the net. These matters were not his responsibility, but no one else had the authority to resolve them
and the number of people who were prepared to be chief of staff with Mr Cummings in the building was limited to his protégés. He never worked hard enough to rebuild relationships with Tory
MPs after the disobliging things he had said about them. He was also guilty of not making allies when he could have done and instead choosing the path of confrontation. But as Mr Cummings
walked out of No 10 last night, he left behind him a bigger legacy than many prime ministers. JAMES FORSYTH IS POLITICAL EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR