Cummings signals collapse

Dominic Cummings doesn’t give interviews often. When he does, something has usually shifted. A Sky News appearance on Wednesday, alongside a sprawling, doom-laced blog post, suggests he now believes Britain is tipping from dysfunction into collapse. This isn’t the Cummings of Vote Leave or Downing Street. This is Cummings as End Times diagnostician: more Turchin than Bismarck, more Cassandra than Rasputin.

His core thesis remains unchanged. Britain is not governed by its politicians. Real power lies elsewhere—in the hands of unaccountable civil servants, the legal establishment and a National Security Secretariat so opaque even the Prime Minister can’t fully penetrate it. What’s changed is his tone, which has hardened from contempt to fatalism. The system, he argues, is no longer merely incompetent. It is delusional, unreformable and terminal. The collapse, he warns, won’t be gentle.

Cummings speaks of violence, of parallel networks forming beyond state control, of civil servants privately fearing ethnic unrest on a scale unseen for decades.

At the centre of this slow-motion crisis, as ever, is immigration. Cummings claims that stopping the boats is operationally trivial but legally impossible. The Human Rights Act blocks any serious action. Sunak knew this and failed. Starmer, he says, is replaying the same pantomime-raising expectations while knowing full well that the legal infrastructure makes meaningful change impossible. The result is preordained: another cycle of anger, more dinghy footage and the fracturing of Labour’s electoral coalition.

Into this vacuum steps Nigel Farage. Cummings has no illusions. Reform UK, he says, is "Farage and an iPhone." But that, for now, may be enough. Voters aren’t looking for a government. They’re looking for a weapon. Farage’s poll surge isn’t about policies but a howl of rage against a regime that no longer governs and a media class that no longer informs.

Can Farage transition from wrecking ball to statesman? Cummings lays out the test: can Reform attract elite talent, build a credible team and project itself as a government-in-waiting? If yes, the Tories are finished. If not, someone else will pick up the baton.

Cummings insists he won’t return to Westminster, join Reform or run. But he’s watching and thinking. His blog reads less like commentary than like an early warning system. He speaks of failing infrastructure, a vulnerable energy grid and no-go areas. He wants to build a dashboard to track indicators of collapse: service failures, breakdowns in law and order, social unrest. This is not punditry. It is a running diagnosis of regime failure.

What makes Cummings so unsettling to the establishment isn’t his abrasiveness. It’s his track record. He said the old parties would implode. They have. He said the courts would block immigration reform. They did. He said Sunak and Starmer were optimising for civil service applause, not delivery. They are. He predicted Farage’s return. It’s happening.

You don’t have to like Cummings to recognise that the system he describes is now plainly visible. Just walk outside, turn on the news, or ask someone how long they waited at A&E.

The question now is not whether the regime is breaking down, but what replaces it. Ever the systems man, Cummings wants new people, new methods, new institutions—something like Apollo-programme logic applied to statecraft. But he knows he’s become an anti-meme in SW1: too radioactive to lead the repair. So he shouts from the margins, publishing treatises as the cast implodes.

In another era, his ideas might have been absorbed, institutionalised, even celebrated. Not now. Now they circulate as truthbombs: read by insiders, repeated by rebels, never spoken aloud. He warns the system will break and that it may not break cleanly. Farage is a possibility, not a solution. Reform is still a hypothesis. And chaos, as Cummings sees it, isn’t coming. It’s already here.