Politics
Prime ministers were told how to stop the boats and chose not to, says Cummings
— 4 mins read
Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser told peers that officials put the answer in writing, and that ministers feared ‘social ostracism’ more than the Channel crossings.
Successive prime ministers were told in writing that the small boats could be stopped, and declined to do it because of how it would go down at London dinner parties. That was Dominic Cummings’s claim to the House of Lords Constitution Committee on 14 October.
Cummings, who ran Downing Street for Boris Johnson until November 2020, said the legal position was settled six years ago. ‘You cannot deal with the small boats problem unless you make primary law changes to the Human Rights Act and change how the courts give effect to the ECHR. That is a fact.’
He said civil servants had set out the route more than once. ‘The officials have repeatedly written down and said, “Yes, of course, Prime Minister. If you want to stop the boats, you can stop the boats. This is what you got to do legally to do that.”’
The answer, he said, was always the same. ‘Imagine how my dinner parties will go down in London if I were to do the following things. It’d be social ostracism. So it’s not done.’
The answer, he said, was always the same. ‘Imagine how my dinner parties will go down in London if I were to do the following things. It’d be social ostracism. So it’s not done.’
‘The Tories didn’t want to face the problem and Labour doesn’t’
Cummings put the blame on politicians of both parties rather than the civil service. ‘Everyone internally knows that this is the case, but everyone also internally knew that the Tories didn’t want to face the problem and that Labour doesn’t want to face the problem.’
He said he had discussed it with Rishi Sunak in December 2022, when he was considering a return to Number 10. Sunak, he claimed, ‘persuaded himself that there were very complicated ways of getting around this’ and ‘found out the hard way himself’.
Convicted terrorists not watched in jail
The same human rights law, Cummings said, stops the state keeping convicted terrorists under surveillance in prison, even after MI5 has warned they will offend again. He described asking officials after an attack whether the released man had been watched inside. ‘Is that because there’s Cabinet Office legal advice that says that because of ECHR rights to privacy, you’re not allowed to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance inside jail? “Yes, Dominic.”’
‘I would say the majority of terrorist offences that you see, there is an ECHR human rights angle,’ he told the committee. ‘Close to 0% are ever explained publicly.’ Officials did not want ministers asking the question, he said, ‘and the ministers don’t want it raised either’. He named Robert Buckland, Justice Secretary from 2019 to 2021, as a minister who ‘didn’t want anyone raising difficult questions about that’.
‘Governing like they hate us’
Asked whether the civil service should act as a guardian of the constitution, Cummings said the idea was ‘pernicious in the extreme’. Unelected officials working in secret had produced ‘unprecedented distrust and hatred for the political class in this country’.
The result, he said, was visible across the West: ‘people saying the guys in charge are not on our side. They’re governing like they hate us, which is what people are saying louder and louder and why people are starting to burn stuff down.’
Ministers, he said, had been ‘largely happy’ to let power drain to officials. ‘It’s hard even to think of a Tory minister that I dealt with who actually wanted to be responsible for what was going on in the department.’ Inside the Cabinet Office, he said, ‘the attitude is the MPs are thick’.
He also turned on Sir Keir Starmer’s speech on grooming gangs in January last year, which he said had blamed Elon Musk rather than the gangs. ‘Disinformation from the top of the British state,’ Cummings called it.
He also turned on Sir Keir Starmer’s speech on grooming gangs in January last year, which he said had blamed Elon Musk rather than the gangs.
What he wants instead
His remedy was blunt: ministers made answerable to Parliament again, prime ministers able to sack permanent secretaries, and civil servants who ‘follow orders from the political people, not to substitute their own political ideas’. At the Department for Education in 2010, he said, ‘we binned four of the top five people’. ‘Purges work.’
The committee’s inquiry into the UK’s constitutional safeguards continues. Daily Britain has asked Mr Buckland for comment.
