Gove Polecat Is Still A Polecat

While the right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate takes it in turns to savage Young Dave for bringing back his piece of paper from Brussels with very little on it - not even the signature of the German Chancellor - the campaign to take the UK out of the EU has been mired in recrimination. And much of the recrimination concerns someone whose name will be all too familiar to Zelo Street regulars: Dominic Cummings.

Cummings is most notorious around the Westminster Village for the time he spent as a SpAd to Michael “Oiky” Gove at the Department for Education. Here, he claimed not to be behind the @toryeducation Twitter feed, a fount of invective and abuse that smeared anybody and everybody who opposed the allegedly Very Wonderful Gove reforms. Cummings was lying, and was duly grassed up by his own side.

He also managed to threaten Cameron himself before Dave bowed to the inevitable and removed Gove from the DfE, to the wailing of all those clueless pundits who had invested so much of their remaining credibility in talking up “Oiky” and his education miracle. But now Cummings is back, in harness with Matthew “Gromit” Elliott, formerly of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, at the Vote Leave campaign.

But there is competition for the prize of being designated the official Out-Of-EU campaign group, and Vote Leave is not the only contender, with leave.EU in the running, that group having also spawned Grassroots Out, which is attracting backing from Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and his fellow saloon bar propper-uppers at UKIP, as well as prominent Tory and Labour figures. Vote Leave’s biggest problem, it seems, is Elliott and Cummings.

Labour donor John Mills, who is deputy chairman of Vote Leave, emailed the less than dynamic duo on Tuesday to ask “What on earth are you doing, generating more and more ill feeling like this entirely unnecessarily? I thought you had promised to stop doing this sort of thing. Don’t you realise that this kind of behaviour puts more and more damaging and unnecessary strain on everyone?” And leave.EU are yet more scathing.

That group’s co-chairman Arron Banks has told “our dealings with both Elliott and Cummings chime with the sentiments expressed in the email from John Mills … Elliott and Cummings are two of the nastiest individuals I have ever had the misfortune to meet … I don’t think I have ever come across two individuals less equipped to run a campaign or business … I wouldn’t put them in charge of the local sweet shop”. Ouch!

So far, so damaging for the various Out campaigns, but the thought then enters that all those Great Leaps Forward at the DfE might not have been quite as wonderful as has been portrayed. Such as the Free Schools programme, which all too soon went more than £1 billion over budget and was the subject of several embarrassing failures. One of the scheme’s most vocal supporters, the loathsome Toby Young, is backing Vote Leave.

Good to see more of the right-wing’s bad luck charms supporting one another, then.