@toryeducation Buffoon Exhumed

Few aspects of Michael “Oiky” Gove’s tenure at the Department for Education were quite as embarrassing to the Tories as the presence of Dominic Cummings as a Special Advisor and, for added entertainment, the principal presence behind the @toryeducation Twitter feed, a source of endless amusement. It was clear more or less from the get-go that whoever was posting the Tweets was seriously batshit.

Olympic freestyle wibbling champion speaks

Yesterday, Cummings confirmed that he was indeed batshit, as he appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee to be quizzed by a variety of MPs, because he was now the presence behind the Vote Leave campaign, the designated organisation urging voters to back Britain’s departure from the European Union in the upcoming Referendum. Committee Chair Andrew Tyrie found Cummings uncooperative and mildly abusive.

The Great Man was clearly keen to build on veteran Labour MP Kate Hoey’s Daily Politics car crash, when she was unable to nominate one reputable study that supported the claim that Britain would be better off leaving the EU. She was sure there was one, but finding it proved elusive. Cummings went one better: we would not only be better off, but would be better off to the tune of countless billions of pounds.
So would Sir like to pitch some figures? “I don’t think it’s Vote Leave’s job to provide figures”. This was clearly going to be a difficult interrogation. Tyrie protested “But Vote Leave quotes numerous figures on its website … most of them misleading or inaccurate”. Cummings was too clever for him: “Accuracy is for snake-oil pussies … and besides, I’ve got a really bad memory”. There are never enough politicians for him to piss off.

Why did Cummings and Vote Leave suggest that the entire EU contribution, which they claimed was £350 million a week, be made available instead to the NHS, when they had also said support for farmers would be maintained? Cummings denied he’d said that. Tyrie produced a downloaded Vote Leave poster which said exactly that. Cummings said there would be lots more money to go around because, well, he knew more than they did.

What about a leaflet that looked like it was an NHS publication, but which in fact was one of Vote Leave’s, and had been picked up from Guy’s Hospital? Cummings denied the existence of such a leaflet. Tyrie produced it. Was this a Vote Leave leaflet? Well, said Cummings, it could have been. Then it was definitely one of his. But later on, it wasn’t. In any case, Vote Leave weren’t distributing them to hospitals.

So a big boy must have done it and run away, then. And that was after Cummings claimed that the British rebate from EU contributions really did get debited from the Treasury. Tyrie, who used to work there, knew it did not. But then, this was the same buffoon who told Jon Snow of Channel 4 News “The Government should eliminate your funding and make you pay your outrageous expenses yourself, instead of [the] poor taxpayer”.

Channel 4 is self-funding. It will surprise no-one that one of the committee that grilled Cummings concluded that he had “no grip on reality at all”. Not good for the outers.