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Once described as a “career psychopath” by former Prime Minister David Cameron, Mr Cummings appears to have become the most powerful unelected political figure in the country. He came to the fore as a special adviser to Michael Gove in 2007. He then attracted further attention as the chief administrative mastermind behind the successful Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum and when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, Mr Cummings was installed as his chief aide, directing operations from Downing Street.

He can largely be credited for the Conservative Party’s triumph in the December 12 general election and for delivering Brexit.

What may be less well known is that for much of this period, the Brexit guru has maintained an unusual blog and has given several speeches – where he has talked about breakthroughs in science and made contributions to debates about the structures in Government and education.

Several of these have an intellectual interest – but, given his current role at the heart of power, they may also yield insights into his thinking.

It was in one of his talks that Mr Cummings arguably made one of the most controversial claims about Downing Street.

In a 2014 speech at the Institute for Public Policy, the former Vote Leave director argued that MPs are completely unsuited to become ministers because they only succeed by being good at political “gimmicks”, while having no understanding of how to make complex decisions or run big departments.

He said it did not matter who won the 2015 general election because the leading members of both parties were the “wrong people” with “bad education” for the jobs they would be expected to do.

He called for the Prime Minister to be allowed to appoint ministers from outside the House of Commons to run departments and for a fundamental shake-up of Whitehall to prioritise evidence-based decision making and the best skills from business and science.

He said: “Westminster and Whitehall are dominated by arts graduates with very poor quantitative skills, little or no understanding of important technical or scientific issues and little or no experience of successful organisations.

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“Most MPs have never been put in charge of managing 100 people let alone 10,000 people.

“They have never managed a budget of £1million and then they have to manage a budget of £70billion.

“MPs don’t like listening – they like talking. People are promoted on the basis of gimmicks.

“How many of our best scientists and entrepreneurs are represented at the top of decision making in Whitehall? The answer is approximately zero.”

Mr Cummings suggested it would have been easier to appoint outside Cabinet ministers to the House of Lords and give them “rights of audience” in the House of Commons to answer questions and take part in debates.

Responding to questions after his speech, Mr Cummings also hit out at the relationship between former Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood and former Prime Minister David Cameron.

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He said: “Heywood is more important than anyone in the Cabinet, apart from Cameron and Osborne and arguably more important than Osborne.

“He sits right next to the Prime Minister. He has him completely by the balls and Cameron does not do anything without Heywood’s permission.”

Mr Cummings also criticised Mr Cameron for having no political priorities whatsoever and operating in chaos.

He added: “It’s the nature of the Cameron team.

“Quite simply, chaos is all they have ever known. They operate in a bubble in which it is, at most, 10 days planning or more usually 48 hours or 72 hours.

“There is no long-term priority. There is no long-term plan. The central people operate in that kind of culture. They don’t think anything can change. They just think that is politics.

“If you have a Prime Minister who has no sense of priorities and cannot manage his way out of a paper bag, and his two chief advisers who don’t know what they are doing with Craig Oliver [Mr Cameron’s communications director] running round with a ridiculous grid which is worrying about Twitter and the news cycle for the next three hours, of course it’s going to be a farce.”

Mr Cummings suggested splitting the role of Permanent Secretary into a chief policy adviser and a chief executive – both of whom would be appointed by ministers.

He also suggested creating departmental “red teams” whose job would have been to challenge decision-making within departments in order to ensure policies were properly thought through before being implemented.

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