Credit: PA
Dominic Cummings has hit out at “pundit babbler” journalists for being “overconfident” and often “wrong” in the wake of the Chesham and Amersham by-election.
The former political aide singled out Mail on Sunday commentator Dan Hodges in a Twitter rant, as well as Financial Times reporters Jim Pickard and Sebastian Payne.
In a typically long thread he told followers to “stop reading these pundit babblers” if you want to improve your understanding of politics as they “don’t understand political communication, never mind how power actually works in SW1”.
Labelling Hodges the “Clown Prince” and “epistemological Godfather of the lobby” he said you can “rarely rely” on his reports, citing Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump predictions and questioning his prognosis of the Chesham and Amersham results.
On Wednesday Cummings published a series of WhatsApp conversations he had with Boris Johnson ahead of Prime Minister’s Questions.
The conversations were revealed on his Substack blog and show the PM called PPE a “disaster” and considered replacing Matt Hancock with Michael Gove.
Cummings said moving Gove would do more harm than good as the Cabinet Office was a “shitshow”.
The texts also show Johnson asking ‘what the f*ck do we do’ to his advisor, who recently gave evidence to a parliamentary committee on the government’s response to the pandemic.
In the blog, Mr Cummings accused the PM of trying to “rewrite history” to defend Hancock and said Mr Johnson “cannot be trusted now either on Covid or any other crucial issue of war and peace”.
He also said a Covid-19 public inquiry will not fix Downing Street’s approach and it has been designed to “punt the tricky parts until after this PM has gone”, adding Johnson will leave two years after the next election.
“He wants to make money and have fun, not go on and on”.
Related: Tories suffer humiliating defeat in Chesham and Amersham by-election
