Show caption Remain demonstrators outside parliament last week with Dominic Cummings ‘devil’ masks. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/AFP/Getty Images Dominic Cummings The real reason we should fear the work of Dominic Cummings Downing Street’s controversial top adviser faces new accusations of poisoning politics, but his true nature was clear during Vote Leave’s Brexit triumph Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla Sat 7 Sep 2019 20.59 BST Share on Facebook

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On 2 March 2017, shortly after my first major article on Cambridge Analytica was published, a furious tweeter appeared in my timeline: “1/ big @Guardian by @carolecadwalla on Mercer/Cambridge Analytica = full of errors & itself spreads disinformation.”

It marked the moment that Dominic Cummings entered my life – though at the time I had no idea who he was. At that time few people did. Cummings was the dark horse, known to just a few Westminster insiders, who had stealthily steered Vote Leave to victory in June 2016 while the rest of us were looking the other way.

But that is no longer the case. In the past two weeks, he has emerged from the shadows and burned himself on to the nation’s consciousness. As Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, he’s helped mastermind some of the most audacious – and outrageous – moves ever committed by a British prime minister: an attempt to suspend parliament, and the expulsion of 21 moderate MPs from the Conservative party. Moves that led the mild man of British politics, the former prime minister John Major, to call him a “political anarchist” who was “poisoning politics”.

For experienced Cummings watchers, it’s an odd moment. Here is a figure that many of us – MPs, journalists, lawyers, MEPs and members of the public – have been shouting about for years. And, in a plot twist none of us saw coming, he is wreaking chaos again, but this time in the full scorching glare of the public eye. Or as Ian Lucas, the Labour MP for Wrexham, says: “It’s good that everyone’s talking about him. They’re just talking about him for all the wrong reasons.”

What we need to be talking about, he says, is “his deliberate, systematic conspiracy to commit electoral fraud and the fact that he has refused to come before parliament and answer questions about it”.

The colourful tales about Cummings are all noise drowning the key fact about him, which should be front and centre in every report: that this is the man who – according to evidence published by the Electoral Commission – played a central role in a scheme that resulted in Vote Leave being judged to have broken the law. A scheme that constitutes the greatest electoral fraud perpetrated in Britain for more than a century – one that Cummings has refused to come before parliament to answer questions about.

So that is where we are now: where the man advising the prime minister in parliament was previously judged to have been in contempt of that same parliament.

Lucas serves on the committee for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which wrote to Cummings once again last week to demand that he appear. Lucas describes the situation as insane: “The people at the heart of Vote Leave who cheated and broke the law are now running the country. And no one is interested. I’m staggered that as an MP, I feel powerless about it, and you as a journalist have been shouting about it and nobody is interested, not even the BBC. Who never even covered this.”

In March 2017, when Cummings first tweeted at me – a 12-point thread about my idiocy, “data charlatans” and Leave.EU “babble” – I knew none of this. But over the next 18 months, we became engaged in a strange cat-and-mouse game. I have never met Cummings but I’ve studied him. And this is not a game.

For me, it’s the ongoing question of rule of law. For him, it’s an opportunity to drive an axe through everything he most hates about the British state, starting with parliament, and ending, I suspect, with the civil service. That’s the deal I believe he will have done with Johnson: he’ll help Johnson get Brexit through, and in exchange, Cummings will blow up his hated civil service.

When Cummings leapt on to my timeline, the most perplexing aspect of his outrage was that my report had nothing to do with him. That first article, in February 2017, didn’t mention Cummings at all: it was all about Leave.EU – the Nigel Farage-led outfit that Arron Banks funded – and its relationship with Robert Mercer – the hedge fund billionaire who funded Donald Trump – Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica.

Cummings, it turned out, was outraged at my suggestion that Banks and co had helped swing the referendum – especially, at the idea that they’d done something clever with data. Because Cummings was the self-appointed data genius, the savant whose interest in quantum physics had, in his own estimation, been the crucial factor that led the Brexit campaign to success. Days later, matters got murkier. A reader from Canada supplied me with an extraordinary tip-off: a then secret relationship between Cambridge Analytica and the Canadian data firm Cummings had employed, AIQ.

Cummings went silent. He had no comment to make, though he eventually insisted, via email, that he’d found AIQ “on the internet”, a ridiculous claim given AIQ didn’t even have a website indexed to the web at the time. Later, one of the whistleblowers confessed to me that he had introduced AIQ to Vote Leave. He had known the company from working with it at Cambridge Analytica.

Boris Johnson en route from Downing St to the Houses of Parliament with special adviser Dominic Cummings. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

And then, on 23 March 2018, matters came to a head. Shahmir Sanni had come forward. He alleged Vote Leave had deliberately used AIQ to break electoral spending laws, allegations now proven and admitted by Vote Leave. This money – nearly three-quarters of a million pounds – was spent in the crucial last four days of the campaign. The period which, by Cummings’s own reckoning, tipped the vote in Vote Leave’s favour: when it served 1.5 billion ads to just seven million people it had identified as “persuadable” or “shy” voters.

I sent Cummings a long multi-point “right to reply”, to which he breezily responded: “hi carole, am dealing with toddler today which is tricky to combine with dealing with you!” He went on: “Fyi your whistleblower is lying to you.” And concluded: “though i think your conspiracy barmy, you seem not a dreadful person and i rather admire you for hammering away at this in a funny way, meant non-patronisingly!”

To use a Breaking Bad comparison, I think Cummings might see me as Hank to his Walter White: the dumb detective he effortlessly evades. Every time he publishes a 10,000-word blog, he sends me the link and suggests I might find it interesting. And although the barmy conspiracy is now the subject of a police investigation, there have already been complaints of incompetence and unexplained delays by the Met, who say “political sensitivities” surround the investigation. And the Observer has learned that the unit behind it has failed in two investigations to bring charges against the ex-mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, even though he was found guilty of vote rigging by a private prosecution brought before the Supreme Court. A group of MPs and MEPs are now seeking a judicial review of the conduct of both the Vote Leave and Leave.EU investigations. In any case, his is not the name in the frame. It’s Vote Leave’s “responsible person”, the man whose name was on the form, one faceless Alan Halsall.