Dominic Cummings, the former head of the Vote Leave campaign who was found in contempt of parliament in March for refusing to appear before MPs, is to be a senior adviser to Boris Johnson in a controversial appointment.

Cummings will serve as one of two key aides to Johnson, alongside the new prime minister’s former adviser when he was London mayor, Sir Edward Lister. These roles will be in place of a formal chief of staff, a role fulfilled by former Tory MP Gavin Barwell under Theresa May.

Cummings, an outspoken and abrasive character who was an adviser to Michael Gove in the Department for Education before becoming director of the official leave campaign, is not expected to have a specific remit.

Instead, he will focus on policymaking, in a sort of chief executive role under Johnson, with Lister giving attention to strategic matters and liaison.

Profile Who is Dominic Cummings? Show Hide Dominic Cummings, the son of an oil rig project manager and a special needs teacher, was born in Durham in 1971. He attended a state primary school followed by the fee-paying Durham school and, in 1994, Oxford University, where he studied ancient and modern history. After three years living in Russia, where he attempted to set up an airline connecting Samara in the south with Vienna, the then 28-year-old became campaign director of Business for Sterling, which worked to prevent Britain from joining the euro. Although he has never, as far as anyone knows, been a member of a political party, Cummings was headhunted to be director of strategy for the then Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, in 2002. While he was seen as a “young, thrusting moderniser”, Cummings quickly offended party traditionalists. He quit the job after only eight months, describing Duncan Smith as incompetent. Following the 2010 general election, the then education secretary, Michael Gove, appointed Cummings as his chief of staff. Many in Whitehall found Cummings as difficult as he found them. In 2013, civil servants in the Department for Education complained to the Independent of an “us-and-them, aggressive, intimidating culture” created by Cummings and Gove. He never hid his disdain for the workings of Whitehall and has derided Westminster figures in eye-catching media interviews and published rambling blogposts that are obsessed over by Westminster insiders. He described prime minister David Cameron as “a sphinx without a riddle”, and former Brexit minister David Davis as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad, and vain as Narcissus”. In 2015, Cummings and the political strategist Matthew Elliott founded Vote Leave, which was designated by the Electoral Commission as the official EU referendum leave campaign in April of the following year. Since the EU referendum, its tactics have been the subject of a series of high-profile scandals. Vote Leave’s use of data analytics has been scrutinised after the Observer reported that the data-mining company Cambridge Analytica had links to the Canadian digital firm AggregateIQ, on which Vote Leave spent 40% of its campaign budget.

In July 2018, the Electoral Commission announced Vote Leave had been found guilty of breaking electoral law by overspending, following testimony from whistleblowers. The group was fined £61,000 and referred to the police.

Cummings has used his blog to furiously defend himself and the Vote Leave campaign. In March 2019, he was found in contempt of parliament for refusing to appear at a committee of MPs investigating fake news. Frances Perraudin

Cummings is likely to prove a hugely contentious early appointment, not least as it is only four months since he was formally found in contempt of parliament by a committee of MPs investigating fake news.

The Commons committee of privileges said Cummings’ refusal to give oral evidence to another committee of MPs investigating false news stories during the EU referendum campaign constituted a significant interference in the work of the inquiry.

The appointment of Cummings, who was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a Channel 4 Brexit drama last year, indicates a robust approach to Brexit by a Johnson government and could dismay more moderate Tories.

Sarah Wollaston, a former Tory MP who quit the party this year and now sits as an independent, said it would be “an appalling error of judgment to appoint someone who has been in contempt of parliament”.

She tweeted: “Very rare for this to happen & would be shameful to be rewarded by PM with such a high profile role.”

The Vote Leave mastermind’s arrival in Downing Street “will bring trepidation into No 10 and more widely in the civil service”, the former head of the civil service Lord Kerslake said.

He said from what he knew Cummings was “somewhat anarchistic, arrogant and adversarial” fuelling fears across Whitehall of wider dismantling of the civil service presence among the top Brexit roles.

Since the Brexit referendum Cummings has filed numerous, often hugely long and occasionally ponderous, updates to his personal blog, a number of which have been insulting to people he might now have to work with.

One post in July 2017 – which seems to have been since deleted – referred to the then Brexit secretary, David Davis, tipped for a return to cabinet, as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad, and vain as Narcissus”.

Kate Green, the chair of the Commons standards committee, said Cummings’

appointment despite the committee’s criticisms in March was “a very

serious matter”.

“An admonishment of an individual for contempt of parliament is an

extremely serious matter, which I would expect any government to take

very careful note of in making appointments,” she said.