Dominic Cummings beats a carpet in Moscow, where he lived in his early 20s after graduating from Oxford, long before he was regularly seen around Westminster as Boris Johnson’s aide

At an airport in central Russia soon after the fall of communism, a British man described as a potential “train wreck” was seen strolling along swigging from a bottle of vodka.

Had you asked those who knew him whether they thought this “obstinate” man in his twenties who drank too much might go on 20 years later to mastermind Britain’s exit from the European Union and become the senior adviser in Downing Street, they would have laughed. Light has finally been shed on the mysterious period that Dominic Cummings spent in Russia in the mid-1990s, after The Times spoke to Adam Dixon, a US businessman who employed him.

Mr Dixon had launched a flight route early that decade, connecting Samara in central Russia with Vienna.