The Startup Party: what is Dominic Cummings planning now?

When the exit poll drops on general election night, Dominic Cummings wants to spring back to the centre of British politics at the head of a new political party.

Back in August, the former Downing Street svengali laid out a plan on his Substack blog describing next steps if Rishi Sunak suffers an election night knockout, including the need to "divert energy and money away from 'how to revive the Tories' to 'how to replace the Tories'" .

He has now revealed that he will do this by launching a new party, currently referred to as The Startup Party, which will be "completely different from the other parties", he told The ipaper.

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What's the new party?

First, it's not actually going to be called The Startup Party. Cummings wrote that "a new party is a startup and it’s a good way to think about this project", but The Startup Party "isn’t an actual name, it’s a place holder". There is "plenty of time for horrific arguments about names if we make this real!", he added.

In his Substack post, he said he wanted a new party focused on cutting immigration, closing tax loopholes for "the 1 percent", investing in public services and dramatically reforming the civil service.

It will be "ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media", he told the ipaper, and "friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country, people who build things in [the] private and public sector".

Cummings wants the party to be filled with entrepreneurs, NHS workers and military veterans, but "he has not released any details about important factors such as its funding, membership and governance", said the outlet.

Although he believes that if Nigel Farage returns to frontline politics the Tories "could easily be driven down to double digit seats", making challenger movements like the Startup Party e a "very mainstream idea", Farage himself would not be welcome in Cummings' party because he is "basically the same as the MPs".

New parties generally fare better in nations with proportional representation, but Cummings insists his imagined party can be electorally successful despite the first-past-the-post system because history shows that big changes that "reshape states" can follow wars and pandemics.

What do commentators say?

Cummings "seems to believe that the start up party he envisages will magically arise like a phoenix from the ashes of the old Westminster parties", wrote Nigel Jones in The Spectator, but he forgets that "even with Farage's dynamic presence" it took Ukip "more than twenty years of patient work before it harvested enough support" to become an "existential threat" to the Tories.

Although "everything militates against the idea" of him succeeding, "right now there's a gap in the market", wrote Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard, so "just because it’s Dom, it doesn't mean it's wrong".

Although Cummings "may be too tarnished to upturn British politics again" as a public figure, wrote Will Lloyd for The Times, he "may also be the prophet who seeds these ideas among British conservatives", so his detractors "would be unwise to laugh too much" .

It's "hard to avoid the conclusion" that political success "isn't even his ambition", wrote Tom Harris in The Telegraph. So "if his ambition stretches, for now", no further than "contributing to the sense" that Sunak's government is "on its last legs", then "he can consider his latest intervention a success".