We haven’t heard much from Dominic Cummings since he walked out of No. 10 Downing Street in November 2020. Now the cerebral Vote Leave mastermind has broken his silence and given us an insight into his latest project. He has proposed a new ‘start up’ party to replace the Tories after what he expects will be their decimation at the next election.

In an interview with the i newspaper and in an essay on his own Substack post, the Svengali behind Boris Johnson’s rise and fall offers a typically withering analysis of what he calls the ‘shit show’ Tories. He is equally scathing about their likely replacement with Keir Starmer’s Labour party.

Cummings believes the start up party would magically arise like a phoenix from the ashes of the old Westminster parties

Cummings castigates the Tories for presiding over a society hostile to entrepreneurs, with mounting debt, failing public services, and full of violent crime and uncontrolled immigration. But he predicts that Labour will pursue the same policies, leaving everyone ‘even more miserable’ by 2026 than they are today.

The former Downing Street Chief of Staff’s answer to this scenario is a new pop up party that will be ‘completely different’ to the old parties. He thinks it would appeal to a majority of voters outside the Westminster bubble.

Cummings identifies his rival Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage as a key figure in the anticipated destruction of the Tories, forecasting that if the former Ukip leader ‘unretires’ and rejoins the political fray he could reduce the Conservatives to single figures in the polls. He adds, however, that Farage would not be welcome in his new party.

So, how realistic are the chances that Cummings’ new movement would reshape the face of politics in the wasteland that he imagines will follow the implosion of the old parties? Though many will agree with his description of the dire state of the Tories, and his scorn for Starmer’s continuity Tory likely Labour replacement, he is very vague on the mechanics of actually building an alternative.

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. He thinks it could carry all before it with the help of new media platforms in the same way that his ‘take back control’ Leave movement triumphed in the 2016 referendum.

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 make Brexit an existential threat to David Cameron’s Tories, compelling him to call the referendum. Another obstacle, as Cummings acknowledges, is Britain’s first past the post electoral system that makes it all but impossible for new parties to break through. Cummings also makes little mention of the fact that there is already a new kid on the electoral block to mop up the votes of disillusioned Tories: Reform UK, the right-wing party founded by Nigel Farage and currently led by Richard Tice.

Although he appeals for people to contact him with their own ideas for constructing the movement that he wants to see, Cummings discloses no practical plans of his own for getting his start up party off the starting line. Unless and until he puts more meat on the bones of his idea , his start up scheme is likely to stay, well, a non starter.