The Left needs an equivalent to Dominic Cummings- the Start-Up party is already here.
Mentoring, influence, repeating the message and values Vs interests
Being a part of a political movement is like being convinced that meat is necessary for your health while also being forced to watch leaked videos of poultry factories blending male chicks into juice.
You are ready to enter frontline politics when you start begging to watch how sausages are made instead.
Looking for Growth is the Start-Up party
While the Democrats are busy looking for a liberal Joe Rogan, I am mourning the absence of a left-wing Dominic Cummings. It would win me brownie points with the right people to dunk on the potty-mouthed shit-stirrer, but that would not fill the gap in my left-wing soul for a left-wing strategist with the same reach, influence, vision and seer level of activity.
Everybody who already knows who they are voting for before their ballot hits their mailbox listens to The Rest is Politics. Yet nearly twice as many Britons are tuning in to Modern Wisdom—a Rogan-esque podcast hosted by Texas-based Geordie Chris Williamson, who even got his start on Love Island’s first season. Despite its massive UK audience, only a handful of British politically-adjacent figures have appeared on it, including Rory Stewart, Claire Fox, Darren Grimes, Steve Hilton, and… Dominic Cummings.
I listened to the episode back when it first aired in August 2024. In the months since, there’s been tabloid slop about Dominic Cumming’s ‘start-up party’ that I am always asked about on radio paper reviews because his name alone is enough to give a non-story an ‘angle’.
A couple of months ago, Looking For Growth launched as a campaigning group pushing for policies that unlock growth in the UK. Cummings spoke at their launch event. They are in contact with our own Labour growth group and have been invited to No10. Their impact is hyped, but having an outside campaigning force backing up what needs to happen is helpful so that the rag editors know not to mess with pro-growth plans.
I then went back to re-listen to Cumming’s podcast. In the last 10 minutes of the 90-minute episode Chris asks him about his future plans:
“What I'm thinking about is setting up something new, setting up a new political campaigning thing to try and grip it and try and force change, and to try and bring in people from outside politics and try and do the whole thing differently. So I'm talking to people now quietly about it. I'm talking to some donors about funding it. I'm trying to figure out how to structure it. I'm talking to some potential staff and things like that.
What would that be? Is it going to be a party, a think tank? Like, what is this?
It's definitely not a think tank. To begin with, it definitely won't be a party. I think it's not the right time to launch an actual party now. I think what you could do is build a very unusual political organization that does a bunch of valuable things and build support. I think pretty quickly, you could get something that has more supporters than the Tories and Labour put together, that tries to represent what the actual voters think, who basically hate all the parties and think they're all rubbish. Then, who knows down the line, right, if you can build this”“thing in the right way and you can get, on the one hand, support from voters and on the other hand, get a lot of elite talent involved with it, then who knows down the line what might be possible.”
and then this from his substack in February:
Summary: shove out Kemi ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a Third Force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 (remember voters keep voting for change but the old parties keep refusing), break the coalition supporting Starmer, take over No10, do regime change. Immediate action: vote Reform in all local elections and help start the avalanche to remove KB: push what’s falling.
[…]
A significant fraction of talented people in Britain have to get involved in order to turn around our appalling politics. This will probably only happen by 2029 if those two parties combine and a significant Third Force from the country joins and improves them then persuades people to defect from Labour. The public can only force the radical change of direction they want by a combination of a) a subset of SW1 elites defecting from the old system, b) a subset of non-SW1 elites deciding to get involved in politics, and c) the energy and legitimacy of a large fraction of the masses.
How do we get the nerds involved?
So here it is, the significant third force that will break the Starmer coalition. LfG founders Newport brothers are setting up branches outside of London and gathering contact details, i.e. laying down the infrastructure for a campaigning vehicle (or, you know, a political party). At the LfG policy summit I attended last Saturday, I saw a lot of the usual nerds I see in other growth-y technoptimist spaces I frequent, including a lot of non-partisan but technically excellent people who I regularly tap into to explain complex science/economics stuff to me like I am a 3-year old. Don’t send DOGE to cull me for being a noticer, but like x observed at their launch event, there was a stark lack of women (and black or brown people); for the first hour, I was 1/10 females in a room of hundreds. I have thoughts about why this happens, but let’s not get distracted. When Lawrence Newport burst onto the stage for the intro, the all-male audience was ecstatic; it felt like an educated aspie young man’s Tony Robins event (a very different tribe from the Sensitive Young Men of Westminster), which is a good thing. We want political campaigning and policy to attract energy and be more appealing than alternative doomloops online.
I think it is naive of the main political parties not to look at LfG and consider why our mainstream parties struggle to attract and retain many intellectually curious, ambitious, but non-partisan young-ish people who show up at events in this broader growth ecosystem. I would never dream of inviting any of the excellent nerds who brief me on complex policy to a political party event. Everybody knows that branch meetings in any party are where dreams go to die. You show up for your executive committee elections, and you realise that some of the pettiest LOSERS you have ever met in your entire life are here and intent on scaring and scarring the normies.
I am exaggerating, of course, I also meet people in political meetings, who make me scream Oh My God, please let me be your agent and map out your political career from branch secretary to Prime Minister. This is why I persevere with establishment politics despite the ugliness of the soul, the shallowness of the spirit, the dearth of talent and the low battery life of brain power. I stay for the brilliant normie who walks in and needs someone to take her under her wing to make sure she fucking runs and doesn’t disappear once she finds a boyfriend, or gets pregnant, or gets sad. Those silver linings must be summoned, and pluralism is my battle cry in this endeavour. I know I am often alone in it. Political power demands discipline and ruthlessness, and the softies get hoovered up like male chicks in an industrial grinder.
But as much as I want to be this figure for other people, I am still young and in need of them myself. The last time I complained on Facebook (yes, many years ago) that it is hard to find mentoring figures in politics, especially if you are a foreigner and even more so if you are a woman, I was told off by someone very senior and well-known who arguably has helped me but whose support and communication with me has been so incredibly patchy and hard to depend on I am starting to wonder whether they were delusional. I will surely get the same sounds from people involved in Westminster’s myriad mentoring networks. I myself have risen through the Fabian Women’s Network Mentoring Scheme, a competitive programme that trains women in public life. I would be horrified if any of its selfless organisers read this and felt under-appreciated. Still, I didn’t quite get enough of what I was looking for in it. Pretending pats on the back are as good as genuine feedback and concrete action plans are not helping us fight the good fight.
The importance of personal investment
The most concrete help I have ever received was the Emergent Ventures grant from the libertarian Tyler Cowen, who believes in investing in talent generously, materially and with no strings attached. I can’t blame the left for not having money because, among the many uncharitable explanations for our lack of funding, the most obvious one is that our principles mean we don’t want undue influence from the same forces we are fighting. But Tyler didn’t just hand me over a bag of cash and call it a day. He connected me with hundreds of people who can help me in pursuit for the greater good and, most importantly, sprinkled me with the stardust of self-belief. He said, Stella, I have read your stuff and watched your videos, and I think you could become incredibly influential if you want to. He has done the same for so many people you will have heard of who are making an impact. The left doesn’t have money to spare, but moral support is free. Solidarity with my systemic oppression is not the same as personal belief in my capacity to be an agent of change. If it is only selfish libertarianism that can bestow that confidence in us, then we, the left, have a problem.
The reason I am mentioning this in an article about the Dominic Cumming’s shaped hole on the Left is that it was evident to me as an outsider that he has invested in people as protegees and encouraged many more to start impactful initiatives in a way that I don’t know anyone doing on the left. I am sure they exist, but their reach has not been enough to reach me. Westminster is littered with initiatives with DomCum’s paws all over them. I won’t list them here and offend people - I could exaggerate his contribution out of ignorance.
I do not know anybody on the left who is considered an influential strategist trying to externalise that influence and invest in talent on the same scale of ambitiousness. People in comparable positions to him on the Labour side, like Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne previously, now obviously Morgan McSweeney, and some time ago, the usual suspects like Alaistair Cambell and Peter Mandelson, did not have obsessive disruptive drive. Also, no one tried to build something that inspired new talent to the same extent. Alastair wrote a book called ‘But What Can I Do’ hoping he’d encourage a new crop of politicians, and I genuinely believe it did. In fact, I know it did. I have a friend who is a ex-McKinsey, and CEO of a social enterprise start-up up, and she decided to run because of it. Still, given his contribution and mythos, I would have liked to see a little army of cheery, energetic, intelligent Labour talent with a direct line to a directional figure. You will appreciate that this may exist in the dark somewhere away from me is of little comfort. While the Labour Party has many talented people, I’d like to think I am connected to enough of them that I would have gotten a whiff of such a figure.
Jon Lansham’s Momentum was a good example of an ambitious organisational effort; many talented people got their first chops through it. They are on the fringes of the left now since they lost the Labour leadership and deserted the party. I am not involved with Labour Together, though I know many people working there. It has hoovered up some talented people and it managed to put Starmer at the helm. I would say Progressive Britain (former Progress) does the most consistently good job at nurturing their own loyal talent, and the Fabians are best at the broad reach of previously non-Labour apparatchiks.
But what I am missing from the mentoring that established organisations offer is the personal touch that can only be bestowed on you from a personal relationship in you specifically as a person, not you as a party member who is also a woman, or BAME, or member of this or that community, or loyal foot soldier to this or that faction who can be trusted to vote for the whole slate in internal elections even if you’ve only heard of two of the people on it and the third one you don’t really like but what the hell. Collective organising is immensely valuable, but it is not enough. People need leaders, and most people genuinely don’t want to lead so a smidge of exceptionalism helps face the horrors of public life.
If there was a left-wing Cummings, what would his message be?
In his blog, Dom repeatedly covers a few topic obsessions, usually rehashing his different treatises in the intro to every journal entry. The result is that if you ask any person vaguely involved in politics they all know his main thesis: We are entrenched in bureaucratic inertia, and the groupthink among political elites cannot stir the blob's ‘trolley’ into meaningful policy change.
This was never a revelatory insight. When I worked for Corbyn’s inner circle, my boss was steering Labour’s ‘preparing for government’ operation, and our main concern was how we would overcome institutional pushback and sabotage if we entered No 10. Numerous policy wonks have written books mapping the problem. But Dom got cut through. Now everybody is a Blob Disrespector.
The blob is driving the trolley into managed decline is not the only justified critique of the system, but unless those who are shedding light on different problems reach similar levels of influence, people won’t act on them.
Who on the Left is doing the same, drilling into the national conscience the most critical systemic problem we have established till it becomes accepted wisdom, and what would that message be? Something basic but recognisably true. Where is the social democrat Foundations essay? Who will write the British version of Abundance? If the race wars on x are proving anything, it is that simple political dictums need to be repeated over and over again without complacency, whether it is ‘free speech is good’ or ‘racism is bad’. Even on the simplest things, it feels like the soft left has abandoned its weapons, and the right is parking its tanks on our lawn: counterculture.
This is why I never dank on well-read, good communicators, no matter their political party affinity. Many people reflexively despise Novara media because it hosts some fringe political opinions, but I ask SW1 9-5 losers to lower their voice when they speak of Aaron Bastani. He built an independent, alternative, progressive media platform with increasingly broad reach at a time when the British media landscape is haemorrhaging cash and eyeballs. You may not like his politics, but you cannot claim his content is not compelling. I know many a former Tory SpAds and tech bros who listen to his podcast.
I value builders with intellectual depth. These two things are hard to fake and the intellectual dishonesty when politicos fail to acknowledge these in their adversaries is selfish and harms the movements they say they want to serve.