[13] He worked for a group attempting to set up an airline connecting Samara in southern Russia to Vienna in Austria which George Parker of the Financial Times said was "spectacularly unsuccessful".

[16][17] The New Frontiers Foundation, a free-market libertarian[18] and Eurosceptic think tank which grew out of Business For Sterling,[19] was founded by Cummings in December 2003, with James Frayne as its co-founder.

[20] Cummings directed the group, and was described by Andrew Pierce in The Times as "a youthful, mercurial figure who has brought together a diverse coalition including Bob Geldof and the Labour MP Frank Field to oppose the single currency".

1) the undermining of the BBC's credibility; 2) the creation of a Fox News equivalent / talk radio shows / bloggers etc to shift the centre of gravity; 3) the end of the ban on TV political advertising".

[10] In 2006, while in a position of what Andrew Neil called "overall responsibility" for the website of The Spectator, Cummings republished a controversial cartoon depicting Muhammed with a bomb in his turban.

[30][32] Cummings was known in the DfE for his blunt style and "not suffering fools gladly";[10][16] he and Michael Gove railed against the "blob", the informal alliance of senior civil servants and teachers who, in their opinion, sought to frustrate attempts at reform.

[33] Cummings was also outspoken regarding other senior politicians, describing Nick Clegg's proposals on free school meals as "Dreamed up on the back of a cigarette packet",[34] and David Davis as "thick as mince" and "lazy as a toad".

[33] Patrick Wintour described the Cummings–Gove working relationship: "Gove, polite to a fault, would often feign ignorance of his adviser's methods, but knew full well the dark arts that Cummings deployed to get his master's way".

[34] In 2014, Prime Minister David Cameron, at a Policy Exchange speech in 2014 mentioned a "career psychopath", which was interpreted by several media outlets as a reference to Cummings,[35] although the two had never met.

[37][38] During his time as an official working for Gove, Cummings received a warning from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for use of private Gmail accounts to deal with government business, saying it should be 'actively discouraged'.

[32] As the leading strategist of the campaign he was credited with creating the Vote Leave slogan, "Take back control" and the claim that Brexit could allow an extra £350 million a week to be spent on the NHS.

The Labour Party opposition spokesman Jon Ashworth said the links between Cummings, the health secretary and Babylon were "increasingly murky and highly irresponsible".

[61] As is customary, Cummings temporarily resigned his role when Parliament dissolved for the 2019 general election, along with most special advisers, but was briefly reinstated to assist the government following widespread flooding.

In a blog post, he said he wanted to recruit data scientists, software developers and economists to help improve the performance of government, making his own role "within a year largely redundant".

[64] The recruitment drive was reported to have resulted in several appointments on short-term contracts, including Baroness Wolf of Dulwich, Professor Vernon Gibson and, briefly, Andrew Sabisky.

He also added that "one senior Tory who thought about applying to be Beeb chair" told him that calls for the BBC's "cultural re-education", which many assumed came from Cummings, actually came from Munira Mirza, director of the Number 10 Policy Unit.

[75] In the weeks leading up to the February 2020 reshuffle, briefings in the press had suggested that a new economic ministry led by Rishi Sunak might be established, to reduce the power and political influence of the Treasury.

[81] In March 2020, it was reported in The Sunday Times that during a private engagement the previous month, Cummings had said that the government's strategy towards COVID-19 was "herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad".

[82] On 27 April, the Guardian website reported that Cummings sat in on meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which advises the cabinet on COVID-19 response.

[84] A joint investigation by the Daily Mirror and The Guardian, published on 22 May 2020, reported that, following sightings of Cummings in Durham at the end of March, the police had spoken to him about breaching lockdown rules.

[103] They also said that a minor breach relating to lockdown rules might have occurred at Barnard Castle, but because there was no apparent breach of the social distancing rules, no action would be taken now, stating: "Had a Durham Constabulary police officer stopped Mr Cummings driving to or from Barnard Castle, the officer would have spoken to him, and, having established the facts, likely advised Mr Cummings to return to the address in Durham, providing advice on the dangers of travelling during the pandemic crisis.

[103] On 3 June, it was reported that Durham County Council was investigating complaints it had received that the cottage Cummings stayed in did not hold the relevant planning permission.

[5] In July 2021, The Guardian reported that Cummings had personally contacted Paul Stephenson, a former colleague from Vote Leave, to invite his company, Hanbury Strategy, to work for the government during its pandemic response.

[114][115] Criticising government leadership, Cummings said that Health Secretary Matt Hancock should have been fired for lying, and that frontline workers and civil servants were "lions led by donkeys".

[115][116] Boris Johnson faced criticism, with Cummings saying that there were "thousands" of people better suited to run the country than him, and that he was not a "fit and proper person" to get the UK through the pandemic.

[121] In January 2016, five months prior to the 2016 European Union referendum in the United Kingdom, Cummings said: Extremists are on the rise in Europe and are being fuelled unfortunately by the Euro project and by the centralisation of power in Brussels.

"[126] He sought to isolate Nigel Farage from the official Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum, believing his presence to not be helpful in winning over undecided voters.

[129][134] Cummings is reportedly fascinated by Otto von Bismarck, Richard Feynman, Sun Tzu,[122] and US fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd.

[135] Journalist Owen Bennett wrote that Cummings "is a Russophile, speaks Russian, and is passionately interested in Dostoyevsky",[6] while Patrick Wintour in The Guardian reported that "Anna Karenina, maths and Bismarck are his three obsessions.

[136][137] In the 2020 revival of Spitting Image, Cummings's puppet was portrayed "as a creepy alien with a pulsating head who drools at the prospect of eating Johnson's baby".