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Dominic Cummings substack

SNIPPETS 16: what comes after Starmer & Kemi?

Planning for a new regime... Collapse of China espionage trial... SW1 NPCs ‘shocked’ jihadis called Jihadi we imported by the thousand do jihad... Lawfare vs Special Forces spreads

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Dominic Cummings
Oct 13, 2025
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The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

I’m speaking at an LFG event at the O2 Arena on 23/10 with:

  • Liv Boeree, physicist, one of the world’s best poker players, podcaster particularly on technology, I did her podcast earlier this year here. Her substack/podcast here.

  • Matt Clifford, an investor who tried to help Sunak and Starmer make AI a priority for the British state. He left government recently. He helped the government negotiate the Microsoft data centre in the North East and other things just announced in Trump’s visit.

  • Chris Curtis MP, a Labour MP fighting a lonely battle with some Labour MPs for the government to do anything useful before 2029. Experience in government has radicalised many on the Left to realise the official story Starmer believed about Whitehall is wrong and this blog is right — the Tory MPs mostly just sat uselessly for 14 years telling themselves fairy tales, importing jihadis and defending the Human Rights Act prioritising jihadi human rights over the safety of British people, spending taxpayers money on weddings for child killers ‘cos human rights’, repeating NPC scripts on definitions of ‘a woman’ suddenly being ‘really complex’, covering up the Grooming Gangs, and marching to destruction.

  • Katie Lam, a new MP who did a lot of brave pushing on the grooming gangs when the official Starmer line was ‘the real story is tech oligarch fascists spreading conspiracy theories about grooming gangs’, which the BBC and NPC army amplified. She’s been helping the LFG campaign and is one of the handful in Tory world who can communicate.

There’ll be other interesting things at this event including those who wrote the Foundations paper. BOOK NOW, see you there.

Info page. (Become a subscriber and get a free ticket.)

Also I’ve been impressed by the guys who set up Pharos. They aggressively get on with things. If you’re rich and looking for something which will DO SOMETHING rather than just babble into the dread void of SW1, call them.


It’s finally clear even to some of the blindest in SW1 that both old parties are disintegrating, with failed leadership and their voters fragmenting all over the shop (but not to each other).

It’s pitiful watching the old regime die, unable to muster any sort of coherent anything on anything. Unable to tell a story. Less than one percent able to give a serious speech or write a serious essay or even do a three hour podcast without exposing themselves as empty/idiotic/useless. Uninterested in even pretending to be interested in policy and how government works and the extraordinary things happening across the world. Unable even to pretend to campaign, because a campaign means defining then maintaining focus on priorities, which has become inconceivable in SW1. Unable to master the 75 year old TV technology and unable to execute the basics of 1990s media management, never mind the new technologies shattering the media ecosystem.

Just mindless chasing their own tails providing content for the legacy media news cycle generated by a pathological Whitehall system the government doesn’t understand, never mind control. An NPC PM living out my golden rule of modern SW1: the government doesn’t control the government, isn’t trying to, and couldn’t if it tried — and pushing it to a grotesque demonstration by writing newspaper articles begging terrorists and their sympathisers not to go on marches demanding a second Holocaust — and having his begging ignored as the No10 press office bleats pitifully ‘but we don’t have any powers’. (NB. when they want to shut down a ‘far right’ protest they suddenly do have ‘the powers’.)

No10 acts as if it studied post-Vote Leave Trolley and Sunak and thought — yes, that’s how to do government, that’s how to do politics, that’s how to communicate, let’s copy all that, zero priorities, ‘respect the institutions’ and leave Whitehall to run itself, machine-gun the entire electoral coalition, defend the old system instead of delivering the change we promised, and spend our days spouting contradictory nonsense in the news cycle, brief ‘major reset’ each month, shuffle NPC jobs, that’s the way.

Meanwhile we import jihadis called ‘Jihadi’ who sing about jihad on the boats then do jihad here and our MPs babble ‘diversity is our strength, behold the British integration miracle success story’.

Voters look on in horror and despair. International investors text each other: ‘not investable, what the fuck happened over there with the troons, commies and jihadis’.

What happened?

The creative power of the minority deserted SW1, there has been an answering withdrawal of mimesis from those outside SW1, and social unity is imploding. Collapse of the old regime is following the normal pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, regime change. Elite fragmentation, collapse of consensus reality, OODA-loop-as-denial-of-service-attack such that the more NPCs act, the more they self-harm but are baffled as to why everything they do fails, so they conclude they should do more of it. Cf. blog in spring, talk in summer.

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