The Chap’s editor Gustav Temple breaks down the sartorial signalling of Dominic Cummings

Why does Dominic Cummings dress so badly?

Is Cummings, like Einstein (who had seven identical suits in his wardrobe, one for each day of the week), so focused on intellectual pursuits and his job as Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister that he simply hasn’t got time to think about trifles such as clothing? Surely if this were the case, we would see him in standard Tory dark blue/grey single-breasted suits, perhaps with a racy top button undone and no tie, to show he’s getting on with the job? Instead, we see Cummings darting about Downing Street, hands full of important files, in tatty jeans, T-shirts, Adidas hoodies and appalling gilets, or ‘bodywarmers’. The only thing of which we can be certain is that Dominic owns a hell of a lot of white shirts and no iron.

This cannot be accidental. The architect of the Leave Campaign, who came up with the “Take Back Control” slogan and persuaded 51.9 per cent of the population to vote Leave, would not ‘accidentally’ throw on any old clothes. Everything Cummings does conveys a coded message; he is like those apocryphal Coke ads that were subliminally slipped into TV programmes in the 80s. Dominic’s slovenly wardrobe sends out a subliminal message to Joe Public, which says, “I’m not one of them; I’m one of you.” Middle-aged dads across the land rejoice when they see a chap on the news who looks just like them: balding, pot bellied in vaguely hip teenage clothes and the sort of trainers that you can only buy in flat-footed sizes.

Cummings thinks most Tories, with their humanities-based educations, are unfit to lead the nation into a ‘technopolis’ with a focus on maths and science. Yet he doesn’t despise the arts too much for his favourite quote to be from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men:

Shape without form, shade without colour
Paralysed force, gesture without motion

He likes this quote because Dominic thinks of himself as a man of action, unlike some of the hollow privileged Tories who surround him daily, whom he openly sneers at while somehow remaining at large among them. His dress sense could simply be his way of cocking a snook at them, rather than us.

The cross-party politician’s outfit is basically monochrome, occasionally straying from charcoal brown or black suit into a dark shade of blue. Ties are either red (Labour/ironic Tory) or blue (Tory/ironic Labour). Lib Dems can’t afford ties. Yet Dominic’s colour palette, in his permanent dress down Friday, doesn’t have to be monochrome. He could be wearing all the colours of the rainbow, but every single ensemble he wears is black, white and grey. He once wore a T-shirt but that was a very precise shade of Conservative blue.

There is only one conclusion to draw from this: Dominic Cummings knows what he is doing with his clothes.

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