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‘The aliens are here’: how movies shape Dominic Cummings’ vision

By bigging up blockbusters and superheroes, the PM’s former chief adviser proved himself the pop culture motherlode in his explosive Commons performance

There are three ways to look at Dominic Cummings’ explosive appearance at yesterday’s joint session of the Commons health and science and technology committees. The first is that we witnessed a brave whistleblower speaking truth to power about a wave of horrifically preventable deaths. The second is that Cummings was spitefully acting out, rewriting history in order to further a handful of personal grievances. And the third is to notice that he referenced quite a lot of films, and to just concentrate on that instead. Today, we will be doing the third.

It should surprise nobody that Cummings is a fount of pop culture references. During the pandemic, the entire Conservative government has fallen back on cinema in an attempt to find a way through, from Matt Hancock’s revelation that the film Contagion helped to inform his vaccination strategy, to Boris Johnson’s admission that his movie idol is the crap mayor from Jaws.

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