Dominic Cummings reveals science deal convinced him to work for Boris Johnson

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, has revealed he only agreed to work in Downing Street if the prime minister doubled Britain’s science budget and created a “high-risk, high-reward” research agency.

Cummings, in his first major public appearance since he was ousted last November, told the House of Commons science select committee the “deal” was struck in his living room on the Sunday before Johnson became prime minister in July 2019.

Cummings said that his terms for working with Johnson also included a commitment to shake up the civil service and an assurance the prime minister was “deadly serious” about delivering Brexit without a second referendum.

“He said ‘deal’,” Cummings told MPs. “It was in my living room, the Sunday before he became prime minister.” The exchanges confirmed the extraordinary influence Cummings wielded over the prime minister.

Cummings walked out of Downing Street last November carrying his possessions in a cardboard box, after a power struggle that saw Johnson cull his most senior advisers from the Vote Leave era.

Since then the Brexit campaign chief has kept a low public profile, although a string of recent stories about Carrie Symonds — Johnson’s fiancée — has been blamed by Number 10 insiders on Cummings’ allies.

Johnson has honoured his pledge to deliver Brexit, has promised to more than double research and development spending to £22bn by 2024-25 and is now creating Aria, an £800m science research agency. But the civil service has proved more resistant to reform.

Looking relaxed in an open-necked white shirt, Cummings gave a familiar exposition to MPs of his belief that “horrific” bureaucracy in Whitehall held back innovation and scientific advance.

He said that Aria — the Advanced Research and Invention Agency — was welcome but needed to be given “extreme freedom” from Whitehall meddling.

The agency, which is due to start work in 2022, is a British version of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, formerly called Arpa, which has been promoted by Cummings for years.

Cummings told MPs that bodies such as Darpa or Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking centre, flourished because they were initially free from “horrific bureaucracy” but they were ultimately stifled by red tape.

He said Aria needed to operate on the “far edges of the science world”, adding: “The bigger danger is that it half happens. If that happened it would be better, in my view, not to do it at all.”

Cummings argued that the agency should be free of typical Whitehall rules covering areas including human resources, state aid, civil service pay scales or “horrific” Treasury business case procedures.

The independent research agency will be charged with funding “the most ambitious, cutting-edge areas of research”.

Government officials said that Cummings was not being talked about as a future leader of the body. The business department said the new agency would be led by “prominent, world-leading scientists”. A recruitment exercise will begin shortly to find a chief executive and chair.

“I’m not seeking to be involved, I shouldn’t be involved,” Cummings said. “The only way I would be of value would be if you picked the wrong people to run it.” He said there were “rumours Number 10 might ask me to do it”, but said that if that were true he would decline.

Cummings denied that was given a 40 per cent pay rise after Covid-19, saying that he only “interfered” in pay discussions by insisting he did not want a pay rise when he arrived in Downing Street in the summer of 2019.

He said the subsequent rise in salary to between £140,000-£145,000 only took place after he was rehired after the general election, when he returned to “the normal pay grade for my position”.