Meet Dominic Cummings, the Brexit supremo brought in by Boris to tear up the Whitehall machine
BORIS Johnson's new Brexit guru is an aggressive, eccentric campaigner who is set to tear the civil service apart.
Dominic Cummings has run a string of successful campaigns - but in between them, he has a habit of disappearing from public life for years at a time.
And when he is in power, he usually falls out with nearly everyone he comes across - not least Whitehall mandarins.
Mr Cummings, 47, is best known for running Vote Leave - immortalised in a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch - and working with Michael Gove at the Department for Education.
But he started his career as a Tory aide when Iain Duncan Smith was leader - only to turn against the party boss and publicly denounce him.
He went off to run the campaign against setting up a "regional assembly" for North-East England, and after a thumping win went to live in a bunker on his father's farm for more than two years.
It was in 2007 that Mr Gove hired Mr Cummings to be his adviser in the role of Shadow Education Secretary.
When the Tories entered Government after 2010, he helped the new Education Secretary push through his agenda of widespread academies and free schools.
But he regularly vented at civil servants he thought were unimaginative and desperate to block ministers' radical plans.
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Mr Cummings believes that mandarins aren't interested in driving change and instead just want to protect their own positions.
And he's not too keen on most MPs either - he thinks the Cabinet should be shrunk to just half a dozen people and has regularly launched colourful attacks on senior figures.
He called David Davis "thick as mince and lazy as a toad", and during the Coalition years called Nick Clegg a "revolting character".
When he took over at Vote Leave he banned veteran Eurosceptics such as Bernard Jenkin from taking part in the campaign - claiming they did more harm than good.
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Last year, he called the hardline European Research Group "pirates" and accused them of distracting from the efforts to deliver on Brexit.
Today Labour aide Damian McBride, a veteran of Gordon Brown's time in No10, warned that Westminster should "be actively expecting the 'no bloody way' unexpected" under Mr Cummings.
The appointment suggests Mr Johnson is serious about enacting serious change and taking a hardline Brexit approach as he starts his time as Prime Minister.
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