According to Dominic Cummings, the man who used to advise Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister, the real person in charge of the UK isn’t Sir Keir Starmer even though he’s the elected Prime Minister. Cummings says the real power lies with someone most people have never even heard of, and no one ever voted for: Sir Chris Wormald.
Sir Chris Wormald is the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service. That makes him the highest-ranking government employee who is not an elected politician. Cummings believes Sir Chris holds far more power than any government minister, including the Prime Minister. In fact, he claimed Sir Chris has “100 times more power” than the average minister.
Cummings shared that when major incidents happen such as terror attacks or government scandals it’s not the elected officials who are contacted first. Instead, he says the Cabinet Secretary is the one who gets the call and makes the big decisions. He added that Sir Chris even controls what ministers are allowed to see or know about.
In a lecture at Oxford, Cummings explained that the Prime Minister doesn’t manage the top civil servants who run the government departments. That responsibility belongs to the Cabinet Secretary.
The entire system of hiring, managing, and promoting these officials operates under Sir Chris, not under the Prime Minister. According to Cummings, this means the Prime Minister doesn’t really have the power to change anything unless they control who is in charge of these key positions and right now, that’s not the case.
Cummings believes this creates a dangerous situation where the people actually running the country aren’t held accountable. He even described a shocking example: he said he once saw terrorists in hiding contact lawyers in London to demand money from British taxpayers using human rights laws.
The Cabinet Office reportedly approved the payments and kept the information so secret that no one in Parliament knew it was happening. Cummings claimed these kinds of things are hidden from both MPs and the public.
Sir Chris Wormald, who is 56 and studied at Oxford, was appointed Cabinet Secretary in December 2024. Before that, he was a top official at the Department for Health during the COVID pandemic and also led the Department for Education. Despite his low profile, Dominic Cummings believes Sir Chris is the one truly running the show in Britain — not the elected Prime Minister.
