Dominic Cummings sets up his own tech consultancy

The former chief adviser to the Prime Minister has established a new company called Siwah

Credit: Reuters

Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has established a new tech consultancy firm. 

Mr Cummings founded a company called Siwah Ltd on Thursday, according to filings made to Companies House that were first reported by Bloomberg.

The move comes three months after he left Downing Street after a bitter power struggle that also led to Lee Cain, a former Government communications director, departing the administration.

The nature of Siwah will be “information technology consultancy activities”, according to the documents. Mr Cummings is also listed as the only initial shareholder in the business, which is registered to a Durham address. Further details of the company’s plans are unclear.

The name of the business may be a reference to Wāḥat Sīwah, which was the site of a legendary oracle that proclaimed Alexander the Great as the Pharaoh of Egypt. Siwah is an urban oasis in Egypt near the Libyan border.

Mr Cummings did not respond to a request for comment from the Telegraph at the time of writing.

The former Whitehall chief of staff was one of the masterminds behind the Brexit campaign and reportedly a firm believer that the UK could create its own trillion-dollar tech giant by providing more state-aid to British tech businesses. 

The UK has so far failed to build large, public technology companies at the same scale of American giants such as Apple, Amazon and Google, which have all reached valuations of $1 trillion.

During his time in Government, Mr Cummings successfully pushed for the establishment of an £800m “blue skies” agency that mimics America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The US agency is best known for its hand in the design of the internet, GPS, and Apple’s voice assistant Siri.

The UK’s version was approved last year and was unveiled by Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, earlier in the month. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will back “high risk, high reward” projects and could launch as early as next year.

Mr Cummings blogged last year that he was in search of “weirdos and misfits” with “odd skills” to work with him.

He said that there were some “profound problems” at the core of how Britain makes decisions.

“We want to improve performance and make me much less important — and within a year largely redundant,” he wrote in January of last year.

“At the moment I have to make decisions well outside what Charlie Munger calls my ‘circle of competence’ and we do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed. This must change fast so we can properly serve the public.”