MR “I had to drive 500 miles in the lockdown to get my eyes tested” Dominic Cummings has defied reason and justice yet again.

This time he has been financially forgiven for building two houses without planning permission and been told he will not have to pay £50,000 or so in backdated council tax.

Cummings’s career has been a remarkable trail of rule-breaking, lying and generally reactionary and ultra-right-wing politics.

He started on this course at Oxford University, where he studied under Norman Stone, an academic best known for his virulent attacks on the Soviet Union and his sympathetic biography of Adolf Hitler. Cummings’s die was cast.

Conventional and often sycophantic biographies of Cummings aren’t hard to find, so I thought rather to set out a list of some of his most diabolical doings that have horrified me over the years.

However bad Cummings has been, he always seems to emerge like the original Teflon toilet pan — no shit sticks to him.

In 2002 Cummings became director of strategy for the Tories. He lasted just eight months trying to modernise a Conservative Party of which he was not actually a member. His appointment was firstly blocked by criminal phone-hacker Andy Coulson who was head of communications for the Tories at the time.

When leader Ian Duncan Smith — a man not known for his courage — refused to let Cummings completely run the show, Cummings took his toys home. His parting shot was labelling Duncan Smith as incompetent.

Free of the Tories, in December 2003 he founded the right-wing New Frontiers Foundation think tank. It only lasted until March 2005.

By 2006 he seemed to be in charge of the website of right-wing rag the Spectator. This of course was Johnson’s launch-pad into politics: it was Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield who first employed Johnson as a columnist — he eventually became the editor. At the Spectator Cummings published a cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

Cummings worked for Michael Gove in various roles in opposition and government from 2007 to 2014.

At the DfE, Cummings complained about what he called “the blob,” an informal group of senior civil servants and teachers who a paranoid Cummings thought were just out to get him.

In fact, it was probably the other way round. He was always a bully, and in 2012, a senior female civil servant received £25,000 in a bullying case against Cummings.

While working for Gove, Cummings received an official warning from the government’s own Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). He had insisted on using his private email accounts to deal with government business. Yes it was against the rules, but rules don’t apply to Cummings do they?

In 2014, Cummings left his job as a special education adviser to open a so-called “free school.” Much earlier, in 2009, he had worked for the New Schools Network, a charity that advises free schools.

Cummings got his really big break in 2007 when he became campaign director of Vote Leave. He claimed he created the Vote Leave slogan “take back control” almost single-handedly.

His strategy was simple: do talk about immigration and  — ironically — don’t make the referendum final.

This campaign saw one of his biggest and most visible lies. A lie so big it covered the side of a bus. Yes, it was Cummings behind the widely disputed claim painted on a huge red bus that Britain would give £350m a week to the NHS after leaving the EU — a complete lie.

After the referendum, Cummings had his own communications team claim that he had been one of the masterminds of the campaign.

Next Cummings advised Babylon Health, a controversial artificial-intelligence firm working within the NHS, which was after a share of a new £250m flagship public fund.

There are strict rules to keep separate those in government jobs from private firms seeking government funding. Do these rules apply to Cummings? You know the answer to that. Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth described the links between Cummings, the health secretary and Babylon, as “increasingly murky.”

In March 2019, the Commons Select Committee of Privileges recommended Cummings be held in contempt of Parliament.

Despite, or more likely because of his dodgy CV, on July 24 2019, Cummings was appointed chief adviser to Prime Minister Johnson.

Cummings told us: “People think and by the way I think most people are right: the Tory Party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me.”

He also said: “Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS.” It is good to know that even he sometimes tells the truth.

Lib Dem MP Layla Moran accused Cummings of hypocrisy when a farm that he co-owns received £235,000 in EU-farming subsidies. The very same subsidies he had previously described as absurd, handed out to very rich landowners to do stupid things.

In November 2019, a whistleblower raised questions about Cummings’s interactions during his years in Russia failing to set up a new airline. Was he involved in liaisons with Putin, selling the need to support Johnson? We’ll never know.

Cummings helped the Tory victory in the last election. Afterwards he advertised for what he called “misfits and weirdos” interested in working in government to contact him through his private email address.

One appointment was ultra-right-wing racist Andrew Sabinsky, whose ideas obviously chimed with Cumming’s and Johnson’s philosophies. Sabinsky claims there is a racial difference in intelligence and that African-Americans are on average less intelligent than whites. He also suggested introducing compulsory contraception for benefits claimants.

Another specialist Cummings appointed was Will O’Shea, who called on police to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters with live ammunition.

In August 2019 Cummings summoned government advisor Sonia Khan to 10 Downing Street and unceremoniously sacked her, ordering an armed police officer to escort the terrified woman off the premises.

He had done this without the permission or knowledge of her boss, chancellor of the exchequer Sajid Javid. Dal Babu, former chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, said it was “a shocking abuse of armed officers” and both Cummings and the Prime Minister had questions to answer.

Javid resigned as chancellor. Johnson had said Javid could keep his position on the condition that he dismiss all of his advisers, who would be replaced with ones selected by Cummings. Javid told the media that “no self-respecting minister would accept those terms.”

In March 2020, the Sunday Times reported that Cummings’ strategy on coronavirus was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

Then Cummings demonstrated his total contempt for his own lockdown rules when he and his wife made the 500-mile round trip to his second home in Durham.

Not content with that, they drove to Barnard Castle for a walk in the woods. Elaborate fairy tales to were conjured up to justify his breaking of the rules and Johnson supported his chief adviser, saying that Cummings had acted “responsibly, legally and with integrity.” So that’s all right then.

Now it has been revealed that Cummings has attended the government’s Sage science advisory committee, raising concerns about Sage’s political independence.

What secret does Cummings have on his buffoon boss, who despite my love of alliteration I won’t call B***s. Lovechild? Lover? Holder of the negatives? I think I’ll leave that one to you.