Downing Street’s Brexit guru who has railed against the ‘absurdity’ of EU subsidies co-owns a farm which has received around £235,000 from the European Union, it has been revealed.
Dominic Cummings, the Vote Leave campaign chief who is now Boris Johnson‘s chief adviser, owns the property in Durham with his parents and one other person.
It has been reported that after quitting a role at Tory HQ in 2002 he spent more than two years in a ‘bunker’ on the family farm, reading science history and philosophy ‘and trying to understand the world’.
But during his self-imposed rural exile the farm was raking in around €20,000 a year in EU subsidies, which it has received for ‘most of the last two decades’, according to an investigation by The Observer newspaper.
Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s top aide, pictured leaving his home this week. The arch-Brexiteer’s family farm has received £235,000 in EU subsidies
In some years the farm even got the most controversial of EU payments: money for land to be ‘set aside’, the since-scrapped scheme which paid farmers not to grow anything.
The revelation is a potential embarrassment for the mastermind behind the Prime Minister’s push to leave the EU by 31 October and opens Cummings up to charges of hypocrisy.
In one of his lengthy blog posts, he attacked the use of agricultural subsidies ‘dreamed up in the 1950s and 1960s’ because they ‘raise prices for the poor to subsidise rich farmers while damaging agriculture in Africa’.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has often been criticised for protecting inefficient European agri-businesses, especially in Frnace, by raising huge barriers to entry for farmers in emerging markets.
Mr Cummings was also behind the Referendum campaign bus emblazoned with the slogan ‘We send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund our NHS instead’.
His blog said ‘the Treasury gross figure is slightly more than £350m of which we get back roughly half, though some of this is spent in absurd ways like subsidies for very rich landowners to do stupid things’.
Off brand: Mr Cummings never misses an opportunity to be photographed with a ‘vote leave’ tote bag but the news his family farm received EU subsidies is not so on-brand
The Observer analysed Land Registry documents and EU subsidy databases to unearth that the farm in Durham, which Cummings jointly owns with his parents and another person, has received roughly €20,000 a year for most of the last two decades.
The website Farmsubsidy.org, which lists EU rural subsidies, reveals that the Durham farm received almost €208,000 between 2000 and 2009, roughly €20,000 a year.
The money was paid out to Cummings’s parents and another family member for several reasons including ‘set aside’ – the now abolished and controversial scheme that paid farmers not to grow anything. The programme has been blamed for making it harder for food producers in developing countries to compete with their European counterparts.
A separate website, operated by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, confirms further payments of roughly £6,500 each were made to Cummings’s parents ‘for practices beneficial for climate and environment’ in 2017 and 2018.
And scrutiny of a third, offline database, revealed that subsidies worth nearly £19,000 were paid out in 2014.
The Liberal Democrats’ spokeswoman for young people, Layla Moran, told the paper: ‘It shows sheer hypocrisy from Cummings that his farm has raked in hundreds of thousands from the ‘absurd subsidies’ he so often criticises.’
The paper said it is not clear when Cummings became co-owner of the farm, which his father reportedly bought after retiring from the oil industry, but that searches show he was a co-owner in 2013.
A profile of Oxford-educated Cummings, for the Conservative Home website, explains after quitting the post of Conservative Party director of strategy in 2002, ‘he then proceeded to spend two and a half years in a bunker he and his father built for him on their farm in Durham, reading science and history and trying to understand the world’.
Cummings gave a flavour of his auto-didactic erudition recently, saying: ‘We need leaders with an understanding of Thucydides and statistical modelling, who have read The Brothers Karamazov and The Quark and the Jaguar, who can feel Kipling’s Kim and succeed in Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project.’
There is concern that rural businesses might fold if lifeline subsidies disappeared in the event of a no deal Brexit.
A Downing St spokeswoman declined to comment.
