NOTE: due to disk space requirements, the files mentioned in this blog post have been removed from the web. If you have any questions about these files, or this issue, please contact me.

Dominic Cummings was Campaign Director of Vote Leave. His tweets from his account @odysseanproject became strangely compelling, and he was a must-follow to understand the minds of Brexiteers. He was especially tough towards those who tried to connect Vote Leave to Leave.eu, and had some choice words about David Davis too.

Then this evening the discovery that his account had been deleted. I suppose it should have come as no surprise that Cummings deleted all his tweets, as that’s what Vote Leave did with its own website in the aftermath of the referendum, before then restoring it.

That started a rather frantic effort to try to see what of Cummings’s tweets were recoverable. This blog entry is written in the stages that I recovered the information, mostly making static HTML pages from Google Cache pages of Cummings’s tweets. Some of the information here may be replicated, but I think it is important to maintain a record of the behaviour of this person who helped Leave win the referendum, and then has tried to wash his hands of it all.

 

Recovery Stage 1
The most controversial tweets were those that Cummings exchanged with The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr. 6 of those threads have been recovered from the Google Cache.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Recovery Stage 2
Dominic Cummings has a website that you can find here. It’s still online at the time of writing, but just in case he decides to take it offline I have made a local copy of every single page on it.

Recovery Stage 3
Any tweet anyone ever wrote to Dominic Cummings can be found here – problem is that these tweets do not make much sense without the original tweet that prompted these replies. Anyway, better than nothing I suppose.

Recovery Stage 4
Some tweets written by Cummings are in the Wayback Machine. But that archives rather few tweets. Whatever there is can be found here. Update: @ambrosen helpfully points out that what’s in Wayback Machine might not be safe, so he made some archives of that for me. All the HTML files, ZIPped, are here.

Recovery Stage 5
I seem to recall Cummings had some choice things to say about David Davis. Here are 5 threads about that. Numbers 4 and 5 are especially… interesting!
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Recovery Stage 6
This time I tried to find things Cummings said about Cambridge Analytica. There are 6 threads on that.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

However that search did lead me to an interesting spat he had with Peter Jukes, him declining to speak to Carole Cadwalladr, and arguing with Carole, and arguing with Ben Goldacre.

Recovery Stage 7
Tweets exchanged with Jolyon Maugham QC were significant too. There are 5 threads on that, with numbers 4 and 5 especially useful.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Recovery Stage 8

One of Cummings’s most memorable Twitter discussions (actually civilised by his standards) was with David Allen Green. Thankfully the text of all of Cummings’s tweets is in the text on David’s blog – enjoy it here!

Recovery Stage 9
It turns out that any tweets used on Storify are still there. There are three Storify threads with Cummings tweets – from Duncan Robinson (archive), David Colquhoun (archive) and Rachel Gooch (archive).

Recovery Stage 10

I’ve found his legendary Euratom tweet (and later parts of the thread here and here), and one of his branches of the future tweets.

Recovery Stage 11
I’ve amassed a bunch of screenshots of Cummings tweets. All here in a gallery!

Recovery Stage 12
All the tweet screenshots, ZIPped – 28mb
All the tweets recovered as HTML – 28mb
Complete archive of Cummings blog, inc. PDFs etc. – 132mb

Recovery Stage 13
I’ve been sent this massive screenshot of more Cummings tweets – click the small version below to view the full resolution version!

5 Comments

  1. N Fulton

    The only people subverting the law are entitled remoaners who are trying every trick in the book to thwart Brexit. #GetBrexitDone

  2. I guess the more newsworthy tweets that made it to online newspaper articles and were embedded will have disappeared with the deletion of the account but they should still live for a while in google cache and more permanently on the wayback machine.

  3. Ian Craig

    Thanks Jon! – Good work..
    I’m sure legal teams will be poring over these in a few years time.

  4. Thanks for being so quick off the mark with this, Jon. Democracy has been hijacked, disinformation is swamping every political thread now and evidence of malpractice is gold dust.

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