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What you see before you today is classic Cummings. Remember the theory about knocking your opponent off balance, ('get inside their OODA loop')? This is it in action.
Yesterday a very wobbly Remain coalition assembled. It needs Labour but couldn't bear the Labour leader being present. It wants to unseat the govt but isn't confident it'll win a confidence vote. It laid out a tentative, painfully agreed, plan... conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2…
...in response, pow, the ball is slammed straight back at them, the govt proposes to limit available time to fulfil that plan. They're forcing the Remain coalition to make a swift decision, when they have an uneasy and unequal committee but no leader... conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2…
...In effect this pushes them to reconsider the very thing they decided yesterday they couldn't risk, a confidence vote. It's strategically unbalancing, deliberately - the thing to watch for is further blows to keep them reeling while they try to catch up. conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2…
Is it guaranteed to work? Not guaranteed, no; it involves risks and it requires timing, co-ordination, effort and good fortune. And "no plan survives contact with the enemy", as von Moltke put it. But trying is preferable to paralysed decline, as previously exhibited by May.
One final final addition to this thread: on the topic of whether it's possible to combine the risky mix of careful choices and swift-decision making required for such a strategy, it's worth reading this Cummings blogpost on 'flow', and trained intuition. dominiccummings.com/2018/05/22/eff…
