There isn’t a single person in the country who doesn’t have an opinion about Dominic Cummings right now. For Remainers, he’s the dark master controlling the strings at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government, while Leavers view him as their last hope to exit the EU on October 31.  Everywhere I look, Dom is there. His face is superimposed onto a Game of Thrones Stop the Coup poster (“Winter is Cummings”). Internet nerds are spending hours dissecting his Game Theory, and there are endless theories on his rather unique style of dress, which has been described variously as ‘ike the man who’d wear flip flops to a wedding,’ ‘the owner-operator of a dangerous fairground ride arriving at his own negligence trial’ and ‘like Moby having a panic attack”.

For those of us who have known him for nearly three decades, it’s quite the spectacle. Ever since I saw that infamous picture of Dom clapping Boris into number 10, I’ve felt like I’m living in a parallel universe. I can’t compute that the strangely mesmerising guy I used to see schlepping up and down Staircase Nine in Exeter College, Oxford, in a shiny baseball jacket, is now effectively running the country. That jacket has gone, replaced by a Barbour gilet and a Vote Leave tote, but his intense glare remains unchanged, as does his love of a t-shirt.

When he first arrived in 1991, from Durham School in the north east, he was a loner who refused to join in any of the usual Freshers’ activities. One of his fellow history students befriended him, drawing him out of his shell, and introduced him to our friendship group. It wasn’t long before he started coming out regularly with our merry band of misfits – an eclectic but down to earth group of students from all over the country who made him feel at home.

He formed a strong bond with the male members of our clique (the “wastrels”) who all had a love of argumentative conversation and used the Hunter S Thompson line, “There were no rules, sleep was unknown and fear was out of the question” as their motto. He inspired a long-standing devotion in them, borne out of nights drinking whisky while playing games like backgammon, chess and Risk (early training for anyone keen on eventual world domination) until the early hours.

But while the rest of us were notorious for getting in trouble with the college authorities, Dom always kept his nose clean and stayed in control – even once rescuing a friend whose knees had become trapped in the railings in the Botanical Gardens during some late night sortie – to the extent some thought he was being groomed to be a spy by one of the dons who was believed be a recruiter for MI6.  He was viewed with a little more suspicion by some of my female friends, however, after he displayed some advance Machiavellian tendencies – on one occasion, he upbraided one of our group for wearing a white poppy, and during our final year, in 1993-4, we were based in college, where nights drinking would invariably end with Dom and I rowing as he ruthlessly skewered what he perceived as lily-livered Left-wing views.

I was never sure if he believed the radical opinions he was espousing (he enjoyed winding me up), but I feel the pain of anyone who’s ended up on the wrong side of him in Number 10 – a pretty sizeable cohort, if reports are to be believed. He inhabited the shadows at Exeter – save for his Matriculation photo, you won’t find pictures of him in the yearbook or the rowing club archives, or in tails at the Bullingdon – all of which were anathema to Dom. However, we did once tempt him onto the log flume during a rainy trip to Alton Towers. On the same day he tried to rescue a squirrel who had become trapped in a bin, only for the furry rodent to savage him as it escaped.

There was little indication of any political ambition – our college was rather apathetic – and Dom never darkened the door of the Oxford Union, unlike Boris Johnson, whose studies at the university didn’t cross over with ours. But his Ancient and Modern History tutors saw a different side to him, with a couple in particular noting his promise and the course, which took in the rise of the Roman Empire as well as 20th century history, helped shape Dom’s world view. He studied the Ancient Greeks with Robin Lane Fox, which sparked an interest in the purity of Grecian democracy, and marked the beginning of his obsession with the relative corruption at Westminster.

But it was under the patronage of the late modern historian Norman Stone that he really flourished. Stone’s controversial theories on Russia (that it was their army’s organisational problems rather than monetary ones that led to disaster on the Eastern Front during the Great War and eventually to revolution) would have influenced Dom’s inquiring mind, and we certainly got the impression he felt he’d met an intellectual match.
Lebby Eyres
Lebby Eyres at Oxford in the 1990s

While we were initially bemused that someone was taking Dom’s opinions seriously, it soon became clear that Stone was Dom’s passport to a different world than the one we were inhabiting, a connection that would lead to introductions to influential people in years to come. And unlike most of the rest of us, he was destined to get a First.

There were few, if any, romantic entanglements – that James Bond villain air of menace was off-putting to some, although perhaps in retrospect we weren’t posh enough. It was only after leaving college we realised that despite not being from an aristocratic background himself – his mum was a teacher and his father a project manager – he had a penchant for upper-crust brunette beauties, which was duly reciprocated. I imagine some were left broken-hearted when he went on to marry Boris’s underling at the Spectator, Mary Wakefield, a descendant of Earl Grey.

While the country has only started to take notice of him recently, we’ve been watching his progress for decades. Several years back, a friend set up a regular email entitled “Dom Watch”, sending round snippets of information about him from the national press as his career ebbed and flowed dramatically and he rose or fell from grace, interspersing months holed up in his Durham bunker writing his blog with working for Iain Duncan Smith, then Michael Gove and Vote Leave.

Dom Watch is now almost a full-time job.  The last time we were all gathered together was at a friend’s Quentin Tarantino-themed 40th birthday in London a few years ago, before he got sucked into the whirlwind of Vote Leave organisation. Dom eschewed the chance to dress as a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, preferring his usual dressed-down look, and we chatted in the corridor where he was, as ever, watching proceedings from the sidelines. Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, he chose not to come to our college reunion this year back at Oxford.

Naturally, we were all beside ourselves when Benedict Cumberbatch was chosen to play Dom in Brexit: The Uncivil War, the TV drama written by James Graham that aired earlier this year. It’s not every day an A-lister portrays one of your old mates, but we were disappointed to find the actor rather miscast. He failed to capture Dom’s wiry edginess, despite spending time with the man himself, and our verdict was his portrayal was not much more than a rehashed Sherlock.  Inevitably, our college WhatsApp channels lit up after Dom’s appointment to Number 10.

A mixture of Leavers and Remainers we might be, but there was no doubt Dom would do his utmost to ensure that the UK left the EU on Hallowe’en. He has, I’m sure, viewed the events since the referendum with despair as Brexit has descended into farce, bogged down by the very bureaucratic processes he despises. It’s no surprise he jumped at the chance to sort things out.

There was a sense of pride among some in his elevation (he might be an evil genius, but he’s our evil genius), but also trepidation at his proximity to anything resembling a red button. Was it really wise of Boris to put the person who would raze everything to the ground in order to start afresh in charge? The irony is, given Dom’s dislike of unelected bureaucrats, that he is now more or less running the show – much to the horror of Tory grandees worried about his influence on Boris. He’s not the man to flinch in the face of the EU, but he won’t care about tearing down tradition to achieve his goal.

While events of the past few days have verged on the catastrophic for the Conservatives, it’s possible Dom, with his philosophy of being cruel to be kind, views the expulsion of Remainers from the party as the only way forward – and one can only assume – for the moment, at least – the PM agrees.  Whether he survives depends on whether Boris can ignore the increasingly loud and insistent voices telling him Dom will be his downfall – that he’s not after all, a master strategist but an impulsive bungler.

None of this criticism or hysterical hatred will be bothering Dom, who has no desire to stay in government long-term, but the failure to deliver any form of Brexit – the first step in his masterplan to reorganise Britain – would certainly wound him. It’s a high-stakes game of chicken, and one which could end up with him being savaged more brutally than on that day at Alton Towers.