| Notes |
Early life
Cummings was born in Durham on 25 November 1971. His father, Robert, had a varied career, primarily as an oil rig project manager for Laing,[1] the construction firm. His mother, Morag, a university graduate, was a teacher and behavioural specialist.[3] Sir John Laws, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, was his uncle.[3]
After attending state primary school, he was privately educated at Durham School[4] and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied under Norman Stone,[5] graduating in 1994 with a First in Ancient and Modern History.[6] One of his former tutors has described him to the New Statesman as "fizzing with ideas, unconvinced by any received set of views about anything". He was "something like a Robespierre – someone determined to bring down things that don’t work."[3] Also in his youth, he worked at Klute, a nightclub owned by his uncle in Durham.[7]
After university, Cummings moved to Yeltsin's post-Soviet Russia from 1994 to 1997,[failed verification] working on various projects at the encouragement of Stone. He worked for a group attempting to set up an airline connecting Samara in southern Russia to Vienna in Austria which George Parker of the Financial Times said was "spectacularly unsuccessful".[8] He subsequently returned to the UK. |