Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…He legally cannot fire anybody else in the building. The personal three people that he brings in that. He can get rid of those three people. The other hundreds of thousands of people in the system, he can’t get rid of a single one of them. So the person who actually is in charge of personnel at the Ministry of Defence is the Permanent secretary. Stressing the word permanent. The only person in the British state who has the legal and constitutional ability to say “This senior person in the Ministry of Defence or the Department of Education is clearly failing and they must be removed, and I order that they be removed” is the Prime Minister. That itself is problematic because the large part system will say, “Well, we can’t just dismiss them, or if we do dismiss them, then there’ll be legal repercussions.” But you can actually remove them from the post. There are complications, and those complications have grown in the last few years because of the way that the legal system and various parts of the law have evolved. But the PM can actually remove someone. But only the PM can. So that gives you an idea as well of the tremendous bottlenecks that occur inside Number 10. I’ll tell you a story about it that kind of summarizes it. At the peak of COVID craziness in March 2020, on the day itself that the PM tested positive for CoVID, a bunch of people come into Number 10 sit around the table and we have a meeting and it’s about supplies of PPE to the NHS. They say, “None of this ppe that we’ve ordered is going to be here until the summer.” “But the peak demand is over the next three to four weeks.” “Sorry, Dominic, but it’s not going to be here.” “Why not?” “Well, because that’s how long it takes to ship from China.” “Why are you shipping from China?” “Well, because that’s what we always do. We ship it from China.” But A, we need it now and B, all of the airlines are grounded. No one’s flying anything. “So call up the airlines, tell them that we’re taking their planes, we’re flying all the planes to China, we’re picking up all our shit, we’re bringing it back here. Do that now. Do that today. Send the planes today.” We did that. But only the Prime Minister could actually cut through all the bureaucracy and say, Ignore these EU rules on Blah. Ignore treasury guidance on Blah. Ignore this. Ignore that. “I am personally saying do this and I will accept full legal responsibility for everything.” You multiply that kind of problem by hundreds and thousands of problems, you get a sense of partly why COVID was so crazy. This is normal government. But in a crisis, when no part of the system can actually move fast, all of these bottlenecks end up very dramatically escalating to the PM’s office. And if you read Jared Kushner’s book, Memoir about the White House, there are very, very similar tales there. That a lot of things that obviously should have been solved elsewhere couldn’t be solved at any other part of the system. book, Memoir about the White House, there are very, very similar tales there. That a lot of things that obviously should have been solved elsewhere couldn’t be solved at any other part of the system. They all end up cascading upwards in these centralized bureaucracies, because ultimately only the president or only the Prime Minister can give certain kinds of orders. What if the Prime Minister said, I am giving a blank check. If I appoint you as minister, whatever you say, I’m going to sign it. So you can rule as if I agree on everything you said. Could they write such a blank check and basically give the minister whatever authority they might want?…

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