Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, or hard for a good statesman to take over as well. You are somebody who has actually lived through and participated at a high level in a hinge point in history, with masterminding Brexit and then as chief advisor doing COVID. What is it that you now understand about how history is written? When you were looking back at previous periods, how do you think about what is written versus what actually happened? Knowing how your time has been described in the press and in contemporary accounts. Close to 100% of the things written about me, what I was trying to do, what I thought, what I said, what I wanted to do, what I actually did, is complete garbage. So it obviously affects how you see everything else. It can’t have any other effect. It was true in the Department of Education. It was true in the referendum itself. It was true in Number 10. It definitely makes me much more skeptical about all kinds of details. I think whenever you read history, it definitely makes me think all the time. “Yeah, but that might easily be wrong. And what else was actually happening behind the scenes also?” Also just like, how much is lost to it. If I think about my own time in doing the referendum or Number 10, close to 100% of the reality of conversations and motivations and calculations is basically lost. It’s history. None of it is really recorded anywhere. I mean, there might be some sketchy WhatsApp conversations here and there. The odd person keeps a diary, which can be useful for sure, but it was pretty rare, certainly amongst top people. Even if they keep it, I think they destroy. Especially in this age where so much is recorded even if you don’t try to. Whereas if you look back at Bismarck’s time, there’s not any emails and so forth that you can dig up.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.