Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…A fundamental problem with how the British state works is this question of prioritization and the Prime Minister’s time. So you have all of these normal parts of the system that essentially can’t really do anything quickly at all, even in a crisis. So the Prime Minister’s time and the Prime Minister’s prioritization is the most important asset. But also it’s something which is constantly pulled hither and thither by all of this craziness. One of the things that obviously we wanted to do was fundamentally reorient Number 10, away from what it’s been since Thatcher, which is a kind of press entertainment service. Where the whole building is just built to respond to what the media says and instead say, “What do we actually think is important?” And what is the management system you’re going to build that actually can maintain focus on those things whilst the inevitable chaos goes on? Most obviously, for example, some terrorist incident happens in central London. Prime Minister can’t ignore that. It’s going to involve the Prime Minister’s time. Politics, the news, the government means that there are things like that happening all day, every day, So if you have the normal state of affairs, then the Prime Minister is just pulled from one crisis like that after another. Now, some of them are justifiable. You’ve got to deal with a terrorist crisis. But in fact, what’s happened over the last 20 years is that that’s just been the model for how Prime Ministers spend practically all of their time. And there isn’t a kind of background system with a set of people who are just plodding on, going “Right. The actually important things are science and technology agenda, productivity reform, the Ministry of Defence, Procurement Reform, deep state this, etc.” So that’s a fundamental structural issue. We tried to deal with that in various ways, but in January 2020, it was clear that this essential question was already a fundamental disagreement between me and Boris. So in the first week of January, Trump had just whacked that Iranian guy. I forgot his name, the head of the revolutionary whatever it was, with the drone strike in Iraq. So we’re talking in that week about the future. So what, three weeks after the election? And he says, these various journalists are complaining that you don’t return their calls. Now’s the time for us to make friends with all of these people after the chaos of 2019. And I said, “No, I don’t think that’s right at all. We’ve gone through hell. We’ve won an 80 seat majority. Now we have to change how this building works and we have to focus on the actual big problems facing the country. We’ve got to get Number 10 and your time, the PM’s time, away from how it’s been managed for the last 20 years, which is media entertainment service.” And his response was, “No, no, no, no. That’s crazy. Everyone will go crazy with us if we do that. We’ve got to make friends with the media. We drove them all mad last year. ia entertainment service.” And his response was, “No, no, no, no. That’s crazy. Everyone will go crazy with us if we do that. We’ve got to make friends with the media. We drove them all mad last year. Now it’s time for a great reconciliation. ” And I said, we could do that, but if we do that, we’ll just be the same as every other government for the last 20 years, which is chasing the bullshit in the media all day. And 4 years will pass and we won’t actually have done anything. And by then it’ll be 14 years of Conservative government. We’ve just won an election, partly by running against the previous decade of the Conservative Party. Can’t pull that off again. We’re actually going to have to do a whole bunch of things. And also, that’s why the people are here. We actually want to solve these problems. Those issues get to the heart of a lot of it. You have a management question about how you actually manage priorities in such an insane environment. You have a personnel problem about a lack of talent. But you also have this fundamental question of, do the key politicians want to spend their time on the important problems, or do they want to spend their time running around all day dealing with the media? And the answer is, almost all of them want to do the second. There’s a lot I want to ask about there. It’s interesting because the way you’re describing it, it sounds like it’s a company with the Prime Minister as a CEO who’s dealing with all these operational things that come up, but there is no CEO who has a long term plan. I’m curious about the media stuff. I want to understand why it’s the case that they’re so obsessed with the media. Does the media actually matter that much to how people perceive the politicians? How is the media interacting with the things that are happening in the building so that people are constantly thinking of the media? Why is the media so ever present in people’s minds?…

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