Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…On your blog, when you’ve written about all these other reformers throughout history, they were able to make their changes in a time of crisis. Lee Kuan Yew after the British leaves or Bismarck after Prussia loses the Napoleonic wars, In this case, you have COVID, you have Brexit, you have an 80 seat majority that you’ve engineered based on campaigning on these things. And you have you as chief advisor to the PM, somebody who understands these things, has thought a lot about them and, in fact, accepted the job on the condition that you would be able to do these things. You have all these things come together. Why was the opportunity wasted? You mentioned, for example, that Boris and Kerry were not interested in changing these things. Presumably they saw that the problem was there. I mean, if you’re a PM you must see the craziness. And also, wasn’t he a fan of Churchill and he wanted to build a legacy or something? I would think if I was PM considering that most PMs are going to be forgotten, you might as well just go forward and try to do something big, and try to be remembered. Why did they waste this opportunity? You have all these things that were going for you guys. If something was going to happen, that seemed like the perfect moment to make something happen. Part of it goes back to what I said before, that you have two fundamentally different attitudes towards the whole thing. Boris was prepared to be very aggressive and revolutionary in various ways in 2019, fundamentally because he thought it was necessary for him to survive as Prime Minister, not for the country, which he didn’t and doesn’t care about, but for himself. In January 2020, we were already arguing about what the fundamental direction is that we’re going to go in. As I said before, my view was: We’ve won. We won saying that we’re going to do all these things. We now have to actually do all of these things. And in order to do all of these object level things, it requires facing these multi-decade long term, some of them over a century, in terms of how the actual constitutional system works, how the civil service works and everything else, versus his view, which is that it all just sounds like a lot of hard work and making a lot of enemies and it doesn’t really seem necessary because the Labour Party is a joke and I want to be friends with London. I want to be friends with insiders. I want to have a nice time. The overwhelming majority of people in politics fundamentally prioritize social relations within the insider network. That is just what totally dominates their life day in, day out, year in, year out. Now in some ways it’s very odd. Because what’s the point of doing this for 30 years and then you kind of become a minister, but you’re not actually in charge of anything and you can’t actually do anything and then you’re spat out and you’re not even going to be even a footnote in history. What on earth is the point of it? It kind of seems completely crazy to me anyway. I think that misunderstands how they see it. For them, the theatre and appearing on TV is the critical part of it. It’s not — Have you actually done anything? And the permanent civil service are brilliant at manipulating the theater to keep the egos of the MPs satisfied. The most obvious way to think about it is the Cabinet. You have the most famous door in the world, Number 10. Every week these characters walk up the street. The cameras are all there. The cameras work. They click, they shout out questions. The ministers smile at the cameras and they think “We’re part of the insider gap.” This is the peak thing that everyone aims at whilst behind the door. The people actually running most of the government regard the Cabinet as just kind of bullshit theater. The meetings are literally scripted. People are given their talking points to read out by the officials. They read them out, they read those out and the conclusions are all pre-written. So the whole thing is a complete potemkin farce. But from the MP’s point of view, we’re on TV, we’re treated like we’re in charge. The fact that the people actually running the Ministry of Defense is not the Secretary of State. The fact that these ministers have fundamentally no power. e on TV, we’re treated like we’re in charge. The fact that the people actually running the Ministry of Defense is not the Secretary of State. The fact that these ministers have fundamentally no power. The fact that in Number 10, officials who are like 28 years old working 5 meters away from the PM have usually far more power and authority over things than the ministers on TV do. But their names are never in the papers. No one knows who they are. This weird mismatch is never explored. It’s never covered. I had a funny conversation the other day. I was talking to one of the editors of one of the biggest newspapers in the country, and I said, “In the old days, there used to be a parliament page in newspapers that would report what happens in Parliament.” Because that’s the center of political activity and what happens in Parliament is important. “Why don’t you start a page where you actually report on the deep state?” and you say, “Oh, the Prime Minister’s secretary for Economic affairs has moved from this job to that job and it’s now been replaced by a 31 year old.” because those jobs actually are far more important. If you look at Brexit, the foreign secretary was almost completely irrelevant to all of the Brexit negotiations. The Prime Minister’s private secretary, a very able character, much more able than anyone in the current cabinet, but was totally unknown in the media. Name never in the media but far more important. So I said to this editor, “Why don’t you have a page and fix that?” And he said, “Well, everyone would think I’d lost my mind if I did that.” It would antagonize everyone. The MPs would go completely crazy because preserving this fiction, the potemkin charade of the MPs trotting up Downing street and being filmed going into the Cabinet which is taking decisions. As long as the potemkin carries on. Just don’t break the kayfabe, as they say in WWE.…

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