Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? To some extent. The system here, in a lots of ways, the Prime Minister has more powers than the president does and is less legally constrained than the president is, because in all kinds of gaps, in lacunae, in the system, there are kind of ancient assumptions that the PM is operating with the authority of the Crown and royal prerogative. So the PM could just do a whole bunch of things, particularly in a crisis, and doesn’t have to necessarily get approval from Parliament. The most obvious example of what you’re talking about in COVID was on the vaccine task force. I said, with others, in March 2020 that the normal system obviously can’t deal with vaccines. It can’t do anything fast. We’re watching it deal with all of these other logistical problems. We have to create a completely different entity to deal with vaccines. So we essentially appointed someone and the Prime Minister said: Ignore all the EU procurement rules. Ignore all UK procurement rules. Ignore everything. You just build the vaccine task force the way that you want to. We’re freeing you from all the normal Whiteall, HR, all the normal things which add massive friction and mean that nobody can do anything quickly and the simplest things take months and months. To a large extent, because of the scale of the crisis that happened. But the vaccine task force was still plagued by lots of parts of Whitehall saying, “Well, we don’t want you to do this. We don’t like this.” So the reality is that it depends on the characters involved. It depends on how much the person the PM has empowered will actually push. It depends on the extent to which they come to the PM. It depends on the extent to which the PM then shows everyone in the system that I’m actually supporting them and also fundamentally is prepared to say that people will just be removed from their post if they don’t do what they’re told. Covid showed how much faster you can do things if the PM’s authority is used and you could prepare to drive things through the system. And the PM is prepared to say, “I will deal with legal issues later.” But it also showed that even in a crisis where literally thousands of people are dying day after day after day, that large parts of the bureaucracy will still simply say “No. We are optimizing for sticking to the old rules.” And that also happened an awful lot. What I find interesting is you’ve written a lot after you got out of the government about all these problems, but there’s other people who have been at a high level in governments in the UK, US, wherever. And it’s weird to me that if there’s this much dysfunction, are they not noticing it? Are they just refusing to talk about it? Have they just never been in a functional environment, maybe in the private sector or something, where they realize how dysfunctional this is? Why is everybody not screaming about this as soon as they get out of the government?…

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