Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. So, what does that reveal about who makes a good PM? What are the characteristics needed for a person who can control the government? It’s impossible to be a good PM if you accept the way that the job currently works. It’s totally impossible because of what we’ve been talking about. You’re just buffeted by media events all day, and you don’t actually control the government. You can’t actually make anything happen. If you accept all the constraints and you accept the way that Whitehall works, it’s impossible for anybody. It doesn’t matter. You could put General Groves into that job. If he did it the way that Sunak’s doing it, General Groves would fail, too. You could put in FDR. You could put in Bismarck. The reality is nobody who actually gets a lot of things done historically operates the way that the current Prime Minister is forced to operate by the prevailing system. They are fundamentally incompatible things. This is the same government that has nukes, that deals with biosecurity, counterterrorism, and all kinds of other things that I’m sure I’m not even aware of. If the general government is this dysfunctional, are the people who are in charge of the nukes just as dysfunctional as those not having Google Docs and taking two years of litigation to do a two week project?…

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