Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance

Asked what outsiders misunderstand about Number 10, Dominic Cummings points to a rabbit warren of old townhouses and a constant string of chaos. One COVID-era day runs from whether to impose a lockdown, to the Prime Minister’s girlfriend angry at the media, to Trump phoning about bombing people in Iraq, to the deep state objecting and other parts of the system insisting on friendship with America. A handful of people must answer very hard problems through old, centralized bureaucracies.

His example of that machinery is file sharing. In summer 2019 there was no system, and two parts of the deep state argued for months over whether Teams or Google Docs was more open to Chinese and Russian interception. His team forced a decision and had GCHQ build one, yet four years on the Cabinet Office and Number 10 are still fighting and have decided to hire consultants for millions of pounds to study it.

The deeper problem, he says, is the Prime Minister’s time. Since Thatcher, Number 10 has been a press entertainment service, and in January 2020 he and Johnson disagreed about it: Johnson wanted a great reconciliation with the media, while Cummings argued that after an 80-seat majority they had to focus on the real problems or four years would pass with nothing done. Almost all key politicians, he concludes, prefer dealing with the media to the important problems, and ministers have been trained by a culture that rewards media performance and leaking. When his team stopped ministers appearing on a leading BBC Radio show in early 2020, the media went completely crazy and a senior BBC figure called him a fascist.

Cummings challenges the phrase “running the department”: a Secretary of State can remove only three personal staff, and the Permanent Secretary controls personnel.

He legally cannot fire anybody else in the building.

Only the Prime Minister can order a failing senior official removed, though legal complications have grown. The result is bottlenecks in Number 10. In March 2020, on the day the Prime Minister tested positive, officials said ordered PPE would arrive only in the summer because shipping from China takes that long, though demand peaked within weeks and airlines were grounded. Cummings told them to take the airlines’ planes and fly to China that day. Only the Prime Minister could override EU rules and Treasury guidance and accept legal responsibility. Multiplied across hundreds of problems, he says, this is why COVID was so chaotic, and he notes Jared Kushner’s White House memoir describes similar cascades upward.

The vaccine task force shows both what prime-ministerial authority can do and its limits. The Prime Minister told it to ignore EU and UK procurement rules and Whitehall HR, yet departments still resisted. COVID showed how much faster things move with the Prime Minister’s authority, but also that large parts of the bureaucracy kept saying no because they were optimizing for sticking to the old rules.

Asked why former senior officials do not speak out, Cummings says many see it as normal life. A data project that officials presented proudly had taken two and a half years.

“Well, the actual project took like eight to twelve weeks. The rest of the two and a half years was the system emailing each other about legal permissions on what to do.”

Senior people who have spent 30 to 40 years in such a system know nothing different, and when his team worked very differently in 2020 it was disruptive and unwelcome, so much of what they did was closed down.

Cummings says the state did not reinforce its COVID successes. The vaccine task force was basically closed, sewage monitoring was closed, and rapid testing was basically closed, with too few tests ordered the following year. Those most wrong in 2020 received awards and promotions, while those repeatedly right have almost all left.

The people who were most obviously repeatedly right have almost all left.