Dominic Cummings hasn’t forgiven or forgotten

'If you've got duff people, then the institutions are going to be duff'

“Can you hear?” Lord Craft asked Dominic Cummings. “I’m just cupping my ear,” Boris Johnson’s former adviser answered, “don’t worry.”

Six years after leaving Downing Street, Cummings had been called in front of a panel of Lords to give evidence on the UK’s constitution. Craft had established Cummings could hear alright, but somehow no one thought to check whether or not he could see. After all, it’s been some years since he had to drive his family to Barnard Castle during lockdown to make sure his vision was top notch.

What Cummings could see, he explained to the Constitution Committee, was the rot inside of government. Much of that was related to the very terrible people working within it, he explained. Ministers? Rubbish. Civil servants? Guff.

“If you've got duff people, then the institutions are going to be duff,” said the strategist-turned-tech-player. “If you've got duff institutions and duff leadership, then you can't recruit great people.

“Inside the Whitehall system, there's a constant demand of, ‘well, why can't we get these great people into the system?’ Well, because great people have options, and they're not going to go and sit in stupid meetings with PowerPoint after PowerPoint with no one actually taking responsibility for anything.”

There’s no doubt that Cummings has seen into the heart of British power structures. As Johnson’s chief strategist, he was the guy, falling out with the Chancellor of the Exchequer over a plan to sack trusted Treasury aides and instal his own team and continually savaging Matt Hancock behind the scenes.

The attitude in the Cabinet Office is the MPs are thick, the MPs don't understand anything

But that was all six years and three prime ministers ago. Time may have gone on, but much of Cummings’ evidence was stuck in the pandemic era, as were his grudges. Has he kissed and made up with Covid Romeo Hancock, whose own parliamentary career ended after being caught on camera in a clinch with his staffer? Not likely, given a sideways dig about a hypothetical Secretary of State who’d had a “very, very unsuitable girlfriend”, or indeed raising his spectre twice as an example of the type of minister who shouldn’t grasp the levers of power. “Do you really want Hancock making decisions?” he pondered.

Anyway, Cummings is better off out of it now, having set up his tech consultancy. That’s where the real “elite talent” is, you see. “In the old days, a large fraction of elite talent went into public life, went into politics, the military, intelligence services, various kinds of public services, et cetera. And for all kinds of complicated reasons, post-1945, that's changed a lot. Now, very little elite talent goes into public life, and a huge amount goes into some kind of mix of maths, computing, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, technology, lots of private research efforts.”

Lots of “great people” did take government jobs during his time, Cummings points out, but “every single one” has been “pushed out or left in disgust”. Meaning that “now you have this building running around going, ‘oh my god, what do you do about AI?’” Which, as images go, seems like something that Grok could easily generate.

You can’t expect top talent to sit around “having normal meetings”, Cummings said.

Well, we all hate those. But you know what Cummings really hates, aside from Matt Hancock? The Cabinet Office. It and the dreaded Treasury would attack “centres of excellence” in government, he complained.

In fact, the very institutions of the British state including the Ministry of Defence pose a very real threat – far more so than, say, Russian warmonger and election-tamperer Vladimir Putin. “Putin is a tiny problem relative to our own Ministry of Defence and the lawyers in the Cabinet Office,” Cummings told the peers.

“It's not Putin who's launching lawfare against the SAS; it's not Putin who's destroyed procurement inside the MoD in a nightmare of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of money wasted – corrupt. It's not Putin who's stopping the MoD learning from drones from Ukraine. It's the civil servants in the MoD who tell the people who come back from Ukraine: ‘this is what's actually happening, don't tell anybody senior what you see in Ukraine about drones because that will jeopardise all our budgets’.

“Our main problems are what we do to ourselves,” he went on, and ain’t that the truth for most of us in our everyday lives? Not that any of those problems are normally quite so big as Brexit, which Cummings helped to spearhead, or botched Covid procurement.

But we were here to talk about the constitution – what works and what doesn’t. Cummings had had a lot to say about ministers and civil servants, but what about parliament, one peer wondered?

Which was all the encouragement Dom needed to set about the Cabinet Office again. “The attitude in the Cabinet Office is the MPs are thick, the MPs don't understand anything, the MPs aren't interested in it, and the MPs just blabber, so the less they're told about anything important, the better,” he answered, staying strictly to the point before making it clear that in many ways he agrees with that outlook.

“If you look at the MPs themselves, look at the last few years, look at Covid, look at Ukraine, look at the MoD shambles. Do you see the Select Committee for Defence actually forcing any discussion on any of these things? No. You had a nuclear sub nearly sink. You've got a complete and utter shitshow throughout the entire infrastructure for the nuclear enterprise. Is there one serious attempt in parliament to ask about that? No, there's not.

“MPs say, ‘well, you know, if we ask them we’ll just be told it's all classified, we can't talk to you’, so you have again. It's a system problem, right? You have the multiple different bits of the system have evolved in a certain direction, fundamentally such that nobody apart from the prime minister now can break certain kinds of gridlock. No individual perm sec can fix this problem. The cab sec can influence a lot of this, being the second most powerful person in the in the country, but can't actually fix a lot of it. Only the PM and political leadership could actually break out of this kind of system malfunction.”

Oh, for a figure who could show that kind of singular, visionary political leadership. One wonders if Cummings could think of anyone.