Programmed to fail
Cummings, Keir, and the no-hope British government.
A year ago, someone who now works in government sold me on Keir Starmer’s plan for reinventing Whitehall. In short: Cummings tried to smash the system up. Better to change it from the inside with Sue Gray. In the end Gray was, like Liz Truss, outlasted by a lettuce in No 10.
But what of that plan for reform? A week ago Keir Starmer, a man whose worry seems to show permanently behind his eyes, picked Chris Wormald, a Whitehall lifer with a talent for obfuscation and a record of error, to run his government. Cummings reacted with his usual calm:
“Since I left No10 Ive explained how Westminster now is truly pathological, it seeks & destroys the few things that work… So it is a truly beautiful, artistic appointment to appoint as the most powerful official - a role 100X more powerful than ministers (other than the PM) - the official who told us all in Q1 2020 that we were 'the best prepared country in the world' for covid, who was responsible for the PM being told by then Cabinet Secretary on Thurs 12 March to go on TV to advocate for people holding 'CHICKENPOX PARTIES' so that as many as possible caught covid as fast as possible - the official who has presided over the implosion of the NHS and A&E.”
Cummings has been filing vivid criticisms of the civil service since 2014. Read them in full. They’re funnier than they’re given credit for. They also ring true.
Some senior Labour people now realise “he was right”, the BBC reported last week. I’ve always found his account quite compelling, and too plausible to ignore, so I’ve looked to distil his view of Whitehall in 28 bullet points below. They come from a conversation he had with
a year ago.I think the fury Cummings expresses is only going to become more widespread in the next decade as technology improves and governments don’t. We’re already seeing this in America, where presidents at least have the merit of being able to pick whomever they want for their cabinet.
In Britain, convention forces prime ministers to pick ministers from a minute pool of talent: their own party’s MPs. Whomever they pick then has to work with a permanent class of officials they cannot replace. I would love to know what percentage of the public think either of these things is a good idea.
I don’t have much confidence that a future British government will achieve much of anything. Do you? The criminal justice system has collapsed. Immigration is not under control. We don’t build homes. Politicians refuse to fix the tax system. The crown jewel of the British state may be its universities – and boy are those flawed. What works?
All of these failings are downstream of the machinery of government and the basic management of our institutions. Britain is full of talented people. They’re just not the ones with political power. Why? Here’s Cummings:
“Anybody who's been at a high functioning company would just be completely stunned by how the core of a G-7 state actually works.”
“One of the things we wanted to do was fundamentally reorient Number 10 away from what it's been since Thatcher, which is a kind of press entertainment service.” By “we” Cummings means he and his allies in No 10, not Johnson. This was something that would be done to Johnson.
Cummings tried to “reorient” Johnson in this way after the 2019 election. Johnson’s purported response: “No, no, no, no. That's crazy. Everyone will go crazy with us if we do that. We've got to make friends with the media. We drove them all mad last year. Now it's time for a great reconciliation.”
“You also have this fundamental question: do the key politicians want to spend their time on the important problems? Or do they want to spend their time running around all day dealing with the media? And the answer is, almost all of them want to do the second.”
Cummings suggests to Johnson that they tell ministers “here are your actual priorities as defined by us. Whether or not you get promoted and whether or not your career goes well is going to be defined by how well your department actually fulfils these goals. We don't care about all of your interviews. We don't care if you are on TV.” This didn’t happen.
The government is not the government. “How many people can the Secretary of State for Defence fire? The three people he brings in [as special advisers]. He legally cannot fire anybody else in the building. The other hundreds of thousands of people in the system, he can't get rid of a single one of them. So the person who actually is in charge of personnel at the Ministry of Defence is the Permanent Secretary, stressing the word permanent. The only person in the British state who has the legal and constitutional ability to say ‘This senior person in the Ministry of Defence or the Department of Education is clearly failing and they must be removed, and I order that they be removed’ is the Prime Minister.”
All action in Whitehall therefore depends, in Cummings’ telling, 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 he’s actually supporting them and is prepared to say that people will just be removed from their post if they don't do what they’re told.” Tony Blair’s empowerment of Andrew Adonis to create academy schools in the 2000s is a great example of this, one which Adonis retells here.
Everyone loves the Vaccine Taskforce Kate Bingham ran during Covid. It operated entirely outside of Whitehall procedure, says Cummings, so why didn’t we remake the centre of government in its image? “Did they say, ‘Okay, the Vaccine Taskforce and Operation Warp Speed [in America] have been great successes. We should massively reinforce them. We should build the next generation of vaccines. We should spread the lessons of how the task force operated?”
The key lesson of the Taskforce was to empower one qualified person—Bingham—and hold them responsible. Responsibility and authority were delegated together. That’s unusual. Typically “nobody ever has the authority just to build or do something.”
The quality of the people is fundamental. Yet the civil service is a closed caste. It promotes lifers like Wormald. “It's a system that promotes practically 100 per cent internally and is therefore, by definition, closed to approximately 100 per cent of the world's most talented people.” Why doesn’t a PM try hiring CEOs who have built successful companies to run government departments instead?
The senior ranks of the civil service resemble “a Japanese company where you get in after college and just stay until you die. The young, excellent people get weeded out by self-selection. The most entrepreneurial leave and the most HR-compliant are promoted. Then that culture becomes highly self-reinforcing… It’s totally self-serving.” (Here’s a contrasting portrait of a former senior civil servant.)
The press upholds this system. “In the summer [of 2020] we actually got rid of roughly half a dozen of the senior permanent secretaries in charge of a lot of these departments. It was described by insiders as a ‘rolling coup’. Fascism. The Vote Leave fascist entity is now essentially mounting a coup, Orban style. That was the reaction of large parts of the old system to saying half a dozen duffers are going to be removed and we're going to start promoting some younger, more dynamic people.”
Cummings blames Starmer for Johnson's inertia in 2020 and 2021, up until Johnson’s self-immolation. “The fact that Starmer was so obviously rubbish also meant that Boris and his wife thought, we don't actually have to do very much. So it goes back to this question of are you actually trying to change a lot or not?”
Boris just wanted to be friends with London insiders, and to have a nice time. “The overwhelming majority of people in politics fundamentally prioritize social relations within the insider network.”
“The permanent civil service are brilliant at manipulating the theatre to keep the egos of the MPs satisfied. The most obvious way to think about it is the Cabinet. Officials who are 28 years old, working five 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.”
“Why don't you start a page where you actually report on the deep state?” Cummings asked a newspaper editor once, “and you say, ‘The Prime Minister’s secretary for economic affairs has moved from this job to that job and has now been replaced by a 31 year old.’” A sort of Puck for Whitehall.
On Sunak, then PM: “He's trying to make the old system work and he's treating the old system with respect. It's political disintegration. He doesn't control the government. He doesn't even control Number 10, the Cabinet Office. He has no political story. He has no message. He has no grip. And he's just buffeted hither and thither by events in the same way that every PM has been since Thatcher.”
On all PMs: “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.”
How any of this changes: “There needs to be some subset of the elite or part of the elite currently not really involved with politics, that decides to get involved with politics, that actually decides that its fundamental goal is to solve a set of problems.”
“You could do it with a relatively small number of people. If you had the right PM, you could start off with ten people. But it has to be people that have a common set of what their goals are and who are very able and who are then able to build a network beyond that. No kind of coup or no kind of regime change ever happens if the small group of people at the start stay small.”
There’s a lot we don’t know, part I: “They [government officials] can classify things and use classification to hide extraordinary public disasters. For example, China’s infiltration of critical infrastructure and data systems in Britain is much, much worse than practically all MPs have any comprehension of.”
Part II: “Similarly, on the nuclear side, I spent a lot of time in 2020 in bunkers without phones, talking to officials about the state of the nuclear enterprise, [and] weapons safety infrastructure. And the truth is absolutely horrific there… you have literally tens of billions of pounds that are going to have to be spent on the nuclear weapons infrastructure that don't appear in the official accounts at all… there are constant bureaucratic incentives to not face reality.”
“A lot of that kind of stuff has been shifted away from politicians over the last ten years. Nobody really has any visibility on large parts of that system at all now. When I dug into these things inside the Cabinet Office, I was essentially the only political person in a long time who'd actually even been discussing it with parts of the system, so the officials themselves said to me.”
These “things” have been “pulled into the Cabinet Office, away from the Ministry of Defence, away from the Foreign Office and away from the Home Office—the three parts of the system that legally in the past had a lot of oversight over what was happening. Now a lot of it happens inside the Cabinet Office where there's essentially zero political oversight of any kind.”
What will affect the future most? “Conflict matters a lot. Technology matters. And they matter in ways that are very contingent and hard to predict and very nonlinear. And ideas matter most of all. But almost none of that really comes from the government, right? It comes, almost by definition, from people who are fringe at the time… everything has its time of growth and decay, and it depends on the culture of the elites. It depends on the ideas that they believe in.”
“Slow rot. Elite blindness. Sudden crisis. Collapse. Bloodshed. Chaos. That's normal. That's the baseline expectation for our own current situation.”
“The obvious set of people that could put the country on a different track are the Silicon Valley builders. [But] the madder the system gets, the more the competent people retreat to their fish ponds.” He’s referring to something Cicero wrote ahead of the collapse of Rome, a reference recently taken up by Marc Andreessen when he went on Joe Rogan.
“They look up, they build walled gardens, they try and build their own companies where they can do things of value. They try to insulate themselves and other people that they care about from the chaos.”
What do you think? Hit reply to let me know. I’m planning to distil things more frequently in future: mainly books, sometimes podcasts. Thanks for reading.
Hi Harry. Yes, most of Dom's criticisms are valid but need to be read with two major warnings in mind.
1. He isn't just criticising the civil service. He (quite rightly) despairs of almost every element of our government/constitution. Ian Dunt (in his recent book) says much the same apart (if I remember rightly) from excusing the judiciary from his criticisms.
2. Dom's only solution was to sack everyone he criticises (Ministers, Spads) or to seek, himself, to control the Prime Minister. He wasn't (and still isn't) prepared clearly to analyse why we ended up in this mess, nor to describe his vision of what should replace Cabinet government and the current invisibility and absence of accountability of officials.
I and others have written extensively about these issues. One place to start might be my 4 August 23 Substack. You could also look at the Civil Service Reform pages on my website (https://www.civilservant.org.uk/) and the depressingly long list of civil service reform reports in its library (https://www.civilservant.org.uk/library.html). But none of those reports, or Dom's rants, have brought about any significant change in the arrangements that were introduced by Haldane in 1919, so the problem is clearly very deep seated and needs to be tackled accordingly.
It is really heartening (if that’s the right word) to see a New Statesman contributor taking this view seriously.
There is a bit of a realignment happening — maybe the only relevant question now is whether we continue as before or take seriously the task of remaking our government. You might enjoy some of the ideas in https://anglofuturism.substack.com.
Look forward to reading more from you.