24
Examination of witness
Dominic Cummings.
Q50 The Chair: Good morning, Dom, and welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Constitution Committee. Today, we are holding the fifth evidence session of the committee’s inquiry into the UK’s constitutional safeguards. We are delighted to be joined by Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Mr Cummings, welcome to the committee. You are very welcome. I remind all members of the committee to declare any interests relevant to this inquiry or today’s meeting the first time that they speak. Just to confirm matters, I have no relevant interests of my own. That is the introduction.
Dominic, as I said earlier, thank you very much for coming along. We are looking at the balance of various powers in the constitution and between different aspects of it, such as No. 10 and the Palace. Of course, we are very much believers in the sovereignty of Parliament. You have over a long period of time been a very vocal critic of various arrangements. You previously argued that the British state, including the Whitehall system, is dysfunctional. What are the most significant weaknesses in how the UK is governed? How do you think these should be addressed? Is this committee hearing at least one way of getting the arguments out into the open?
Dominic Cummings: That is a very broad opening question. I start with the core arguments that I would make. No. 1: many of these problems are obviously not unique to Britain. We saw during Covid, and we can see in Ukraine, many of the same pathologies across pretty much all western countries. Lots of these things are common. The first thing is that over a period of decades you have had a very marked shift in elite talent, where it goes and how it spends its time. In the old days, a large fraction of elite talent went into public life, politics, the military, intelligence services, various kinds of public services and so on. For all kinds of complicated reasons, post 1945, that has 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 and so on. When you look at previous crises in Britain, war efforts and so on, and you think of certain famous people and ask where their equivalents are today, most of them are not in public service. We saw that very clearly during Covid. That is one big thing.
A second big thing is that the old British constitution that you can see pre the 1850s and very clearly in the 1790s, the life of Pitt and the whole period of the French Revolution and whatnot—you can see it in letters from Palmerston to Queen Victoria in the 1830s and 1840s—was obviously based centrally on the principle of ministerial responsibility to Parliament. Responsibility was real. You can read many letters from people like Palmerston explaining it. The principle was that the Minister answering questions about a department in Parliament actually understood and was truly responsible for what happened in that department.
That obviously has become a complete fake charade, for many complicated reasons. The shift of the Northcote-Trevelyan system was a huge part of it. Essentially, in that system we substituted the old British approach for a Chinese meritocracy approach of basing everything on exams like the old Mandarin system. That began a process of transforming British institutions and the constitution, and you can see already its effects in World War I and in World War II. You can read memoirs from people such as Alanbrooke and RV Jones in World War II, and you can see already the signs there of many things that would come to haunt us during Covid and now over Ukraine. That fundamental collapse of ministerial responsibility is central.
The third thing to point out is that, if you go back and look at the history of the Cabinet Office, it was created out of the terrible crisis of the trench warfare in World War I and worries in this building that we were near collapse. Out of that, the Cabinet Office was created to try to change how the centre of power operated. If you look at the history of it, absolutely central to that history was the idea that of course the Cabinet Office must not become the policy-making entity, and of course, even more important, the Cabinet Office must in no sense take over responsibilities for personnel and appointments. That was agreed. There were many arguments about the creation of the Cabinet Office, including in this place, but everyone agreed at the time that it would obviously be a disaster if the Cabinet Office had anything to do with policy and appointments. Fast forward a century, and who is in control of all policy and appointments? The Cabinet Office. You have had here former Cabinet Secretaries say on the record that they regard the Prime Minister’s Office as an accounting unit of the Cabinet Office, and I think that reflects the general view inside the Cabinet Office. Certainly, the Cabinet Office does not in any way see its job as to execute the views of the Prime Minister—obviously.
I would start with those three big basics. If you look at anything that really works well in the world, you see great talent, responsibility inside institutions and speed of execution. The way in which the British system has evolved means that all three of those things now are more or less unlawful in the current situation.
The Chair: It is about the quality of people, the responsibility that is put upon them and their inability to cut through the bureaucracy, if I can paraphrase what you have said.
Dominic Cummings: Sort of, yes. It is a complex system. There are lots of arguments saying, “Oh, it’s the people”, or, “No, it’s not the people. It’s the institutions”. You have these arguments, but they are not really fruitful because you have to look at the overall thing and how they interact. If you have duff people, the institutions are going to be duff. If you have duff institutions and duff leadership, you cannot recruit great people. You see this constantly inside the Whitehall system. There is a constant demand of, “Why can’t we get these great people into the system?” It is because great people have options, and they are not going to sit in stupid meetings with PowerPoint after PowerPoint, and no one actually taking responsibility for anything.
Lots of great people came in to help the system in 2020 because it was the worst crisis since 1945. Literally every single one of those great people who came in in 2020 was either pushed out or left in disgust. Now you have this building running around going, “Oh my God, what do you do about AI?” The Cabinet Office literally pushed out people who came in in 2020 to help the British state deal with AI, who are now running some of the most important programmes in the world in companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It is a pathological response of the system to push out such people. It is a feedback mechanism. You cannot expect those people to come in if they are going to be sitting around having normal meetings.
The Chair: Right at the start, when you talked about talent, if I can put it very bluntly, you said it is about pay and conditions, whereas in the outside world, particularly in the City and some of the tech companies, people are very highly rewarded for what they do and it is impossible for the Civil Service to compete.
Dominic Cummings: Money is actually less important. When I was working in No. 10, there were some amazingly good officials, but the amazingly good officials were almost all young. Now there is an inverse talent ratchet whereby the system sucks in very idealistic and able young people in their 20s, but they gradually become disillusioned, and then by the time they get to 40-ish they look above them and they look at their management and they say, “I don’t want to do this”. The most entrepreneurial and punchy people with the most options leave, and the worst kind of HR people get promoted. Then that filters up and up until you have a situation like 2020 and Covid, where you have a bunch of Permanent Secretaries who are essentially nightmare HR hires.
Q51 Lord Cryer: Based on what you just said, would you say that the British constitution is under serious threat? Sorry, can you hear?
Dominic Cummings: Yes. My ears do not work so well. I am cupping my ear. Do not worry.
Lord Cryer: All right. Would you say the British constitution is under serious threat? If so, what are those threats?
Dominic Cummings: Yes, it is under threat. It is under threat because there is a general collapse of trust in the competence and integrity of institutions, and that obviously includes the political parties, the media, Parliament and the Civil Service. That, as I said at the start, is a general problem across the West, including here. A fundamental aspect of this is that, because of the internet, people can see many of the lies that are told. People can also see a fundamental lack of responsibility for things. This is not an idiosyncratic view of mine. If you listen to Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama’s chief of staff in the White House and a very establishment Democrat-type character, and his analysis of why America is in the situation that it is in, he will say that we have had Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, and disaster after disaster, and a perception among voters that the old system lies about it all and refuses to ever take any responsibility for it or to change. The response always seems to be doubling down on, “Well, you should trust us more and give us more money and power”.
Yes, the British constitution is under threat. Yes, there are foreign adversaries and enemies who hate us and are trying to cause problems. But by far our biggest problem is here. Putin is a tiny problem relative to our own Ministry of Defence and the lawyers in the Cabinet Office. It is not Putin who is launching lawfare against the SAS. It is not Putin who has destroyed procurement inside the MoD in a nightmare of corruption and hundreds of billions of pounds wasted. It is not Putin who is stopping the MoD learning from drones in Ukraine. It is 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”. It is not Putin and China doing these things to us. Our main problems are what we do to ourselves.
Q52 Baroness Laing of Elderslie: It is very interesting to hear what you say about ministerial responsibility being a “fake charade”. That is the kind of phrase that rightly shakes up thinking on this aspect of government. Would you consider perhaps that there might be too many arm’s-length institutions, quangos and other organisations checking the prerogative or statutory power of Ministers, so that if a Minister is trying to get something done there are so many hurdles put in the way by quangos and arm’s-length bodies?
Dominic Cummings: Yes, that is obviously a problem. It really accelerated in the 1980s with the Thatcher Government. A lot of people in the Tory party then thought that if we created all these independent agencies they would operate a bit like businesses with CEOs and whatnot. Of course, that was a completely false analogy to how the world works. All they really do is create things where responsibility is extremely opaque. Certainly, going back to my very first point, it undermined the old British constitutional principle of ministerial responsibility. Yes, that is a big problem.
There is an expression in Moscow: everyone is right and everyone is unhappy. It means everyone kind of has a point. The Civil Service response to what you said is—and civil servants have said this to me directly—”But look at the quality of the MPs. The MPs are so rubbish. They don’t want responsibility. They don’t want to be in charge. Imagine, Dominic, if we put so and so, Minister X, in charge of this. Yes, it’s a shambles now, but imagine if so and so was in charge; it would be even worse. They don’t want to be responsible”. That, I am afraid, is also very true. It is hard even to think of a Tory Minister whom I dealt with who actually wanted to be responsible for what was going on in the department. That is also an important thing. It is true that the Civil Service system has gradually disempowered Ministers, correct, but it is also true that the Ministers and the MPs themselves have become infantilised and have actually been largely happy with this process.
Baroness Laing of Elderslie: Would government work better and would the constitution be less threatened if there were fewer outside bodies wielding power?
Dominic Cummings: Yes, but I would go back to the pre-Northcote-Trevelyan system and have Ministers accountable to Parliament. That is the principle under which the old British constitution worked, and worked phenomenally well. It helped Britain lead the Industrial Revolution. It helped us beat Napoleon. Why can we not have that good old system rather than the nightmare bureaucracy that we have today, which is failing on all fronts?
Q53 Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: Thanks very much. It is fascinating to hear you. My background is not in politics but in street-level activities of various kinds. A lot of the things that we demonstrated about, wrote petitions about and organised community responses about, we always felt, were never being picked up anywhere and dealt with, but we went on doing that. It was strange for me, given some of the things that we remember you being reported for, that you are saying some of these things and identifying them at the very heart of government. I found myself very fascinated by that—how someone could get in there when we got as far as the door of No. 10 in order to present a petition, and that was as far as we got. I am in politics now, and I am conscious of the tensions and pressures that compete with each other within the political machine. You have properly pointed us towards good practice elsewhere and in history. You pointed to some key principles—ministerial responsibility and so on.
From the life that you have lived—it was a very public life after all—and the responsibilities that you have handled, have you found within the machine good practice that you can bring to the attention of others who were perhaps less well served? Was there part of a dialectic that you were placed to deal with, to present and suggest that we could learn from internal ways of acting as well as from external ones, either temporal or spatial? I do not know if I am making myself clear on this point. You seem rather well placed to have your views listened to, and I wondered if you could see centres of excellence and use those as part of the dialectic that you were responsible for.
Dominic Cummings: First, as I referred to earlier, private offices are actually remarkably good and remarkably understudied in general. Again, it is connected to the youth. Generally, they are much younger. It is close to 100% that that will be the case—possibly not always but in principle they are more junior people and there is a lot more talent density there. That is a strength. The Prime Minister’s private office attracts a lot of great people, and that is a strength. But I would also point out that a lot of those great people now leave. It used to be a very important pipeline of young, talented people, talent-spotted and encouraged to go to the Prime Minister’s private office, and then from there fast-tracked through to leadership positions in the future. To quite a large extent, that pipeline now is broken, and that has feedback effects on the system. It also means now that what has been true for a very long time, with able officials trying to get into the Prime Minister’s Office, to some extent now no longer happens, and people have been trying to avoid it because it is seen as such a constant nightmare and shambles.
In No. 10, there were obviously some centres of excellence, but you tended to find that the centres of excellence were being attacked by the Cabinet Office and Treasury. The Treasury was generally trying to cut the funding of everything that worked well and opposed helping them out. The year 2020 was interesting in a few ways. It was such a big crisis that the system had to change because you were faced with mass death on a weekly basis. Even then, Whitehall had to look a bit differently at things. We were originally advised by the Cabinet Office to do vaccines in the same way as the EU and beg to be part of the EU vaccine system. We looked at the system. It was obviously a complete shitshow, and it was not going to build anything or do anything, so we came up with a different plan, which was basically to do vaccines in the spirit of great things that have happened in this country and in America in the past. That largely meant stripping out of the way Cabinet Office and Treasury officials, so you could actually hire people and make people responsible. It was closed down.
We built sewage monitoring in 2020, which was then copied by dozens of countries, maybe by 100 countries or something now. It was closed down by the Treasury in 2021. The Cabinet Office has tried to restart it three or four times, each time so incompetently that it has not been able to restart it. All over Africa, there are now sewage monitoring schemes copying what we did in 2020, but Britain does not have one because Whitehall closed it.
With rapid testing, similarly, we got ahead of the game secretly on that. We built ourselves into a great position, it was closed down, and then the Government literally forgot to order any rapid tests for winter 2021. You can repeat this tragicomic thing over and over again.
What is one of the few remaining centres of excellence left in Britain? The British Special Forces. Who is their biggest enemy today? China? No. Russia? No. Iran? No. It is the Cabinet Office and MoD lawyers.
Q54 Lord Bellamy: Mr Cummings, accepting, as many people would, that the British state does not work very well at the moment, you have highlighted a number of dilemmas that we have, including the fact that the people who used to go into the Civil Service or politics go elsewhere now into hedge funds and so forth. We clearly have a problem, but one purpose of this committee is to work out what we should start to do about a problem like that. You mentioned a moment ago the possibility of going back to the old 1840s system of ministerial responsibility in its purest sense, but that was a long time ago, and there are very different circumstances there. From memory, the then Foreign Office had a staff of about 40 or something of that kind. If we were going to start tackling these problems in baby steps one by one to reach some practical solutions, what would be the first steps that you would take in order to progressively improve the public wheel?
Dominic Cummings: There are two things. First, with respect, you say that was long ago, but the principles of how things work well or do not work well are eternal. It is not a question of their being out of date. You see the same principles in 500 BC, 1800 with Pitt, or today in SpaceX—you name it. It is not correct conceptually to say that some of these core things have become out of date. Of course, times change and technology changes and whatnot, but basic principles of whether an organisation has actual responsibility, whether it has great talent density and whether it can move quickly are completely eternal principles.
On your second point about specifics, in spring 2020 you had a meltdown of the system and quickly trying to get out of it, but in a morass, nightmarish way. In summer 2020, briefly, the Prime Minister was in the mode of, “The system has nearly killed me. The system has already killed tens of thousands of people. Every part of the British state seems to be basically failing. We have to do things differently”. We had a series of meetings with the Cabinet Secretary, and I got, then, agreement from both the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister to make some changes. You might call them baby steps but I think they were bigger than that. No. 1 was that Civil Service appointments should shift from closed by default to open by default. That sounds like a small thing, but it is actually huge. Going back to the whole point about the Northcote-Trevelyan system, since then, for 150 years, you have had a system that has morphed slowly into a closed-caste system, in which Buggins promotes Buggins internally, and that is why you have completely non-technical people put in charge of deeply technical programmes inside GCHQ or whatever. If you showed someone from 1810 this kind of thing, they would think that we had completely lost our minds.
You can change the default mode of the Civil Service from closed by default to open by default without tearing up the entire old Northcote-Trevelyan system and also without massive legal changes. I think you should tear up the old Northcote-Trevelyan system. You should do major constitutional changes by primary legislation. My point is that, because of the flexibility of how the system works, you can actually do things. The Prime Minister now as Minister for the Civil Service, working with the Cabinet Secretary, if they agree, can do very radical things with appointments that could have a dramatic effect today. Of course, as soon as I was out the door, all of that was immediately binned and nothing went ahead.
Secondly, again going back to what I said about the Cabinet Office and its historical evolution, the Cabinet Secretary now controls all the Permanent Secretary appointments. If you speak to the Cabinet Secretary and say, “How is the performance of these people managed? How are their priorities set?”, it is essentially a black box from the perspective of everybody who is elected. No Secretary of State has any input into it. The Prime Minister does not have any formal role. It is a whisky with the Cab Sec in the Cab Sec’s office and the Perm Sec at the end of the year, and then they dish out some bonus on the QT according to the ideas that they have themselves.
Another obvious thing to do is for the Prime Minister’s Office to say that the Prime Minister’s Office will play a central role in the performance management of the Permanent Secretaries, bearing in mind that the Prime Minister, working through the Cabinet Secretary, can actually replace these people, and bearing in mind that the Prime Minister is the only person who can replace them. Again, why did so much of the Covid chaos happen? Because, constitutionally now, everything is blocked other than through the Prime Minister’s Office. Only the Prime Minister’s Office can unblock certain things, particularly in a crisis. Things cascade into the Prime Minister’s Office, making the whole system even more mad, dysfunctional and compressed inside there, because people in No. 10 are having meeting after meeting to solve things that they should not be dealing with. It goes there because, now, all this constitutional authority is funnelled in a way that only the Prime Minister or someone speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister can actually get things done.
Tomorrow, if you had a Prime Minister who wanted to have a Government that controls the Government, you could say that we are changing how the appointments system works for officials. You could also sweep away a whole bunch of completely insane HR rules, which we started to do in 2020 but that was stopped. That was not idiosyncratic to me, I stress. Everyone in the system knows they are mad, such as the whole two-year promotion system whereby you have to constantly move jobs to get a promotion and pay rise. That is completely insane. No decent organisation in the world operates like that, but the Civil Service operates like that now. You could sweep away all of those. You could have the Prime Minister’s Office integrated with the actual core definition of priorities for the Perm Secs. “Do we agree, Perm Sec at the Home Office, that if the following things don’t happen you’ve failed and you should be replaced?” They are just the most basic conversations that would happen in any competent entity and do not happen in our system. If you had a Government that wanted to control the Government, you could do that. I go back to what I said before: Prime Ministers have not wanted to control the Government, and Ministers have been happy with the fake system.
Q55 Lord Burnett of Maldon: A lot of the answers that you are giving have really increased in my mind a question that I would like to know your views about, which is where real power lies in this country and in our political system. You have given some examples in the last few minutes. You said that Whitehall closes things down, which suggests that “Whitehall”, however one tries to characterise it, has a power that overrides political power. Your basic thesis about Ministers being accountable to Parliament as they used to be in the old days, if I can put it that way, was also a manifestation of political power being exercised by Ministers. You have spoken in the past about the Cabinet Secretary’s power being massively understated and the enormous power that the principal private secretary to the Prime Minister exercises. I wonder whether you might be able to bring these thoughts together to give us a short explanation of where you think power really lies, whether it rests in the right place and whether there are changes—you began just now to explain one or two of them—that could be made to put power back where you think it should rest.
Dominic Cummings: In 2020, I did not attend a single Cabinet meeting. It is normal for senior political people to attend Cabinet, but I did not go to any. The reason is that, other than at very odd, peculiar times now of political stress, essentially, Cabinet has become an irrelevance, and the actual important meetings that decide what is going on are 50 metres away in the Cabinet Office. If you look back to 2020 and Covid, the media were all reporting Cabinet meetings on blah, and rows between A and B on blah—all basically Potemkin theatre nonsense. The Covid task force was the thing that was actually deciding things, 50 metres away in the Cabinet Office, not the Cabinet.
It is certainly true that the Cabinet Secretary’s role is very much underrated. People do not understand how much power there is there. Also, people do not understand how that changed from, I am not sure exactly when but, say, roughly the Gus O’Donnell/Heywood era, after which another huge change was that a lot of aspects of how things like the intelligence services work, the co-ordination between the intelligence services, the Cabinet Office, No. 10 and MoD—a lot of that machinery— basically got transferred inside the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. That essentially became a black box outside any ministerial political oversight or involvement of any description. There are things like the NSC(O) meetings—“O” for officials—where all sorts of crucial things are decided. There are very obscure little Cabinet Office committees that decide things like how to task MI5 and MI6 with priorities. All these things essentially became completely separated from any ministerial role. The defence of the system is, “Well, they are in the Cabinet Office so they are sort of under the Prime Minister”. Of course, the Prime Minister does not attend any of those meetings. If the Prime Minister’s most senior political advisers ask to attend those meetings, they will be told, “Sorry, but PET”—the internal Gestapo for HR—”would not be happy with that sort of thing”. That is another aspect.
If a bomb goes off or if some Secretary of State—in a completely hypothetical situation, you understand—were to have a very unsuitable girlfriend, which may or may not have happened in the last few years, the first thing that happens is that people in the intelligence services go and speak to the Cabinet Secretary. They have a meeting and decide, “Okay, the bomb has gone off. What do we think about blah blah blah?” They decide then what information is given to the PM. The PM sits in a little room and is told a few things but is very much not at the centre of what is going on. A whole subterranean system operates between these other different power centres in Whitehall, almost entirely out of the view of any Minister or the Prime Minister. That is a huge change.
As an example of the thing you are talking about, if you go back to Brexit, people often ask questions like, “What did the Foreign Secretary or whoever say about this aspect of Brexit?” The answer is, “I can’t remember and it wasn’t important”. What was important was: what did the private secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office think about X? I dealt with them multiple times a day. They wrote the agenda for meetings. We would argue about what the action points were. That official has never been named and is not in the media, blah, blah, blah, but had 50 times more influence on what happened in the Brexit negotiations to 2019 than any Minister did, apart from the Prime Minister himself.
All these changes are very profound but, generally speaking, no one really wants to talk about them. The MPs are quite happy for people not to face the reality of this. The media are happy taking photos of everyone walking up Downing Street and pretending that the Cabinet is actually where things are decided. The officials are obviously very happy with it. The officials have a good point: “Okay, but, if you change this, do you really want Hancock making decisions?” That is a hard question to answer. Actually, it is not a hard question to answer: obviously, no. I would almost always prefer some official in the Cabinet Office to be in charge of it rather than Hancock, but you see my point. From a constitutional perspective, you see how the whole thing evolves.
Lord Burnett of Maldon: In your answer, you have not mentioned Parliament at all.
Dominic Cummings: You have a similar dynamic there. The attitude in the Cabinet Office is that the MPs are thick, do not understand anything, are not interested in it and just blabber, so the less they are told about anything important the better. If you look at the MPs themselves, look at the last few years. Look at Covid, Ukraine or the MoD—shambles. Do you see the Defence Select Committee actually forcing any discussion on any of these things? No. You had a nuclear sub nearly sink. You have 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 is not. As MPs say, “Well, if we ask them, we’ll just be told it’s all classified and, ‘We can’t talk to you’”. Again, it is a system problem. 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 country, but cannot actually fix a lot of it. Only the PM and political leadership could break out of this kind of system malfunction.
Lord Burnett of Maldon: I thus infer that you believe that needs to happen.
Dominic Cummings: Yes, I do. Do you want to keep going on the trajectory that we are on?
Lord Burnett of Maldon: Sorry?
Dominic Cummings: Do you want to keep going on the trajectory that we are on now?
Lord Burnett of Maldon: Happily, I do not have to answer any questions. Thank you.
Q56 Baroness Hamwee: Going back a little bit, talking about the people who are recruited and who want to be part of government—
Dominic Cummings: Do you mean officials or MPs?
Baroness Hamwee: Younger people.
Dominic Cummings: Oh, you mean officials.
Baroness Hamwee: Yes. Do you have anything to say about corporate memory? I wonder whether you think that is important. Secondly, following on from the scenario that you described about a bomb going off and officials working out what the Prime Minister should be told and presumably should not be told or bothered with—I am not sure—is this, in your view, malign, incompetent or what?
Dominic Cummings: Yes, the corporate memory issue is real. It became very visible after Covid. I left, I think, in November 2020. Huge numbers of officials then left over the next few months and into 2021. By the time we got to 2023, I was getting texts from new officials inside No. 10 asking me what happened then and why was this decided, because there was this incredible churn internally of so many people leaving. There is no doubt that that is a huge problem.
Something that always stuck in my mind was a story from a long time ago, probably 20 years ago or longer, of the Foreign Office destroying its own library. That happened a lot around Whitehall. The Department for Education similarly basically cracked up its own library. A symptom of pathological institutions is doing things like destroying your own library. That was an early sign of where these things were going, and for sure that is a big problem now.
In terms of keeping things secret, I will give one very obvious example. I watched repeatedly, and experienced repeatedly, this process where terrorist incident X happens. There was a meeting with the Prime Minister in No. 10, explaining blah blah blah. Clearly, there’s a rabbit off so you ask questions. People look at the ground and do not answer. You have another meeting afterwards with the same officials, and you say, “You let a guy out of jail after MI5 warned that he would almost definitely go and blow up something again. Obviously, you kept the guy under surveillance, right, because you were warned by MI5? You kept him under surveillance in jail before you let him out so you could see who he was talking to”. Everyone’s head looks at the floor. “Oh, you didn’t keep him under surveillance. Aha! Is that because there’s Cabinet Office legal advice that says that, because of ECHR rights to privacy, you are not allowed to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance inside jail?” “Yes, Dominic.” “Why didn’t you explain that to the Prime Minister? Why didn’t you explain to the Prime Minister that we let out a guy who we thought was going to do another terrorist act, and we did not even keep him under surveillance because the legal advice is that it’s unlawful under the Human Rights Act and the ECHR?”
That happens routinely. I would say for the majority of terrorist offences that you see there is an ECHR human rights angle. Close to 0% are ever explained publicly. It is never discussed publicly. Part of the reason for that is that officials do not want Ministers asking questions, and the Ministers do not want it raised either. We had Buckland in charge at the Ministry of Justice, and all the officials knew that Buckland did not want anyone raising difficult questions about that. Therefore, it is not raised. Again, you can blame officials in one sense, but also, fundamentally, these questions are political. The reality is that Conservative MPs for 14 years did not want to face the reality of ECHR, terrorism and border control. Officials get the message.
I had meetings with the now deceased former head of MI6 about various things inside MI6. A very basic issue there is that MPs of both parties rolled over, abandoned the intelligence services on various aspects of these things, and made clear, “We are not going to back you up in difficult situations”. Now in all sorts of questions, you would think, “Oh, well, MI6 must be doing X, Y, and Z”. Then I will tell you that they are not doing X, Y, and Z. You would say, “Oh, that’s crazy. Why would MI6 not be doing X, Y, and Z?” The answer is that MI6 knows that the Ministers will not back up doing X, Y, and Z. So it is very hard to say exactly where responsibility lies. That is why I keep coming back to saying that you have to think of it as a system. You cannot just blame the people. You cannot just blame the institutions. A mix of ideas and people in institutions over a long period of time have created this pathological mess that we have.
Q57 Lord Jones of Penybont: I have two questions. First, you mentioned the fact that the pipeline of talent is broken and that there are good, young people in the Civil Service who are then lost before they get the job, and not enough of them make it into senior management. How do you fix that pipeline? Secondly, you mentioned some issues to do with the ECHR and legal advice that was being provided to Ministers at the time. You mentioned that there was a reluctance to talk about ECHR border control. What did you mean by that?
Dominic Cummings: Sorry, your question was—
Lord Jones of Penybont: The first question was about how you fix the pipeline.
Dominic Cummings: Yes. The second one was ECHR—
Lord Jones of Penybont: You mentioned a reluctance to discuss ECHR border control. What did you mean by that?
Dominic Cummings: Gotcha. It is extremely hard to fix the pipeline because it cannot really be faked. We have had one Minister after another. If you go back over the last six years or whatever since I was at No. 10, every few months, there is another speech on, “We’re going to reform the Civil Service, blah blah blah”. Every speech basically repeats every other such speech going back to the report back in the 1960s that set out a lot of those problems then, because it was already apparent before I was even born. Of course, everyone can watch “Yes Minister”, where you see this all playing out.
You cannot fix it just by giving these speeches and declarations. Talented people will change their decisions only if they think it is real. In 2020, we could get talented people in there, but that was because you had a mix of genuine national crisis, what they were doing with their day job was completely turned upside down, and the Prime Minister said, “Come to No. 10 and I will support you, and we will be able to get these sorts of things done”. That is why we got the former commanding officer of 22 SAS to come in and work on testing. That is why we got a bunch of extremely able people to ditch what they were doing and come into No. 10 and to help the system on various things. It was real. As soon as they saw how things were evolving, all such people left. It can change only if it is obvious that there is a Prime Minister who actually wants it to change and is going to force change through the system. It is not going to change in any other way.
Of course, there are small things here and there. The Permanent Secretary can make some small tweak in the Home Office or whatever, but you are not going to fix the fundamental core problem unless the Prime Minister says there is going to be a generational change in how this whole thing works. “If people do not go and do blah blah blah in the private sector and do come in here, we will have real jobs with real responsibility and real budgets where you can build real things”. That has to be done, and people have to see it is true, and then there will be a bandwagon effect of people going, “Holy shit, this is amazing. Brilliant! I want to join in”. That is the first thing. Where we are now is it can only change if there is a Prime Minister who wants the Government to control the Government and is himself or herself determined on change.
Secondly, regarding the Human Rights Act and borders, we went through all this in 2020. All serious lawyers agreed, whether they are pro-ECHR or anti-ECHR, pro-Human Rights Act or anti, that you cannot deal with the small boats problem unless you make primary law changes to the Human Rights Act and change how the courts give effect to the ECHR. That is a fact. It is uncomfortable for all political sides to face this fact, but it is a fact. I had discussions with Sunak about it in December 2022, when we had discussions about whether I might go back to No. 10 to help. He persuaded himself that there were very complicated ways of getting around this and that all the internal advice telling him that he was wrong was itself wrong, and he found out the hard way. Everyone internally knows that this is the case, but everyone also internally knew that the Tories did not want to face the problem and knows that Labour does not want to face the problem. The officials do what is inevitable for officials, which is to obfuscate and come up with complicated workarounds, which everyone knows are not going to actually solve the problem.
Here, it really is something where the political people are much more to blame than the officials. The officials have repeatedly written down and said, “Yes, of course, Prime Minister, if you want to stop the boats, you can stop the boats. This is what you’ve got to do legally to do that”. Then every time, the PM looks at it and goes, “My God, I’m not doing that. Imagine how my dinner parties will go down in London if I were to do the following things. There would be social ostracism”. So it is not done, and officials all know that it is not going to be done, hence you have this constant farce over the issue.
Lord Jones of Penybont: On the point about fixing the pipeline, let us imagine you are the Prime Minister. Give me three things that you would do to fix the pipeline.
Dominic Cummings: I think I have already mentioned them. I would restart what I started in summer 2020, which is to make Civil Service appointments open by default. There would be a tiny number, less than 1%, regarding national security stuff. You would have certain kinds of exceptions, but that is a tiny element of the whole thing. If you did that, that would be huge—if the Prime Minister said, “I’m taking responsibility for actual performance management of the Permanent Secretaries”.
There is a concept in the private sector that some of you will know: the directly responsible individual. That is how every complicated project that works, works. That concept has been rendered something close to unlawful inside the current system, and every aspect of how the current system works is to obfuscate actual responsibility. If you say in a meeting internally in Whitehall, “Which specific person is actually responsible for doing X by date Y?”, everyone throws their hands up in horror. If you have a Prime Minister who says that we are going to open up the system to external appointments, we are going to have directly responsible individuals at the top, and those directly responsible individuals are going to have the power to hire and fire like every healthy, successful operation in the world does, then you would have a very big effect on the whole system. You would get huge amounts of talent going in.
There is this huge demand. When I wrote that blog in January 2020 saying, “We’re going to open up the system and we want people to apply”, something like 55,000 or 60,000 people emailed the Gmail account. Some of those people then came in and worked inside the system. There is huge desire in the country to help. People are so miserable, depressed and fed up with what has been going on since way before Brexit as well as watching the farce post Brexit and now post Covid, that there is a huge desire among people to help, but at the moment all those people are basically repelled by the existing structure. If you have prime ministerial leadership that makes clear that they are going to change that, you will see thousands of people say, “I’ll pack in my brilliant job to come and do it, but only if the job is real. I’m not going to pack in my great job and have all the problems of public life for a Potemkin job”.
Q58 Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: I find a great deal of what you say very attractive. I was part of a small unit in 1971, and I got the job because the head of this unit, which defined itself as throwing grit into the smooth running of the machine, asked for young people to come and work for him. The Civil Service sent a lot of people aged 45, and I happened to be passing by and quite unjustifiably got a job aged 25. It was great fun. We were done down in the end by the Treasury, of course.
The point I want to try to get at is something to do with the baby and the bathwater. Northcote-Trevelyan was partly to do with getting rid of the old corruption and stopping ancestors of mine building Houghton Hall out of the proceeds of running the country. The evangelicals and everybody else at that stage in the 19th century said, “We’ve got to get rid of the corruption”. If a Prime Minister has his party more or less under control in the House of Commons, he can do more or less anything he likes. Lord Hailsham was right: it is an elective dictatorship at that stage if you are brave enough to do it. But where should the constraints be that do not allow the people to start stuffing money in their pockets again? At the moment, I expect some people would say, “Oh, well, an independent Civil Service is a barrier to corruption”. There are other guardrails like that. If you have a sufficiently radical and united leadership to have the will to do some of the things that you want to do, where are the guardrails, and how are they based?
Dominic Cummings: We have huge corruption now. Look at the relationship between the MoD and British Aerospace. There is vast corruption everywhere, much greater than the old corruption. The idea that the new system stops corruption is completely crackers. It changes it. It squeezes where the money goes and how power and influence operate, but it does not get rid of it at all—as you can see, just from the downloads from all the Mandelson texts and whatnot. You can create all these new systems. Of course, the Civil Service says it is to stop corruption, but that is not actually the effect. I will give you a couple of great examples.
Example No. 1 is the Manhattan Project. I have talked about this many times, but it is directly relevant to what you said. It was completely secret with no normal modern systems applying to it, yet when it then became public after 1945 and Congress looked at it, they found to their horror that Groves was running around the country making deals with handshakes, my God—like Warren Buffett, who could do a deal with a handshake. Yet it was totally uncorrupt, unbelievably efficient, unbelievably fast, and an unbelievably brilliant deal for the US taxpayer. Why? Because you had people of ability, integrity and responsibility in charge. The idea that you make everything more complicated and have Sir Humphrey in charge of everything, and then that gets rid of corruption is total nonsense.
Look at the Pentagon now. The Pentagon has gone massively backwards since the huge reforms of the 1960s. You had an American system for procurement pre the Whiz Kids of McNamara that was a byword for brilliance and efficiency. It did nuclear bombs. It did ICBMs. It did Apollo and the space programme. Then you had McNamara and the Whiz Kids come in from Ford, and they said, “Well, this is all very fast moving, and we don’t like the look of this. We’re going for efficiency and anti-corruption. We’re going to change how it works”. They introduced a system for the next 50 years. NASA immediately imploded and has never recovered. For the next 50 years, you had increasing uselessness, corruption and disaster of the US procurement system, which cannot even change after the biggest pandemic since 1918 and the biggest war in Europe since 1945. That is how impermeable it is to change. Britain copied that and so did most of the western world, which is why we are now sitting here year after year watching this most stupid war in modern history unfold, completely unable to adapt to it.
Go back and read the meetings with Pitt and how they dealt with it—with actual responsibility. Pitt had real meetings, not fake meetings. People were actually responsible and Parliament, this place, had unbelievably tough investigations into people over procurement and corruption. It dragged people in. It threw people in jail in the 1790s and early 1800s, because, “We have to beat Napoleon and we have to do it properly, and we’re going to crack down on you”. It was very tough, very open, very disruptive. Sir Humphrey these days would go crackers at the idea. This place dealt with it much better then than it does 225 years later.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill: Are there any guardrails, and where do they come from?
Dominic Cummings: Yes, responsibility. Ministerial responsibility to Parliament is the most important guardrail. You should have a Minister who can go and say, “Right, we’ve got to build this thing. We’re looking around. It should be built in 18 months. We’re going to get so and so to build this thing. I’m responsible. I’m going to hire him. He’s got the following freedoms to do it”. If it then goes tits up, the person gets fired, and the Minister is responsible in Parliament, rather than the farce that you have now where the Minister comes in and says, “I hold myself totally responsible”. Everyone knows that that actually means, “I’m completely without any responsibility whatever”. Then the officials come in and go, “Blah blah blah”, and the Minister is responsible, and everyone knows those are the people actually in charge of it. Then you all nod and write some report that no one takes action over.
The Chair: Dominic, I sense you are warming to your theme. We have done an hour, but we have a few more questions to come, so I hope you are okay to do that.
Q59 Lord Bichard: I have two questions. First, the things that you are saying have been said so often—
Dominic Cummings: Right—all in “Yes Minister”.
Lord Bichard: Sometimes by people like me who came in from outside, but over the last 50 years I could run through, as you did earlier, a whole range of reports on how we were going to modernise or reform government. You have tried it. I have tried it. Francis Maude tried it. They have all failed; we have all failed. The question has been asked as to why they failed. Your answer was that the first thing you need is a Prime Minister, a leader, who is absolutely clear that this is going to happen and has the determination. Working in a department, my experience was that you needed the political leader to have that commitment but you also needed the official leader to have that commitment. The one without the other was never going to achieve the kind of change that you, I and other people want. Do you agree? You did not mention that partnership. Do you agree that that is rather important?
As I say, I have sympathy with so many of the things that you say. What I am never quite clear about, though, is what role you think the Civil Service should properly have and, in the context of what we are discussing, what role the Civil Service has in protecting the constitution and our constitutional democracy. Does it have a role? Does it merely defer to political leadership? Are there occasions when it should have some not independent but separate role in protecting our constitutional democracy? Those two questions are linked in a way.
Dominic Cummings: On the first point, I sort of agree. Before No. 10, I was in the Department for Education. There are many things written about what happened there, and it has been a subject of interest in the last month or two because of the recent PISA results that came out. Almost everything you read about it is basically wrong and ignores the central thing. The first year or so of being in the Department for Education was a complete and utter shambles. It was at least five disasters a day every day for over a year. The critical thing that changed was we binned the Permanent Secretary, we binned four of the top five people, and we binned roughly 15 of the top 20 people. Purges work. We purged the senior management of the place.
We then had a bunch of much younger people who realised that we were there to actually try to improve schools. You could argue about whether we were right or wrong about various things, but they understood that we actually wanted to improve schools, and there were idealistic, motivated younger officials who then worked with us very effectively. Very much underdiscussed in that whole episode is how screwed we were at the beginning because the Civil Service was so hostile, and then, once it was purged and different people came in, there was a genuine partnership between the political people and the officials, which is why so much changed.
Similarly, in No. 10, pretty much without exception, the things that worked best were where the political people in No. 10 were working with officials, we agreed on what needed to be done and the officials trusted our motives and said, “Yeah, okay, we’re going to work with you to make this happen”. Then things could happen very fast and very efficiently. Of course, it is true that for anything big and difficult to happen in the system it cannot just come from political people shouting and demanding, whinging or whatever. It has to come from political people sitting in difficult meetings 18 hours a day with the officials, and with good will, banging out problem after problem all day every day. There is no doubt of that.
Lord Bichard: That is such an important point, and I am glad you agreed with it and clarified that, because I do not think you will ever get change in this system unless that happens and unless we have a Prime Minister and a Cabinet Secretary, the latter remaining apolitical, none the less working together in a partnership that people can see. That is such an important point. It is not actually central to what we are talking about in this committee, but, none the less, I could not resist asking it.
The second question is: what do you think in a functional system is the role of the Civil Service, especially in defending the constitution?
Dominic Cummings: Twenty seconds just to finish your first point: one other thing that has gone very badly wrong in the last few years—both parties are guilty of it—is that under pressure Ministers lash out and blame the Civil Service for various things, when the officials know that the fundamental reality is that the political leadership in the Prime Minister’s Office do not actually want to do the thing. Boris did it, Sunak did it and Starmer did it. All of them under pressure lashed out, and then it is completely counterproductive.
On the question about the role of the Civil Service, I strongly disagree with that, and I will tell you why. The more that the system says that the Civil Service has to defend the constitution, the more you are driving yourselves into crisis. It is not for unelected officials to work secretly in some kind of platonic guardian role to protect the system. That has been the way people have thought about it, and the effect of that has been what you can see, which is unprecedented distrust and hatred for the political class in this country. If the response to the current crisis is doubling down on that approach and saying that the Civil Service must be the guardians of the constitution, all you will do is make more people hate you and hate this building.
The people who actually have to safeguard our constitution are the Lords and the MPs. It is Parliament that has to safeguard the constitution. Thinking that this could be devolved to a bunch of officials in the Cabinet Office is what has got us into this nightmare in the first place. Strengthening that and strengthening the dynamics behind that cannot be the answer. That can only strengthen the crisis that you can see spreading across the whole western world of people saying, “The guys in charge are not on our side. They are governing like they hate us”. That is what people are saying louder and louder, and is why people are starting to burn stuff down. This whole idea of the Civil Service as guardians of the constitution is pernicious in the extreme. This building must start taking more responsibility.
Lord Bichard: That was the answer I was expecting, and in large parts I agree with it, but the first part of my question was: what do you think the role of the Civil Service is in a functioning system in this country?
Dominic Cummings: To follow orders from the political people; not to substitute their own political ideas. If they want to do that, they should go into politics. Their job is to execute and to give advice. Their job is not, under the old British constitution at least, to be platonic guardians. If you want to have a Civil Service of platonic guardians, argue your case for that and see where that gets you.
Q60 Lord Beith: You seem to be putting on Ministers a level of responsibility that does not actually work in practice. You pointed out how—these are not your words but mine—farcical it is sometimes when Ministers purport to be taking responsibility for things in Parliament when they are not really, and they did not have much to do with the decision that they are talking about. You fail to recognise in the way you argue the case that the Executive have very considerable power in Parliament. Parliament as an entity does not exist independently of the Executive. The Executive dominate it so long as they can secure majorities. The electoral system produces sometimes, but not now regularly, substantial majorities in Parliament. How can you expect a position of ministerial responsibility given its known weaknesses and its failure to identify who is actually making a decision—how can you rely on that in a system where the end of the line for ministerial responsibility is, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, pass a vote of no confidence in me”? It is just not a constitutionally adequate means of controlling the exercise of power, is it?
Dominic Cummings: I am afraid I do not really understand your question. Britain, for centuries, operated with ministerial responsibility being genuine, not fake. Why can we not go back to ministerial responsibility being genuine? Why can we not go back to the world in which Palmerston said, “I’m in charge of the Home Office, and I’m actually in charge of the Home Office. If things go wrong in the Home Office, it’s on me. Also, it’s on me to hire good people into the Home Office and to weed out duffers and to spot things going wrong. All these things are my responsibility. If I can’t do that, then the Prime Minister should fire me”. What is so complicated about that? That is the system under which the British Empire grew and took over much of the world. Why can we not do that? Why can we not have that system back?
Lord Beith: The Executive that weas operating at that time was not running a welfare system, not running a National Health Service, and not engaging with citizens to the extent that so much parliamentary activity is now generated at the point of interaction between the state and citizens.
Dominic Cummings: If you want a state that is running very complicated things like welfare systems, health systems and everything else, it makes individual responsibility all the more important. Look at the constant series of atrocious, horrific, nightmarish scandals that you see across the NHS. What do people say about it? “No one will ever get fired.” The people are right: no one ever does get fired. Your argument, with respect, is 180 degrees wrong. If you want those things to work, you need more individual responsibility everywhere in the system, not less.
Lord Beith: I do not disagree with that. I am suggesting that to place on the system of ministerial responsibility alone the responsibility for protecting us against abuse of executive power you are relying too much on a system in which other interests prevail, and you cannot ensure that it is protected.
Dominic Cummings: What abuses of executive power are you worried about?
Lord Beith: What?
Dominic Cummings: You are talking about abuses of executive power. What sorts of things are you talking about, to be more specific?
Lord Beith: Using that power to discriminate in favour of one group in society as against others.
Dominic Cummings: The what, sorry?
Lord Beith: Using that power to discriminate against one group in society in favour of others. There are many examples of abuse of executive power. There is use of the political system to preserve the Executive in power. There are many. I do not need to tell you that there are many potential abuses of executive power.
Dominic Cummings: Keir Starmer gave a speech in January last year and said, “The real problem with the grooming gangs isn’t the grooming gangs; it’s Elon Musk talking about the grooming gangs on X”—disinformation from the top of the British state. You could say that that is an abuse of executive power. Who is responsible for that? He is responsible for that politically. An accumulation of such disastrous decisions is what did for him. Yet the idea that the Civil Service somehow can correct for that, I do not really understand what it is that you are suggesting. There is no system that will stop PMs doing stupid things, sometimes mad things and sometimes corrupt things.
Q61 Baroness Laing of Elderslie: I have a very quick question, which occurred to me as I was listening to your arguments developing. You talk about the need to have ministerial responsibility, and therefore that would require high-achieving, highly intelligent, capable people taking the role of Ministers. It also requires good people in Parliament to hold Ministers to account. Is there not a conflict between the need on the one hand to get good people taking on those roles in Parliament as Ministers and as chairs of Select Committees and so on, holding Ministers to account, and on the other hand the need to get elected? Sometimes, is it not the case that the person who has the talent to get elected is not necessarily the person who has the talent to carry out an administrative job? Would the system work better if Members of Parliament spent more time in the House of Commons holding Ministers to account and learning possibly to become Ministers, rather than in their constituencies looking after potholes? The House of Commons now sits—
Dominic Cummings: Sort of, yes. It is a complicated question. I go back to some of the things that we talked about. Point 1: in the old days, a large amount of top talent in the country was either down the corridor in the Commons or here in the House of Lords. When you were filling a Government, you could get a lot of top talent within 100 metres or so of where we are sitting. That has changed. Now, you have a chicken and egg problem. Where are you going to get people to run the NHS, et cetera? If you do not change the composition of Parliament, by definition you do not have the talent here.
There is a strong argument for political responsibility fundamentally being exercised by the Prime Minister in Parliament, with the Prime Minister using his powers of appointment much more widely to appoint external people who are directly responsible to do particular things. I actually had this conversation in the Cabinet Room with the PM and the Cabinet Secretary in summer 2020 as we were discussing various things about Covid. It was also very striking then because we had a conversation and I said to the PM, “PM, you could appoint who you want as a Minister”. “Well, yes, I know. We could put them in the House of Lords.” “No,” I said, “you can appoint whoever you want as a Minister.” “What absolute nonsense. What are you talking about?”, he said. “Cabinet Secretary, please explain to the PM what his actual constitutional powers are.” The Cabinet Secretary says, “Dominic is right, PM. You can in fact appoint anybody you want to. Churchill did it. It is constitutionally perfectly possible.” “My God,” said Boris. “My God,” said the other MPs in the room. The MPs in the room did not even know themselves what the actual constitutional position of the Prime Minister was, which I think explains a lot about the situation we are in.
The short answer is yes: if you want to have vastly improved capabilities now, the obvious necessary shortcut is that the Prime Minister creates directly responsible people. If you said, as I wanted to back in 2020, that AI, robotics, drones and everything are going to be critical technologies for the future, both commercially for the normal economy and in defence, intelligence and whatnot, and it is a super-duper priority, giving it to the average MP as a responsibility is probably not going to work very well, particularly in an environment where that Minister has very little power, cannot hire and fire a team, does not really control the budget because the Treasury does, and the Treasury long-term budgets on capital are a complete disaster zone—dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. The only way you are really going to make things different is if the PM goes, “AI, drones and robotics are a super-duper priority. Person X is appointed who actually understands the stuff. They are directly responsible in the following clearly defined way, and here is their budget, which is up to them to spend. I will take responsibility for this decision”. That is how I would do things.
Q62 Lord Murphy of Torfaen: That is fascinating, if I might say so, Mr Cummings. I have two very short questions. First, in the 10 years I was a Minister, there were some extremely good officials and of course there were very poor officials, and it was very difficult to get rid of the poor officials, as you said. You then told us a few seconds ago that when you were in the Department for Education you instigated a necessary purge from the Permanent Secretary right down through different ranks. You did it, so why could anybody else not do it? When I say “you”, I mean—
Dominic Cummings: No, I did not do it. What actually happened is a demonstration of exactly the point that I am talking about. We wanted to do that. We could not do it because the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, did not have the constitutional power to do it.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen: How do you do it?
Dominic Cummings: What actually happened was that Gove prevailed on Osborne to persuade Cameron to call in Heywood and say, “There’s got to be a change in the Department for Education. The Perm Sec’s got to go. I want the new person who goes in to try to help Gove get stuff done”. Heywood binned the Perm Sec at the request of the PM. That illustrates exactly my point. Every normal MP and Minister is just stuck dealing with a complete disaster in their department until and unless the PM is prepared to say, “I will use my authority with the Cabinet Secretary to force change”.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen: Thank you very much. The second question is on a different tack altogether. When you were in No. 10, if you had a policy, an action or a decision that was taken or about to be taken, were they ever changed because of the constitutional implications of what might happen if you did those things?
Dominic Cummings: Oh, goodness, yes, in 2019 and 2020, but in somewhat different ways. In 2019, there was obviously a very high-stakes constitutional crisis. We were engaged with very difficult things around what is the rule of law; what is the surrender Act, otherwise known as the Benn Act; what does that actually mean; what happens if the Prime Minister refuses to send it; and what about the legal advice? We had an unprecedented constitutional position as well then where we had many of the lawyers in the Cabinet Office essentially working for the enemy and leaking things, for which the Cabinet Secretary came and apologised and said that as far as he, the Cabinet Secretary, was aware it was the first time in British history he had to apologise on behalf of the Civil Service because of government lawyers leaking to undermine the Government. There were huge questions there. We had lawyers threatening to resign and all kinds of craziness.
Of course, it also involved some very tricky issues that were pretty unprecedented. Other people in the room will have much better expertise than me, but the whole question about prorogation, the powers of the Queen and so on raised very big issues that no one alive had really dealt with before at that point. Those things were all jumbling around amid a political nightmare. If you remember back to that time, in this building sitting here, you would hear people screaming and shouting outside because people had been driven so demented by Brexit. There were huge questions then.
The year 2020 was somewhat different. On the one hand, you had people dying at the level of thousands a day or a week. Then you have a bunch of officials saying we cannot actually do A, B, or C because the rules, the law, the budgets or European procurement law—we had already left the EU—says blah blah blah. What do we do? That led to some very big decisions inside No. 10 where, essentially, I said on behalf of the PM, for example, “Call the airlines. Commandeer the planes. Fly the planes to China. Pick up all our PPE. Fly back here. We don’t care if the officials all say it’s unlawful. If we don’t get all this PPE back, God knows how many doctors and nurses are going to die as a consequence. Do it, and, if there’s a judicial review that says it’s all illegal, whatever, the PM will deal with that down the line”. In a normal situation, the Civil Service is obviously highly averse to, “Basically, just do it, and who cares about the judicial review?” In 2020, things like that all had to be live conversations in chaos.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen: Very interesting. Thank you very much.
The Chair: It has come up to midday. Lord Jones, do you have any other questions that you wanted to ask?
Q63 Lord Jones of Penybont: Just a point of clarification. You mentioned introducing the idea of hire and fire into the Civil Service. Did you mean the senior Civil Service or throughout the Civil Service?
Dominic Cummings: I mean throughout. Going back to my example before on AI, robotics and whatnot, the Prime Minister appoints person X directly responsible for a defined mission, a set of goals, and then you make that person responsible for hiring and firing a team, for compensation and for everything else within some kind of agreed budget. It is nothing extraordinary, just exactly how every high-performance thing works.
Lord Jones of Penybont: You have rightly pointed out the need to retain talent at the very least, but if you create a hire and fire culture, it means potentially you have fewer employment rights than if you are in the private sector. You have lower pay than you have in the private sector. How does that help with retention?
Dominic Cummings: You also have jobs that you cannot do anywhere else. A lot of people will forgo money in order to engage in extremely interesting problems that can only be dealt with in government. AI in government, again, is a very good example. I know because I have personally done it. In 2020 I got in people who could have gone to DeepMind or whatever and been paid more than half a million quid. Twenty-five year-olds could be paid by a frontier company in AI more than anybody in the British Civil Service aged 25. I persuaded them to come in to No. 10 for, basically, complete chicken feed. Why? Because they knew that they could do something in No. 10 that you could not do in DeepMind, OpenAI or whatever. That is very underrated. Crucial to that is they have to believe that the job is real. They will not come in and just sit with stupid Cabinet Office committees going nowhere. That is the critical thing.
The Chair: Lord Burnett, did you have a final question that you wanted to ask?
Lord Burnett of Maldon: If I had, I have now forgotten what it was, I am afraid.
The Chair: That is fine because Lady Laing has one. This will be the last question. Thank you very much, Dominic.
Q64 Baroness Laing of Elderslie: Pulling all this together, can I ask rather controversially: do you think there is any point in codifying the constitutional position to try to bring about what we have been discussing this morning to improve matters?
Dominic Cummings: Most of it just needs removing things. Repeal CRaG. Repeal various other bits of Civil Service legislation. As a kind of guiding star, if it is closer to how Pitt would have done it, you are moving in the right direction.
The Chair: Very good. That is a great way for us to finish, Dominic. Thank you very much indeed. We have ranged far and wide across a number of subjects. You are very clear. We have obviously taken a note, and that will play an important part in our deliberations when we come to reach our conclusions. That allows me to say that this committee will continue taking oral evidence in a fortnight’s time. In the meantime, I now draw this public evidence session to a close.
