Dominic Cummings on the small boat crisis, our broken political system and Farage

0:03The Telegraph.

0:10Politics is broken. The government is in the doldrums. Britain, many say, is broken. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low. The public want something new. And one man is saying what needs to be done. Mr Marmite himself, Dominic Cummings. Whether you've worked with him, as I have, or listened to him, as millions have, does he have a blueprint for the future? What did he learn from his years in Number 10 alongside Boris Johnson and from Covid and from winning the Brexit referendum? And what next for one of the most influential political figures of the 21st century? Some say one day he could be Prime Minister, but if not him, who?

0:51Who says that? Welcome. You've heard anyone say that. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Kamal Ahmed. And me, Claire Watson.

1:09Dominic, we're in your home in North London. Thank you so much for welcoming The Daily Tea to your house. Now, what we usually do when kicking off a long interview with the brilliant people we have on The Daily Tea podcast is ask them who would you, alive or dead, can't be a member of your family, most like to have a cup of tea with? Alive or dead? Alive or dead. We've had some clever answers right back to the 15th century. Well, if you could have dead, I mean, it would be someone super famous, like, I don't know, Plato or Ice Under the Great or Newton or something like that, I suppose. Very, very good.

1:46And what would you talk about? What would you ask Plato? I mean, it would be amazing just to show them some videos of 20th century history going back to World War I starts with horses, nuclear weapons, now, GPT. You'd probably say, you haven't made much progress, have you? I'm going back in the cave, actually. So, Dominic, let's kick off. Lots and lots to talk about. But I think one of the big themes, as we said at the top of the podcast, is this idea of brokenness in its broader sense, whether you're talking about the economy and how it works for people, whether you're talking about politics, particularly Westminster politics, whether you're talking about global institutions, the global order, this idea of brokenness.

2:33Just give us your sense of where we are and how historic a moment this is in the 21st century. So I think you have to distinguish between, there's a bunch of sort of obvious relatively surface phenomena, like whether it's the NHS, whether it's the stupid boats, things like that, that are kind of the visible manifestations of things not working. but I think what's happening at a deeper level is we're just living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out which is that over a few generations the institutions and ideas of elites start to come out of whack with reality the ideas don't match the institutions can't cope and what you see repeatedly is this cycle of the of kind of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling, and then a sudden crisis kicks in, and then institutions collapse, the EU regime comes through.

3:37If you look back at Europe over the last X hundred years, you just see this cycle play out repeatedly. The big difference in England has been that the institutions have kind of had similar crises, but they've managed to adapt as they've gone along without large breakdowns in violence, without the kind of core institutions changing, right? So if you go back in, you know, Germany, Russia, France, whatever, you can see actual full regime changes happen multiple times over a couple of hundred years. Whereas in Britain, you've kind of kept the same constitutional structure, the kind of deep constitutional structure in place.

4:14But what's happening now is another cycle like that, like sort of 1848, the 1850s where you see the old if you compare that time you see very similar process to what's happening now you see the death of the generation that had beaten napoleon the people who'd walked through the napoleonic battlefields and said we can't do this again created a whole institutional structure from 1815 onwards all those people by the 1840s are retiring dying off etc etc universities going crazy new ideas old conservatism dying feeling of crisis then 1848 happens regimes tumble new countries are formed we're living through the same thing the institutions can't cope the ideas can't cope you can see the elites fragmenting you can see the institutions crumbling all around i think that's what's happening but of course it's you never know right when you're looking back historically you can see you can analyze it and you can abstract and you know okay that's the cycle but when you're living it it's extremely different and you just never know where the hell you are in the whole process or if you're even in that process maybe everything I'm saying is completely delusional.

5:24Some people might criticize you for that you've actually been in government saying many similar things what did you learn from being in government about the problems that we are still facing today? I mean that's obviously a vast question I guess it's a sort of big picture level one there are some great people that go into the civil service young but it's important to realize that by their 40s most of these people self-select out and have left so prime minister's office is weird because you have a bunch of relatively young people and hierarchically quite junior people in extremely important in many ways the most important jobs right so it's quite hard to explain but if you're the private secretary the PM's office for say the economy of a foreign affairs your name's never in the newspaper and you're in the hierarchy quite junior but you're actually more important than almost all the ministers now because of how the system works because the ministerial jobs have become fake a lot of those people leave now because the most talented and able can't stand being part of such an appalling system.

6:35And then what happens is you have the worst kind of pathological psychology ends up staying and taking over and then becoming senior management, hence debacle over COVID, hence so many of our problems. So number one is this big historical trend, I think, of where elite talent goes. For obvious reasons, historically, a lot of elite talent where it always went into public service, into courts, into army, into intelligence services and things like that. Because if you don't, then you end up having your arms hacked off. But over the last 50 years or so, we've obviously across the West had a very different trend, which is a lot of elite talent going into some combination of maths, money, computing, and away from public institutions.

7:22So I think the talent collapse is one thing, obviously also in the political parties so not just in the civil service but in the political parties it's obvious I think number 10 itself I think that something which is hard to appreciate if you haven't worked there is how crazy a working environment it is because of the wide pathologies of the system all feeding on themselves so one of the things about working number 10 you can see it just in the last five days with the grooming gangs thing because the whole wider white hall system is fundamentally broken and the people don't know what they're doing you have this cascade where all of these crises flood into number 10 so if you work in number 10 you get up and you have all sorts of ideas about how you want to spend the day but then what actually happens is you're called into a cobra meeting about some national security threat or terrorism you then have trump on the phone you have a flood and we have all the media You're screaming, why is the prime minister not at the flood?

8:21And then you can't tell them a lot of the reasons why it's not at the flood and why it's got to do other things. You know, every hour sometimes there can be a thing like this, which is every one of which could be leading the news, and every one of which has people running around saying, the PM must have this meeting, the PM must do this, the PM must do that. It's obviously a completely deranged way for a government to work, but it's become kind of normalised. And it means that the people in Number 10, you have basically like the same 10 people are just in one meeting after another about each of these different things so a lot of people now for example are saying why was the whole thing of the grooming gang such a fiasco well you have to think it's the same 10 people looking at grooming signing off grooming gang stuff in number 10 who are also dealing with israel special forces landing in iran trump on the phone and you know 15 other things happening and because of how the kind of the media show around politics has developed and the way the institutions have evolved, everything now becomes a number 10, you know, Marshall McLuhan's line about if it's on TV, it's a TV show.

9:27Well, as soon as these things break, like the number 10 TV show is expected to have a view on it and expected to be in charge of it. What should be happening in number 10 doesn't happen. And instead, number 10 is just constantly swamped by the Marshall McLuhan TV show. Why does everything rush into number 10? Why isn't the Home Office dealing with it or the Secretary of State for Education or the Foreign Secretary? Why is everything coming to these 10 people in the middle of the system who should be surely protected because you need to be thinking about other things? The way the system used to work in many ways was much more distributed power.

10:05Departments actually were in charge of things. Ministers were in charge of things. But ministerial responsibility was real. So if you go back to 1850, say, you look at the age of Palmerston, the ministers then were actually responsible to Parliament constitutionally and in reality. It was real. Now all of that is fake. The ministers are nominally in charge and nominally responsible, but they're not actually. You have very rubbish people in a lot of these jobs. You You have Hancock and trust types running around actually in these jobs. So, of course, things break and are incompetently and stupidly handled.

10:46When you say rubbish people, Dominic, so what do you mean? They're just not able to be intellectually. I mean, people who obviously should not be, in every way, not suited for the job, intellectually, in terms of their temperament and everything else. But also, this connects to another part of it, And I think it's also important to remember that since the 90s, the MPs were trained by the system to think that their real job was the Marshall McLuhan TV show. They don't think of their job as being the actual job. But it means that you have a whole set of people who go into ministerial jobs, I mean, most epitomized by the likes of Liz Truss and Hancock, who genuinely have just thought that is their job.

11:30and I think it's very important for people to realise that the culture of Westminster became this where the ministers think of their job as not actually running the department because they don't they think of their job as being about their interviews and their appearance on the state programme and everything else so you have many different pathologies coming together the quality of the people is bad so even if they were focused on it they wouldn't know what to do they're not actually responsible so even if they knew what to do they couldn't actually do it either and they've been trained by the culture to actually focus on the media show rather than thinking about the important things so you have all of these things coming together that means that you then have this pathological cycle where number 10 says correctly well obviously we can't leave the home secretary and the like broken home office to deal with blah blah blah so then number 10 calls everyone in and then a certain set of people try and interrogate what the hell is actually happening with whatever the problem is terrorism boats you name it and then they clutch their head and they go oh my god what an absolute farce everything we've probably accidentally said all the wrong things to the media this is not true this is true and then you have to end up having a set of people in lombard 10 who are not experts on the whole thing go okay don't do the x don't do y don't listen to what the home secretary says because it's mad do blah instead and then 45 minutes later it's on to you know the same thing with Department of Health or whatever.

12:57Now, the obvious solution to that is you have to change the people, you have to change the institutions, you have to change the incentives altogether. But Westminster's been extremely reluctant to face these questions for decades. Deep questions about how the system really works have not been a subject of discussion. And people who've talked about it, like me over the last 15-20 years has been seen as either weird or eccentric or malevolent or mad or all of the above i think that what's happening now though is that the problems have become so obvious and you also now have a change of political leadership after 14 years but it's obvious to everyone that on the one hand, they seem to be just mimicking what Sunak did in many ways, right?

13:58The boats being the most obvious thing. So they're mimicking things and the problems just continue. But we all, in Westminster, people thought, oh, it's all going to change once the political regime changes, but it's just the same for us. So I think that's one of the reasons why the debate is now starting to change. Lots of insiders in the system who wanted to believe that they could pin the problems just on the Tory party's appalling, Hancock's appalling, Cummings is appalling, Johnson's appalling, Brexit's mad, et cetera, et cetera. Now that Starmer's taken over, Sue Gray, the supposed serious grown-up, instantly blew up the whole Starmer project.

14:36It vaporised on contact with Whitehall. That's obviously forcing people all over the system to confront, OK, there's clearly more profound problems here. I've been feeling a bit for Morgan McSweeney this week. I don't know if you saw some of his... He's the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff. He is, sorry. And his attitude you might find familiar, but he obviously began as the Director of Communications while Sue Gray was Chief of Staff. There were obviously lots of interesting periods from just over a year in Downing Street, but one period I remember in particular, which people don't think of so much, is that summer 2020 period, which is this sort of eat out to help out between waves one and two of COVID.

15:18And that's when we had a change of cabinet secretary. And there was this sense that it was, quote, the vote leave team versus the rest of the system. And you do get these ebbs and flows still in the media now of the same thing with Morgan McSweeney, where his team have sort of captured the prime minister and he's essentially in charge. And I just wondered, I don't know if you've met him, what you make of him and what advice you'd give him based on your periods of sort of so-called infighting. There's a caveat, which is everyone looks for structural solutions to how to change number 10 in response to the fact that Whitehall obviously doesn't work.

16:03There are many things structurally that need to be changed to number 10 and that you could do, and I'll explain what they are, but it's also obviously the case that any set of structural changes and other personnel changes could only do so much given the actual nature of the prime ministers. And it's not just a comment on Starmer, but just going back the last 20, 30 years. Precisely because of the things we discussed in the centralisation of power in Whitehall now, the character of the prime minister ends up being super important. The prime minister is now the only person that can effectively replace critical officials.

16:41No other minister can. so more and more power is rolled in onto the prime minister's shoulders there's only so much that improvements in the structure the management and the other people around the pm can do at the part of it if the pm doesn't want to do certain things and is incapable of doing certain things their character will out and obviously starmer can't do the job he's just a completely wrong person completely wrong character type to be prime minister he obviously hates it he doesn't know what he's doing. And I think this is exemplified by repeated comments that he's made to officials in the cabinet office and to his own political staff, which is, why am I having all these terrible meetings with people disagreeing?

17:22I want you guys to figure things out and bring me consensus. He doesn't understand a core part of his job is to have difficult meetings because no one can agree elsewhere in the system. And only the prime minister can therefore listen to the arguments and make a decision. He doesn't understand the basics of that job. Sunak sort of understood intellectually that that was his job, but temperamentally couldn't do it. You have to have a system in number 10 whereby the prime minister actually sets certain critical priorities for the system. You then have to have a system that can monitor whether or not these priorities are actually being done.

17:57You have to decentralize responsibility to people inside the system to deliver. Number 10 cannot micromanage all of these things. It's completely doomed enterprise to try. And the prime minister's office needs to be centrally involved in the question of, okay, we can see that the home office can't do blah, blah, blah, blah. The monetary system tells us they can't do blah, blah, blah. The team's failing. The people in charge of the team must be immediately replaced with people that can do it and other changes that need happening must happen. Only the PM's office has the authority to force these kind of changes on the system.

18:41So at the moment you have, you know, failure all over. The PermSec won't change anyone inside the department because that's not how the system now works. The Secretary of State can't insist because the Secretary of State has zero power over the civil servants. And the Prime Minister repeatedly, one prime minister after another also won't intervene and say fired fired fired bringing new people change the whole thing so the shambles just continues everywhere and the shambles kind of end up interacting with each other and you have the the current situation you have to have a way a mechanism whereby the pm can intervene and say these people are gone these people have to be in to take over.

19:20Now, of course, that raises another directly related question, which is the ministerial jobs being fake. What we should actually do is also end the whole basis of the modern civil service. Once you create a permanent bureaucratic caste that excludes on principle roughly 100 % of the world's most able people from doing certain jobs and promotes almost completely internally and fires approximately zero people for failure, of course you have a constant running shambles everywhere you look. But this is a system which all political parties have gone along with. The way out of it is to revert back to the person in charge of that thing in whatever entity it is, government department or some other agency, are actually responsible and they have the powers, they have power over the money and have power over the people.

20:21So what I'm saying is completely not controversial in terms of how all the things that function in the world actually work. But we have a constitutional system which is built on stopping any part of the system working like any high-performance entity anywhere on the face of the planet. Human resources law, employment law, has got to be completely reformed. Because the notion of the prime minister walking in to number 10 saying that person's fired, that person's fired, that person's fired, would have him up before the courts immediately. Yes and no. Actually, because of the oddities of how the British constitution works, there are all sorts of jobs that the prime minister can actually fire people from.

21:03And they're not subject to normal employment law explicitly because of how the constitution works. the deeper problem is that the prime ministers have been encouraged for decades not even to realize that they really have this power i'll give you a concrete example in 2020 so prime minister's box arrives on a friday inside that box there are a bunch of appointment things and the way the civil service do it is they put a whole bunch of things on the top like the bishop of leicester or the such and such such and such like sounds like something from a trollop novel title right and of course the prime minister starts off signing us off late at night exhausted on friday bishop of leicester whatever tick tick tick because nobody since gladstone or whoever is actually prime minister has actually interfered with those decisions right so they kind of fake things but the constitution means that the prime minister doesn't size them off then below that you get to the head of science in the treasury responsible for dealing with the intelligence services and the mod on black budgets and all the most sensitive stuff in science and technology oh that person is being moved to be in charge of whatever in defra defra devour environment food and agriculture correct yeah so i said late at night on a friday this is obviously insane this person is extremely good we should not be moving them to defra especially now when we're in the middle of this total nightmare and a spending review and everything else prime minister does not approve this appointment.

22:32Cue chaos. Prime Minister himself said to me, am I allowed to do that? Cue the cabinet secretary going crazy. Cue the Prime Minister's PPS going crazy. And of course, partly that is them saying, well, this is not the Prime Minister really stopping this. This is you stopping this. The Prime Minister really has the authority to do it, but you don't have the authority to do it. So leave that kind of subtext aside. At the heart of it was, what the hell is going on with the Prime Minister actually vetoing an internal civil service appointment? Because the system is set up to make the PMs think that this is all basically just he signs them off and he can't actually have any real authority over these things.

23:08But the Prime Minister can exert his authority over these things. So you're saying now, like, what should Starmer, everyone's saying, what should McSweeney and co do in Number 10? I think they're screwed because of the character of the Prime Minister. And the Prime Minister will just do what the senior officials do, want them to do the same as Sunak. but if you actually wanted to do it what's what we'll be sweet and co-suit sit down say the pm you actually have the following powers pm we don't just have to sit here being given three stupid options by the treasury we can do other options and we can replace these people but you're the only person who actually has the authority to do this do you want to do it do you want to be a government that controls the government do you want to be prime minister actually in charge or do you want to carry on the Potemkin farce and speedrun Sunak?

23:55The latter being presumably the answer yes, we'll carry on with the shambles. Well, I mean, that's what's happening at the moment. You can see it most clearly on the boats where Starmer has literally just done exactly what Sunak did, right? He stood up and said, this is a complete disaster. It's extremely bad for the country. I'm putting my personal authority behind solving it. Oh, right, so are you going to do blah, blah, blah to actually stop the problem? Oh, no, of course not. Our actual priority is staying in the European Convention of Human Rights. all right okay so you're not going to stop the boats and the boats are just going to be a daily joke on social media and on tv what would you do dominic to stop the boats stopping the boat is both trivial and tricky in two different dimensions it's i went into this in extreme detail in 2020 so operationally it's obviously extremely simple to stop the boats you can deploy the navy you can stop the boats the entire problem is legal and constitutional The interaction of how the European Convention of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act and Judicial Review works means that there is complete agreement between specialists who've studied this subject that it is not possible for the British Prime Minister now to deploy the Navy and do the things that you need to do in order to actually stop the votes.

25:10The courts will declare it unlawful because of the Human Rights Act. so what you have to do is you have to repeal the human rights act you have to state that you're withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the strasbourg court and you then deploy the navy and you stop the boats and you say nobody is landing from any of these boats everybody from these boats that we pick up will be get dropped on an island somewhere no one will be coming to mainland britain of any kind the boats will be destroyed and the people organizing the boats are going to be put on a list for UK special forces to kill or capture the way that we do with various terrorist organisations.

25:48As soon as you announce that that is your policy and take serious steps to do it, the boat stops straight away because the people doing this are not ideological terrorists, right, who want to die and get into and fight about this. They're there to make money. So as soon as they realise, oh, an island nation is actually just going to stop these stupid boats, they're obviously going to send the people somewhere else. So, Dominic, sorry, can I just be clear what you're saying for the boats is that special forces should be able to capture or kill the gangmasters that are arranging for these dinghies.

26:21Correct. If you actually are going to prioritise stopping it, which I think you should do, you can't have tens of thousands of people a year coming over on these stupid things and then stacked up in hotels for which we're paying billions of quid. Then they run around, a lot of them committing crimes, undermining any kind of public support on immigration policy. It's an all-round farcical disaster that makes us look like a joke country in the eyes of the world. So you have to stop it. Stopping it means physically stopping the boats and having the legal framework in place so that you can do that.

26:54And it means sending a clear message to them, like we do to all organised crime, that they're on a list. And if you think that you can run around North Africa organising this sort of thing with impunity, you can't anymore now as soon as we do that we eliminate the problem for ourselves of course you squash it over to other parts of europe but that's their problem right the rest of europe doesn't want to face these problems any either can't do they're also enmeshed in both eu legal problems and echr problems they can't police the med etc etc but we are an island and we can stop this stupid problem for ourselves, simply.

27:32Can you do it by reforming the ECHR, or do we have to pull out? And lots of people would say that would risk membership of the United Nations, Security Council position, the Good Friday Agreement, all sorts of other international trade agreements with the European Union, for example. Can you reform, or do you have to exit? So eventually, the other European countries are obviously going to make their own moves to escape some of this Strasbourg court on lots of these things. But that's going to take years, like lots of things in Europe, and they're stuck. And also in Europe, the ECHR is now thoroughly entangled in the EU legal structures, making the whole thing even more complicated for them to deal with.

28:14For us, partly because of Brexit, partly because of how the constitution works, we can simply pass primary legislation that zaps the problem, the legal and constitutional problem immediately. The idea that it puts us at risk with the UN is obviously farcical. Most countries in the world are not part of the ECHR. The idea that somehow it puts the Security Council and UN at risk is in every way stupid, politically, constitutionally, in every way. What actually puts our Security Council position in jeopardy is looking like a joke country, which we do now. So if we actually solve the problem, then people would have some respect for us instead of increasingly around the world saying, what the hell happened to you as a country?

29:00Good Friday agreement? It has to be rewritten. Everything has to be rewritten. But it's a question of priorities. Do you actually want to get to grips with fundamental legal problems and security problems we have in this country or not? The consensus amongst MPs has been for 30 years not. But the country don't agree with them. Both parties have tried to keep going with the old way and tried to persuade people that it can be done differently. They failed. They've lost the country. The country wants these problems solved. So it's obviously going to happen. The ECHR is toast and we'll be out there.

29:39You don't seem to think that Starmer's the man for the job to take on not just the ECHR on small boats challenges, but total state failure. Is there anyone you think is capable of doing it? In the political system at the moment. There are some people... We'll go through some names. There are some people, but obviously I wouldn't curse them by naming them. Were existing politicians? Let's just say there are people inside the system now who I think certainly could do these things, but as I said, I'm not going to say who they are because that would be bad for them and bad for all sorts of people.

30:14Politicians or officials? Both. There are lots of good people inside the system. The problem is that the good people are completely disempowered and the worst people have almost all the power. And the good people don't have the actual leverage inside the system to change any of the important things. That doesn't mean there aren't good people in it. What about someone who isn't political then? Say you were putting together a campaign for mayor of London and you can pick anyone. have you got an idea of who that could be? Of course, yeah, but again, naming names at this point is not productive. So we're not going to say J.K.

30:54Rowling at this stage? I mean, I think it would be great if J.K. I mean, I think she's done the country, the Western world in general, a huge favour by getting involved with the issues that she has. And in principle, I think it would be good if she got more involved, but she doesn't strike me as someone who wants to run for elected office. Does Dominic Cummings want to run? For clarity, I've never spoken to her, never met her, and don't know anything that's not in the public domain. Does Dominic Cummings want to run for public office? No. I don't think that would be... You laugh when I said some people have said you could be the next Prime Minister.

31:32Yeah, I mean, it's obviously laughable. But you can't be the Mayor of London either? Of course not. We have got some leaders, political leaders, who are, you know, We know who they are. We are going to run through a few names, actually. You may curse them or otherwise. Is Nigel Farage capable of making the changes that you're explaining need to be made? I mean, it's an open question at the moment, I think. I mean, I think the big question on Nigel is he could quite easily win the next election if he simply stood up and set out a path by which he explains, here is how I'm going to go about recruiting people to be MPs and to be ministers over the next two or three years before the next election before the next election starts you'll see me stand on a platform and I will have a bunch of people who I'll be taking into government with me and it will just be obvious to everybody it'll be unarguable that the caliber of the people I've found is just much higher than either of the dead old parties can handle here is the process by which I'm going to do that.

32:35Here are some of the people who are going to help me start to build this. And if he actually said that and then started doing it, it would be, you know, like that scene in Wondfu or the Cuckoo's Nest where they kind of like electrocute Jack Nicholson. It would be like that for the old parties, I think, in Westminster, because the people in there kind of know that they're dying and rotten and knackered, right? And they're desperately, their last desperate hope is that Faroz somehow blows himself up. but if Farah showed that he could actually grow and recruit and begin what everyone is desperate for in the country which is a political force that says the old system is rubbish it's rubbish because the institutions are broken but also because the caliber of people is too low I am going about actively recruiting some of the wonderful people in this country who can build things who can do these things much better we need to get them into public life and I'm going to do it that's what everyone's crying out for if he can do it then it'll set off a whole wave of secondary effects and that's a big thing right that's more important than setting out a policy platform which is the big criticism of him at the moment that he's kind of doing up on the hoof and one little bit at a time and it's not well thought through i think it's completely connected like all these things are connected policy people and management are all connected it's a system and at the moment all of them are knackered and i think one of the problems with the westminster debate is it constantly goes oh no it's the policy oh no it's the people oh no it's management no it's all of them all of the core things have gone wrong together it's like saying what's wrong with number 10 oh it's mainly the people no no it's not the people it's the structure no no it's not the structure it's the pm's character no no it's not that it's the way the media it's all of these things they've all that's what happens with pathological institutions that don't work all the things start breaking at the same time and the only way out of it is to fix all of the things together so with Farage it's not like it's not an either or I think on on policy or the people it's all of it you have to communicate completely differently because the media is fragmenting you have to have a policy process which he hasn't got now but you can't do any of these things if you also don't actually hire some great people to do these things for you right you can't have a policy process that holds up under pressure unless you can hire great people So there's thousands of people.

34:53One of the things which has changed for the better in politics in the 30 years I've been involved with it now is, 25 years, is that you can see... So one of the things I've been doing in the last few months is helping these guys, the LFG campaign, trying to campaign on growth. That's looking for growth, and you're wearing, for people who are watching this podcast, you're wearing a looking for growth cap. Exactly. So I think the most interesting thing about the public meetings that they organize is the caliber of the people that go to them. So if you go back 30 years, you go back even to 2016 in the referendum, you go back to 2019 in the election, you could not get people, a whole network of people who we know, who've got amazing education, who are incredibly talented, have great jobs, are building amazing companies, they're professor of whatever they have got company blah they're investing zillions in whatever as part of what i was saying before this kind of elite talent thing has shifted shifted away from politics and gone to all these other things you couldn't get these people to engage with politics their attitude was like leave that to people to bill clinton leave that to obama leave that to david cameron blah blah what's changed in the last couple of years is those people are realizing oh my god the actual political institutions are broken and the people are too rubbish to fix them we somehow have to get involved with them so you can now find these amazing 25 year olds incredibly smart incredibly able so many options in their life actually now going to political events and talking about how does the cabinet office work right that's never happened in britain in in our living memory and that is an important shift so there's looking for growth you've also spoken yourself about a startup party maybe led by you or or at least chaired by you is that going to be a thing certainly certainly not led by me certainly not chaired by me but i think so when i talked about that before the last election the basic premise of it was the conservatives obviously drive themselves to destruction and labor will implode extremely quickly after they take over.

37:03Westminster thinks that Sue Gray and co will make it work. They're wrong. And we'll see this play out. That's obviously happened. But also what's happened is that because of the particular way which Sunak blew himself and the Tories up, also revived Farage, who was, you know, gone after 2019, Brexit party stopped, etc. So I think over the next year or so, I think we'll see a few things. One is, Starmer will keep failing because mostly character is destiny, and he just doesn't have it. There'll be endless things about Sackless Advisor, Morgan McSweeney seems to be almost one of the few people around politically who actually knows what the hell he's doing, so obviously there's a lot of pressure to get rid of him.

37:45It's very logical in Westminster. There'll be a lot of talk about how he can reset, but at the heart of it, I simply think that like Sunak, Starmer's fundamental core software patch is optimized for pats on the head from permsex that's what he actually will just keep tuning to because he can't do anything else his whole life is set him on that course so i'd be amazed if that if that changes the tories are obviously going to get rid of kemi but it's only question of whether they do it in the autumn or whether they wait until they're smashed up in the May elections. So she'll go. After which, they'll either put in cleverly, which case then shut the party down, definitively game over.

38:32Clarifying? Good. We all know where we are then. Or there'll be one last attempt at some kind of last second. Are we over the cliff or are we not over the cliff? Can we somehow reboot ourselves moment from them? Is that Robert Jenrick? Is he their only hope? I mean, he's obviously the person who everyone's talking about for a simple reason. The rest of the shadow cabinet are literally visible and no one even knows who any of them are. Even people who are interested in politics don't know who they are. Someone asked me the other day, like, who's shadow chancellor? Who's shadow health? Who's shadow forensic?

39:04I mean, I haven't got a clue. No one knows. I think it's just completely visible. Jarek's the only one who seems to have a pulse and is actually doing anything. So obviously, and he was in a senior position before, so everyone's talking about him. I mean, I know him very little. I had very few conversations with him in number 10, maybe two or something. So I haven't got any kind of insight into him. But then there's also this question that we just touched on with Faraj. Does he set this out? Now, if he sets that out and starts executing and hires the people that do that, then that's a game changer.

39:40And we'll set the system off in a certain direction. But it's also possible that by next summer, we're all sitting here a year from now saying, government obviously broken. So Tories are putting cleverly, game over, mass defections, shutting down, game over. And Farage has completely squandered the last year and has made clear that he's not interested in hiring all these people. It's just going to stay Nigel and an iPhone and that's it. Now, if that's how the branching histories work out, then there'll be a whole set of questions about, OK, well, clearly something new has to be created. But I think the Westminster game has to play out.

40:19this cycle has to play out first and then we'll see. I mean, you're obviously quite disdained for the Conservatives, but on and off for 25 years you have worked with them. Why? I've always been a project person rather than a party person. I've never liked any of the parties and the political things I got involved with have always been just because I wanted to do Project X, whether that was schools or whether it was the Euro or Brexit or whatever. So on that basis, you end up just, you know, just working with whoever's around. And I was as happy working with Labour MPs as I was Tory MPs, just that because of the things I'm particularly interested in, it turned out that most of them were Conservative.

40:58Would you serve Faraj if he came to you and said, Dominic, you're the man, or Zia Yousef came to you and said, Dominic, you're the man to help reform do just the things you are talking about? Hi, who you want. I think it's very unlikely on the reform front, just because there's a lot of history there and a lot of the people who've worked with Nigel. I actually had dinner with him, very friendly dinner in December where we talked about stuff. Thought that was interesting that he wanted to talk about the cabinet office and how power really works. He said, which is, I think, interesting. He said, you know, I've never been in government myself.

41:30I've never been a minister. I don't really know how it works. I'm now an MP though. And I talked to the Tory MPs and it's clear that they don't understand how it works. And they don't seem very curious about it. And it's odd that they don't seem to know really, how does power actually work inside the Cabinet Office? And they don't seem very interested in why Liz Truss vaporised instantly. But obviously, we in reform have to start thinking about these questions. So we had a long chat about how things actually work inside number 10 in the Cabinet Office, which I thought was an interesting sign. But there's a lot of people around, you know, without spoiling for all of your listeners, But there was a lot of extremely depressing kind of shenanigans over the Brexit referendum and rouse between various factions of MPs and Brexit people back in 2015, 2016, which means that there's a lot of people around Nigel who very strongly don't like me.

42:23So I think it's very unlikely that anyone would be interested in my help. But I also don't think that that's the right way of looking at it. And I think I'm quite irrelevant to it. The fundamental question is, does Nigel actually want to be Prime Minister in 2029? And if he does, is he prepared to build the thing that you need to build to do that, which intrinsically involves turning reform into an entity that can go out and engage with the country and find all these wonderful people and bring them in and get some fraction of them involved with politics at the senior level? That's the core question.

43:03If he does that, then the whole system will undergo profound shock and it will be a big deal and I'll be irrelevant to it. And if he doesn't do it, he's also just be signaling this is going to be the same old trambles. And something else will grow. Also, I'll be irrelevant to it. Well, you'll be relevant then because something else will grow, won't it? I think, so, yeah, as we said, I think if a year from now it's obvious that all three things have just sunk even further and can't actually change, then I think you'll see then a kind of burst of energy from a whole bunch of people to say okay right let's start something new and I think you'd see people from Labour defecting to join it I think you'd see Tories and reform people but crucially a whole set of people who are now not involved with politics so right okay we can see all three things are knackered we can't go on like this in 2029 in the election and then have another four years with a bunch of these bozos in charge we've got that we're gonna have to do but I think these things have to play out first can Starmer reset I think odds of that are tiny can the Tories revive unlikely what does Farage do these three things have to kind of play out and then I think you'll see the next steps

44:27What about the economy and the way that that serves people or doesn't? Have you been impressed at all by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and what she's done so far? I mean, it's just sort of continuity. The last 30 years, the last 30 years, knackered, rubbish economic model. Here and there, a few little signs of improvement, at least some glimmers of sense on things like planning, but buried, even if they do some of the little things, it won't move the dial much. It just goes back to the fundamental thing. Do you think that, like a lot of Westminster people do, that there's just not really anything that one can do very differently than the current thing?

45:09You can tweak it here and there, but that's all that politics really is about. Or do you agree with most people in the country that something's gone profoundly wrong over the last 20 years and it actually needs big changes? and the other huge force, which is kind of extraordinary that it's not more of a subject to Westminster. Westminster is always the last place to see anything, right? That's just a golden rule the last 25 years. New things always have seen their last. And that's playing out again now with the whole revolution with the AI models that's happening. The implications of what's happening there are very profound in all sorts of ways.

45:49parts of the government system particularly things like militaries and intelligence services real are realizing this and quietly trying to think about it but they're largely paralyzed in responding by the institutional problems that we've talked about people at GCHQ know that this is a huge thing and they want to deal with it but the treasury won't let them change the rules on things like pay so they can't actually hire any of the people from the three big labs etc etc so the usual pathologies at play. It's not really a subject in Westminster now, barely. And yet the almost complete absence of discussion about those things in conventional Westminster politics is going to seem really weird, I think, in a few years' time to people looking back and go, oh my God, how could this not be even really on people's radar?

46:41I mean, if you look at a whole a representative sample of Westminster's punditry now they are still tweeting and retweeting and mainly blue skying at each other about how the model is out it's fake it's a con it's a scam it's a bubble because opinions amongst a lot of those people have become almost completely correlated right so because a set of silicon valley got involved with trump the people who hate trump and politically on the other side have driven themselves into a position of all of this these changes in the technology world are basically just nonsense it's all fake they can't accept that the people doing this actually that it's real and important so wismans is like self-blinding on a lot of these questions i think and the mps therefore who turn to a lot of mainstream political commentary for kind of orientation therefore also don't really see see what's coming but the media landscape by 2029 is also going to be completely different than it was in the last election.

47:43So you have the collapse of the old parties, disintegration of the old media organisations happening at the same time as these new technologies are making it easier and easier for a very small number of people to leverage capabilities in various ways. You're going to be able to spin up political campaigns and communication much faster, much cheaper, much more effectively, but only if you actually have got quite core talent that can do these things. Talent which is not currently engaged in Westminster. You've talked a bit about old media, Dominic. What should the BBC, has obviously been a subject of big debate, it's still incredibly, it's very, very highly used by the population, although more briefly and fewer people are engaging with it.

48:26What do you think should happen to the BBC and particularly BBC News, which is at the heart of kind of how we consider how the news industry works here in the UK? In the private sector, you have creative destruction with startups coming along, and therefore you have this constant churn. It doesn't happen in government and doesn't happen in things like state broadcasters, which can just keep going in the old ways. So I think the BBC will, like all of the big organizations, it's extremely hard for them to adapt. And history suggests that that's just not how things work, right? It's like the Kodak thing.

49:00Kodak invents digital cameras, but then still goes bust anyway, because it can't actually figure out internally, because of its own institutional structure, it can't actually learn from its own invention. And it takes a whole bunch of startups that actually do digital photography. Same thing is going to play out in the media. It's just very unlikely. Why would this be different than what the pattern you see repeatedly in history, which is the old things just can't adapt, and new things come along and do it differently? So license fee should go, the government should act, should it? And get rid of the way that the BBC is funded or just let it wither?

49:34It'll just happen. I mean, it'll just happen anyway. I mean, there are ways in which you could accelerate, I think, positive things. But these forces can't be stopped by any kind of normal British government. We're just moving towards the end of this brilliant conversation. But I did want to ask you, and maybe it's connected to what you've just said, the issues around immigration and culture change. One of the huge criticisms of Boris Johnson was the huge increase in immigration, particularly post-COVID. What's needed is you have to have a mix of things. You have to essentially knock unskilled immigration and very low skilled immigration almost totally on the head, like actually close to zero.

50:17you need to have a number in thousands of actually super able people that you basically eliminate almost all friction for but they're massive net contributors no one cares about them sorry i mean no one cares about them in the sense of no one thinks they're a problem in any way shape or form because they're not they but there's so then the numbers of them are tiny you have to actually change a whole bunch of things so the country can build because building is is central to it you can't actually build any kind of infrastructure now in anything less than like 10 20 30 years you see this week the complete farce of hs2 so you have to change those all of those systems so that you could actually build in an emergency way and build things quickly you need to obviously stop the boat as we discussed before out of the uchr out of strasbourg's jurisdiction in general, primary legislation that completely eliminates in every way all aspects of international law on asylum and everything else that constrain the ability of British government to control its borders.

51:20You have to get a grip of a whole set of issues around extremism, which is another parallel thing. As you know, every week in London now, there are marches in London where people very They openly call for another Holocaust, wave photos of Hitler around, nothing happens to them. That's another huge signal about the direction in which the country is going. Very little coverage of it at the BBC and ITV because it's so sensitive, people don't want to discuss it. All of that stuff needs to be completely knocked on the head as well. Every single major aspect of how we deal with all of these problems has to be 180 degree change.

51:57And you have to do it all at the same time. we've been covering the grooming gang's announcement for an inquiry this week and Maggie Oliver who's a former police officer who became a whistleblower on the whole issue in Rochdale saw your Sky News interview about what was going on while you were at the Department for Education and how in your view there was a Whitehall cover-up would you take part in the inquiry if you were asked to and based on your experience of the Covid inquiry which I have my own views on the moment, largely that it's expensive and bloated and it's still going on and they haven't reported on the first stage yet.

52:34Do you think inquiries actually do any good? And do you think that the grooming gang inquiry specifically is actually the right course of action for this issue? So I think separate out of two things. In principle, it's obviously correct that the country actually gets to grips with this absolutely horrific nightmare. All aspects of the old system have essentially tried to ignore it for many years, decades. The fact that it's become uncontainable for some of the reasons that we talked about earlier on, and they're now having a U-turn, is in principle good. However, the kind of inquiry is obviously very important.

53:13You just look at COVID, right? The COVID inquiry is so amazingly stupid that even a whole set of officials who were actually central to the whole thing in 2020 haven't even been asked to give statements, right? Forget being interviewed in front of the judge. They haven't even been asked to give statements about what happened in 2020. That's how completely farcical the COVID inquiry is. If you look at the judge's statements on the blood scandal, he pretty clearly signals that he thinks that civil servants engaged in widespread destruction of documents to cover up the whole thing. And I'm absolutely sure that that's what happened.

53:48I saw my own experience in the Department of Education in 2020. Officials came to me and said, the stuff that you and Gove are trying to do in terms of opening this system up and publishing various of these documents has scared enough people that people in the child protection part of the building are talking about incinerating large numbers of these documents to ensure that you guys can never publish them. now as I've said many times before the trope that in Westminster it's normally a cock-up not a conspiracy is largely true but the one big area where it's not true is child abuse and the whole issue around like serious case reviews and appalling deaths of certain children in certain circumstances I've witnessed this with my own eyes I used to go and sit in white in at home I used to go back for a weekend take the unredacted secret version of a report into one of these horrific things and then the redacted version of the department would want to put out in the public domain and sit with a bottle of wine and read the two things comparing them and you could just see over and over again the way that they would like a paragraph would be deleted and you'd think i go in on monday morning say why is that paragraph being deleted and they'd say to protect the the the identity of the family members but it doesn't mention that all it says is the police did this the social workers did that it's a total disaster massive incompetence doesn't mention that any anyone's name at all.

55:09Dominic, we just have a different view on it. We think it's necessary to redact that to protect the identity of the victim. Well, it's obviously nonsensical and you're obviously lying. And I had that conversation repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. By the way, another ECHR issue, they would use the ECHR as the legal hook and rights to privacy and blah, blah, blah. But leave that aside parenthetically. So in general, there's a huge culture of cover-up on the subject generally of bureaucratic failure of various kinds leading to appalling things happening to children. Across the whole spectrum of different cases, that's what I would do.

55:45Far beyond the grooming gang stuff. I think that any kind of normal inquiry led by a judge will be mostly a farce. It'll be easily played by Whitehall. They'll destroy documents. They'll consent, delay, evade. The normal Whitehall approach will be applied. I think it's still good for everyone to apply pressure on it though in principle because some good will come out of it and some leads will come out of it and in some sense most importantly I think the chance of them digging through to the heart of the truth about the whole thing in any normal inquiry are close to zero but it could create pressure that it actually affects what's happening now on the street but I think at the heart of it you'd only really get the truth if you also have a political regime change in 2029 and a regime in number 10 that says, no, no, we actually want to find out the truth.

56:33Final question. Are you net optimistic about the future of the United Kingdom or net pessimistic? So I think it's different timescales, obviously. In the short term, no one can, I think, be reasonably optimistic about politics because the old system is just going to play out over the next few years. There are reasons for hope, though, right? One obvious reason for hope is that Britain is pretty much unique globally for having got through a few hundred years without significant political violence. Do you think that will be maintained? Or do you think that is at risk now? It's definitely at risk.

57:07It's definitely at risk, but a lot of these things are very path-dependent. Countries that are pro that repeatedly have violence are more likely to have violence in the future, and countries that are good at avoiding it have a better chance of avoiding it. And therefore, I think that the long-term kind of, whatever the right word is, kind of cultural capital that's built up over centuries is an important factor and gives us some chance of avoiding the fate that you can see of just spreading mayhem all over the world. But only fundamentally if we start getting to grips with these core things. At the heart of it, that means the old parties, they have to go.

57:47The old Whitehall system of Northcote Trevelyan, that has to go. So I think the other obviously really big thing is connecting to some of the things we've talked about is this kind of like long term, long term civilizational cultural question, which is also really bound up with educational institutions. One of the most destructive things that's happened is the state taking over education. It's created fake exams, fake curricula, fake education in all sorts of ways, which is a cultural disaster. and that's bound up with why in lots of ways why we have the elites that we do. That whole world is anyway going to is now in the process of being fundamentally challenged by what's happening with these models and people are going to start building completely new educational institutions from the ground up completely outside government control.

58:37The government's going to hate it, not going to be happy with it but they're not going to be able to stop it happening and I think rebuilding ideas about how we bring up children with completely different attitude than the assumptions of the last kind of whatever 70 odd years about state-controlled schools you go nine till three these are what the classes are this is how the curriculum is set by a bunch of people in the department of education in whitehall that world has been a disaster it's losing power it's going to be replaced in various ways and that is I think a source of great hope and a lot of the a lot of questions about politics often how do you change Westminster and that often sounds like like a few couple thousand people basically battling things out in the centre and almost the whole country excluded from it the educational side of things is a bottom-up thing though that everyone can get involved with thinking how do we bring up our children differently how do we escape the old school system how do you rebuild institutions where you've got university institutions that for a few hundred years were supposed to be beacons of enlightened inquiry becoming kind of backdrop to demonstrations calling for for violence praising terrorism etc etc all of that madness we could all do have to be westminster you don't have to be in politics we can all get involved with building alternatives to that and that's i think something to be very hopeful about Dominic Cummings thank you so much for joining the Daily Tea the birds are singing outside in your garden so there's hope all around us thank you

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