Dominic Cummings and me - merely a coincidence, your Honour...

It was entirely coincidental that, more than 3,500 miles apart, Dominic and I were both blogging about his suggestions about changing the way Government is done. Trust me, my typing speed isn’t really that quick, and my drafting far too cautious to allow me to have responded that quickly. But now I’ve had a chance to read his blog, and reflect upon its content a little, perhaps I ought to offer some thoughts.

Firstly, the sort of people he indicates that he’s looking for. Smart, “weird” people, he suggests. Bright, young, without any baggage. And in at least one sense, he’s absolutely right, of course. The Civil Service requires regular infusions of talent, people who can rise through the ranks quickly, and in due course be the leaders going forward. How you recruit them, and how you retain them, he’s rather less clear about.

He could tear up the existing pay scales, the merit-based recruitment systems that exist, and he might even be right to do so. Do the basic rules of supply and demand apply in the public sector? Should they, and if the answer is yes, no matter how qualified, is there a will to change things? Do Civil Service entrance processes actually test the right things, do they discourage talented individuals from under-represented groups, do they promote the best skill sets going forward? Are they actually reflective of current best practice? As a relatively junior official, I’m not privy to that sort of information, nor is there any reason why I should be.

The sort of people he feels are needed are, I think, the subject of broad agreement, although fashions are, how can I put it, just that, fashions. The long-term impacts of individual reforms are often never truly known because so little time is given to allow them to bed in, and the transition is often under-resourced. Perpetual revolution means instability and caution amongst those who might at any time become victims of said revolution.

And the problem with instability in one of the three legs of the structure of the unwritten constitutional settlement is that it risks destabilising the whole arrangement. Now, if what I read is to be believed, that’s what Dominic wants, at least in the short term. How the effects of change are managed, controlled and limited to the specific field of battle is something he may well have thought through, and one would hope that this was the case. But he is, as I said before, more restricted by a legislative framework than he was as a campaigner.

He’s also at the mercy of someone who needs to get re-elected, which can be an uncomfortable place to be, as Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill discovered. Does he really have carte blanche, or are there limits when push comes to shove?

The general response so far has been anger and ridicule. Anger that he proposes to tear up something that, in the minds of some, works pretty well as it is, and ridicule in terms of how he proposes to go about things.

I personally wouldn’t recommend either. Dominic doesn’t play by the conventional rules - he seems to think that many of them are absurd and protectionist. He also has a record of getting what he wants, and given Boris’s reputation for granting wide discretion to his advisors, there is no obvious reason to assume that he can’t get his way. And, just because he’s Dominic Cummings, that doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily wrong.