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His preferred idiom was very sweary (ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images)
It was Halloween on Tuesday, and over at the Covid Inquiry the party theme for witnesses seemed to be “Nineties crime movie”. Though the presumed intention of Dominic Cummings was to appear suitably funereal, in his white shirt and skinny black tie he put one in mind of an extra from Reservoir Dogs. And with exposure to his profanity-strewn emails and private messaging, spectators were plunged into a retro world of adolescent play-acting — quite possibly due to its protagonists watching too many mob movies at a formative age.
The preferred idiom was very sweary. According to Cummings’s communications from 2020, government ministers and civil servants dealing with the Covid crisis were “useless fuckpigs”, “morons”, and “cunts”. Everyone mentioned seemed to have a nickname, as if planning a heist: “Sonic” the Hedgehog Special Advisor; “Frosty” the Snowman Minister of State at the Cabinet Office; “Trolley” the Problem Prime Minister, and so on.
Sexist bravado also apparently abounded, with Cummings threatening, in one exchange with Trolley and Director of Communications Lee Cain, to “personally handcuff” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara and “escort her from the building”. In cadences reminiscent of a made man arranging concrete shoes for a troublesome foot soldier, Cummings continued: “We gotta get Helen out of [the Cabinet Office] She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case. She’s trying to get spads fired and cause trouble on multiple fronts. Can we get her in Monday for chat re her moving to [the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government] … we need her out ASAP. Building millions of lovely houses.”
Yet in the flesh at the Inquiry, Cummings was more penitent schoolboy than would-be gangster, apologising repeatedly for his previous “terrible” and “appalling” language. And the contrast was also stark with his written submission, in which, as others have also noted, he came across more like Adrian Mole than Harvey Keitel. (A characteristically mournful extract: “Although I was/am often described as ‘all powerful’ in No 10 in 2020 this is false and very misleading regarding Covid… For example, in January 2020 I could not even stop Chris Grayling being appointed by the PM to chair the Commons intelligence committee”.)
Equally, when the next day MacNamara herself appeared at the Inquiry, giving us first sight of Cummings’s much-maligned female nemesis, the deep histrionics running through his communications about her became even more discernible. For if his own fictional lodestar seems to be Nineties Tarantino films, MacNamara’s seems to be Bridget Jones Diary — even down to the fact of having once brought a karaoke machine to a lockdown party at Downing Street.
Though appearing calm and self-assured on the stand, MacNamara’s reported messages to fellow officials seemed almost parodically self-deprecating and tentative — perhaps partly due to the calibre of the individuals she was dealing with at the time. One email to the Cabinet Secretary from 2020 about the inadequate fit of most PPE with female bodies started with the words “Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me” and closed with “I didn’t know who to annoy with this so chose you”. She signed off with a fist emoji but immediately felt the need to explain, quasi-humorously: “that’s a fist bump not a punch”.
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SubscribeWell written as usual but I disagree. It may be my age but I am firmly in the camp that says results matter more than process and impact than language.
Dominic Cummings is clearly simultaneously both brilliant and a menace to any organisation; the sort of individual best kept in a glass box labelled “break only in emergency”. Indeed, evaluating his role in government centres largely on the way he gripped two emergencies: making BREXIT happen and Covid.
On delivering BREXIT, his ruthless advice – such as sacking several Tory grandees and restoring a degree of discipline to the Tory party in the Commons – allowed Britain to escape an embarrassing gridlock. I was a remainer but can accept that it was better to resolve the issue one way or another than drift on.
On Covid, he pushed through the first lockdown after a late conversion to the cause. What one thinks of that depends on one’s view of the lockdown but he did at least ensure a decision.
The tragedy of the Boris regime was that it could have been very successful. Boris had a highly unusual ability to connect with the public and set broad goals but is incapable of managing a whelk store. He needed someone to play Thomas Cromwell to his Henry VIII. Unfortunately, he fell out with first Michael Gove then Dominic Cummings which left him without a Chief Operating Officer and too distrustful ever to appoint another. From that point he was doomed.
Cummings was, however, never an ideal COO for any circumstances other than an emergency. If he was often perceptive in his identification of flaws in policies and individuals, he was too hurried and harsh in trying to act on these judgements. He lacked any experience of running a large organisation. Many would agree, for example, with his critique of the senior civil service but think the solutions need to be more constructive, long term and consistently pursued than his approach of firing anyone he clashed with and recruiting oddballs from the private sector.
Perhaps he would have mellowed and become more subtle, managerial and wiser if he had lasted longer as Grand Vizier – Gove learnt from his first years at Education – but his open derision of Boris made this impossible. The Boris/Dom team was less not more than the sum of its parts and inevitably short lived. If tragedies are defined as disasters made inevitable by the character flaws of the protagonists, then this story qualifies.
Thank you Alex – better than the article!
The article was entertaining, but the comments more so.
Very usually are John. More can be read from below than above in almost all articles IMHO
I think a serious politician should be able to manage a welk store. All the chaos in the end comes from that man – he never believed in anything so couldn’t make a decision.
Except Johnson did make decisions as Cummings testified. On Saturday 14th March 2020 the decision was made to firstly introduce the restrictions from 16-20th March, but also prepare for full Lockdown on 23rd March. On 7th March WHO had issued its updated guidelines with no mention of full lockdowns, which were not in the UK Pandemic Plan either. Can’t have it both ways – Johnson did make a decision as PM to ignore both WHO and the Pandemic Plan!
Yes, Johnson did make these atrocious decisions, BUT one must remember that Cummings was among the major figures who pushed him down that route TWICE along with Hancock & Gove, before that Johnson was rightly inclined towards the Swedish approach. So while Boris is definitely responsible for the mess, I for one hold Cummings in even more contempt, perhaps as much as the contempt I hold for Hancock!
I have to admit to thinking that Cummings was the answer to something or other, but his thoughts and actions during the ‘pandemic’ disabused me of that.
It’s unsurprising that having a boss who repeatedly U-turns on decisions could be wearing. For that reason, I can forgive DC his sweary comms style.
One has to wonder, given that a pandemic plan was in place, how the ‘pandemic’ that arrived differed so much that the plan was no longer applicable.
What is missing from the article is any consideration of where (and to whom) that half-trillion spaffed by Sunak (and ‘the Trolley’) went…
I think that’s a whelk stall.
Yes indeed- my mistake!
You skilfully avoided any mention of the ‘Carrie beast’, very much the Agrippina of this whole squalid affair.
Unfair to Agrippina? In the five years between her murdering her husband, Claudius, and being murdered by her son, Nero, she ran the Roman Empire extremely well chiefly by installing Seneca, Burrus and Pallas to manage the system.
As for Carrie, I know the gossip but I am a little sceptical. There is a temptation to feel that no political story is complete without a Lady Macbeth. Cummings was apparently being so offensive to Boris by that stage that the latter was bound to sack him sooner or later whatever his sleeping arrangements. I sometimes wonder if Dom realised he was in over his head and, despite the aggressive bluster, was trying subconsciously to engineer his own dismissal.
I think that Carrie’s real failure – if she did have that much influence – was that she failed to arrange the appointment of an effective “Seneca” as COO to replace Dom. Hence chaos and exit stage left.
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that I used Agrippina as a ‘popular’ metaphor for a female schemer?
However in her defence there is much in what you say, although the ancient sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio etc, are not that complimentary, nor indeed the late Hugh Scullard (1903-83.)
On reflection I have rather ‘over promoted’ Carrie, who is very epicene in comparison to Agrippina, as I think you will agree. It would have a veritable miracle if she had managed to arrange for the appointment of new Chief of Staff to replace the errant Mr Dominic Cummings.
Of course – just as I was using Agrippina to suggest personal influence is often best employed in securing the appointment of individuals of ability, integrity or whatever rather than in interfering in the details of policy.
Boris is not entirely wrong in seeing some similarities between himself and Churchill. They share some flaws. One key difference, however, was that Churchill was better at selecting people and respecting their advice – if often after some violent debate. His effective if abrasive relationship with General Sir Alan Brooke, the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, which was central to success in WW2, comes to mind. If Boris had been temperamentally capable of forging a similar relationship with a capable and tough “COO” he would probably still be PM.
‘Academically’ Boris was far more gifted than Churchill, and perhaps this brought a certain amount of arrogance into the equation?
It is a great pity than neither he or Cummings recalled Churchill’s great maxim “Scientists should be on tap, NOT on top”.
too easy to blame the woman…she wasn’t the elected, or appointed official and any influence should have been at the discretion of said officials. if she was over influential, then that’s another negative nail in BoJo’s coffin.
I’m NOT blaming her but just noting that she cannot be excluded from the narrative.
Boris is undoubtedly the author of his own demise, does anyone seriously deny that?
‘It’s your own fault Boris for doing what I told you.’ Women and the eternal, necessary and evolved evasion of responsibility.
I agree with you Alex, it’s outcomes that matter, as long as the path to achieving them, is legal and ethical. We are in an age, where people are more interested in looking good rather than doing good.
Excellent. Thank you.
I’m stuck on “cuffing her and escorting her from the building” being used as an example of sexist bravado. This phrase could have been directed at a man he had contempt for. I see this in feminism a lot; Taking anything negative a man does to a women as sexist.
Evidently you missed the bit where Cummings called McNamara a “c**t.”
Again, not sexist. He was using an insult that also gets directed at men rather a lot. What you appear to be complaining about is a disregard for chivalry, which in some schools of thought is the opposite of sexism.
Evidently you missed the bit where Cummings called McNamara a four-letter word beginning with c. (I spelled it out in an earlier post, which was deleted.)
You consider that sexist?
I’ve heard more men called that than women.
Er, but he also used that word to describe Hancock. He’s not sexist, he’s just a very naughty boy.
To be fair, I think a large proportion of the population thinks that of Hancock.
This was also my first thought. There wasn’t anything remotely sexist in that line. A complaint about that comment being directed at a woman belongs in Victorian times.
Astute observers of the loathsome Hennegan abusing pro lockdown Inquiry accidently uncovered a new and terrifying truth last week. Cummings, a sociopath, went mad. In a crazed period of just days in early 2020, he abused his powers of access to the PM to lead a de facto coup. He was determined to smash the Scientists and Government’s ‘Swedish’ policy of non coercion and resistance to an impossible and uncosted lockdown. He flooded the dysfunctional command system with his own extreme and hysterical ‘modelling’ of 500,000 dead…and he won. With the BBC and MSM similarly licenced and encouraged to generate mass panic and hysteria within the public, this country was propelled into catastrophic avoidable ruin. Shame on the meek useless vast greedy useless public health bureaucracy for its craven behaviour in sustaining the madness and pity Johnson for having a crazed destructive Rasputin in his court. Cummings is guilty of near criminal abuse of power (as is the BBC). He even denied the PM important papers which contested his panicked worldview. The scandal is so much greater and so different from what I had imagined.
A perfect synopsis of this loathsome toad.
An arts graduate enthralled by ‘science’ he couldn’t understand, coupled with conceit that far exceeded his intellect.We are well rid of him.
I think he desperately craved to be part of the establishment, but once he realised he would never be, he resorted to despising it.
The clarity of that remark is outstanding, thank you.
In a mere twenty three words you have said it all.
Probably true – but he was still intelligent enough to be an effective critic of it – whatever his motivation. However bitter he may have been, his evaluation of those who govern us, and their aides, is turning out to be horribly accurate.
So true. I had seen him as a Robespierre figure. A crazed loner and outlier who had courage and great insight into the underlying sickness of our Blairite New Order and the EU. But his hatred of the Blob and then Boris appears to have unhinged him. I think he saw a ‘Second Saviour’ role in Lockdown and used his special privilege and access at apex of power to smash the rival patient mature Swedish way. The way he blitzed the system with a ferocious Project Fear (the irony!l) needs unpacking. The fact that the public – duped by the catastrophizing mendacious BBC and the acquiesence of the inadequate public health Blob- still think of Boris and Partygate as the crime in Downing Street is outrageous. Cummings was an incubus. He has destroyed Brexit, the Johnson Government and the long term health of our economy. All in a 10 Day Lockdown Coup.
Rather bad judgement on BoJo’s part to appoint him, then.
Well quite. His famous whiteboard with its “chart” is laughable.
Digressively peaking of Arts graduates Charles- did you know that Neil Ferguson has some kind of Bachelor of Arts in Physics? Must explain a few things about his track record!
Many Oxford undergraduate science degrees are BAs, an anachronism that persists.
You shouldn’t ask; like Ferguson’s models it is incomprehensible.
I think it just explains a conceit of the University of Oxford. A BSc is never awarded at first degree level, and Masters degrees such as MPhys (Master of Physics which confusingly is nowadays given for undergraduate studies) are automatically ‘upgraded’ to an MA after 7 years.
I do not know if this maps NF’s path to glory.
Perhaps I read a bit too much into the BA/BSc semantics, so I stand corrected on that. Still, NF’s known degrees are all in physics, but nothing even remotely related to biology, epidemiology or public health. From what I recall he rode Tony Blair and David King’s(a climate change alarmist who is biased towards math models, also another SAGE man) coatails to his scandalous debut during the BSE outbreak in 2001, and the next 20+ years was history! But I digress.
Excellent!
I’ve just finished reading the latest book by Mark Woolhouse, The year the world went mad; it’s worthwhile reading. There were plenty of scientists, who worked with SAGE, that supported lockdowns, it wasn’t just Cummings on his own. Also I don’t believe the PM, was the anti lockdown person, that some people make him out to be. It is my belief, that if we had a grown up in charge at the time, we wouldn’t have went in to any form of lockdowns.
I agree. Boris ultimately takes responsibility and was weak, for we constantly find him whats apping all the observations we sceptics felt had to be true. He saw the useless no bed NHS and the appalling unpreparedness of the No Risk of Care Home deaths PHE. He reached out to sceptics. Later he sees the death data showing there was no risk to healthy children and anyone healthy under 65. He senses that lockdown would shatter the economy. And STILL he bowed to the panicked deranged groupthink of Cummings and his allies. Of course there were many in the Public Health Bureaucracy wanting to overturn the ‘Swedish Model’. But the Cummings revelations identify him as the principal advocate who manufactured the 50000 Dead with his chosen modellers. Classic Tudor court politics. He could and did block opposition and was the insider the lockers needed to trigger the panic and the switch.
I have to disagree. Lockdown was inevitable for one simple reason, that initially it was government policy not to.
The MSM have been mostly left-leaning for decades but since the Brexit referendum the anti-Tory groundswell has been palpable. Following Boris’s stunning (in both senses) 2019 GE victory, the MSM became even more hysterically anti-Boris and anti-Tory. Whatever the Government policy was, on any subject, the MSM would decree that it was wrong. Hence, when Boris initially resisted calls to copy Italy and others in locking down, the MSM automatically adopted Lockdown as the correct, indeed the only possible, policy. The opposition parties of course joined in, as, shamefully, did the lefty academic, scientific and medical establishments.
The media was full of interviews with doctors and directors of public health viciously criticising the government who, on investigation, mostly turned out to be Labour activists. At he daily No 10 press conference the BBC, ITV, Sky News and C4 correspondents took turn to ask “Are you a mass murderer, Prime Minister?” or variations on the theme. In that environment, coupled with natural and inevitable public concern at the increasing numbers of cases and deaths, lockdown was inevitable, whichever adult had been in charge.
Of course, once the media’s chosen policy was adopted, they still couldn’t concede that the evil Torees were doing the right thing, so they had to push for lockdown to be stronger and longer than whatever the Government was considering at the time. Naturally, there’s no chance of the media’s pernicious role in this being investigated by the Inquiry.
Of course the media played a major part in us going in to the lockdowns. However, that was allowed to happen, because Johnson failed to ask the right questions.
From my viewpoint he failed to ask the right questions all the way through the pandemic.
He was informed in September 2020 by Professors Heneghan and Gupta, that the way infection rates data, was being presented was misleading, yet he still put us in to the 2nd lockdown.
The data from both the ZOE app and from the NHS own testing, showed infections falling at the end of December 2020, yet just over a week later he put us into our 3rd lockdown.
I can fully understand the first lockdown. As for the others, there were people telling him there was another way, he chose to ignore them.
Well said. If the role of the BBC and its wicked calculating cynical Project Fear is not examined in depth by the Inquiry then about 30% of the story will be buried. You are 100% right. There was a wild deranged toxic anti Brexit groupthink in the leftist/liberal BBC and MSM and it was peaking just as Covid landed. The BBC had thrown out the idea of neutral analytical Birtian current affairs long ago. Catastrophizing, hooman interest and Fear Mongering was a crack cocaine – way more fun, great for eye balls and way more addictive. The Covid outbreak also tapped the BBC’s own decades long ‘Protect/Venerate The NHS’ addiction. Cue Body Count from Day 1 and huge attention to BAME NHS worker tragedies. Monsters like Piers Morgan joined in the Fear Frenzy and the monstrous power of media turned Brits into mushy pathetic agrophobic pot bashing hysterics. And how the BBC loved it!! Its like the good old days! People Need Us Again!, they crowed! But no. This was not a War. They needed Truth. What unfolded was a rancid 2 year long abuse of the Charter as the calm rigorous independent analysis which may have protected the people was spurned and cancelled. Being an Orwellian self important State Ministry of Health Propagsnda was way way more fun. The BBC, the State. The NHS and ALL political parties merged in an orgy of destructive bullying cruel authoritarian groupthink. The Fool Boris was blinded by polls suggesting mass support for his Churchillian leadership and did not see what was obvious – that his Leninist enemies saw in the virus and hard lockdown a means to totally destroy his Government. But those same polls were all constructed on the knowing lies of the BBC and MSM. The healthy Under 65s were all safe and need not be paid 400bn to watch TV at home. The MSM and BBC will not be rushing to ‘fact check’ and reveal the truth of their collective cowardice neglect and betrayal. But it must, must out…
It wasn’t just the MSM, don’t forget the Behavioural Insight Unit, which was part of the cabinet office. They were feeding the MSM with the messages the government wanted the public us to know. They wanted data like, like deaths and cases, to be presented to the public, as reported figures, rather than when they occurred. After all if you don’t know the timeline of events, your view of what’s really going on, is restricted.
“Monsters like Piers Morgan joined in the Fear Frenzy..”
I am somewhat sympathetic to Piers Morgan here. One of his friends – Derek Draper – was seriously ill after covid. The virus wrecked his body in horrific ways and he spent the best part of a year in hospital.
He’s also since recognised that he was wrong to call for such draconian measures.
Superb, and 100% on the money.
That is an excellent exposition of what went on. And still does.
You’ve nailed it. Thank you for walking us back to the that fetid post election hysteria, where the massed media apparatchiks were looking for fresh sticks to beat the government with every day.
I’m sadly lost on this do you mean the “loathsome Henagan” or were you referring to Cummings ? If Henegan why ?
I think, and hope, that the hyphen was missing and it should have been the “loathsome, Heneghan-abusing pro-lockdown lobby”, rather than a dig at the excellent Carl H.
Quite so! Apologies!
Phew!
Ahhh, well spotted
I love and respect Hennegan. I was saying that The Inquiry saw him as loathsome. They treated him with total disrespect, revealing that the pro lock groupthink controls these overpaid crappy lawyers too.
Thanks that’s clearer & in line with my views
I’m glad you asked, that one had me foxed as well.
Great summary Walter, though I already knew this back in mid-2021(while I was still living abroad!) and have despised him ever since. In some ways he is just as dangerous and crooked as Hancock. And not only he pushed for 1st lockdown, he was one of the UK ringleaders(along with Hancock and Jeremy Farrar) quashing the discourse around the now-vindicated Great Barrington Declaration, eventually leading the UK to the 2nd lockdown. In fact, Jeremy Farrar admitted that Cummings was organizing a “press-led smear campaign” against the Declaration. So yes, Cummings, Hancock, Gove, Labour & SAGE(incl. Farrar) & MSM are, in their own words, “all in this together!”
I am glad he is no longer in power, and hope it remains this way for a very long time!
For anyone, like me, who wondered why the sensible Hennegan is loathsome, perhaps the first line should read:
‘Astute observers of the loathsome Heneghan-abusing pro-lockdown Inquiry….’?
Punctuation is important. Eats, shoots and leaves.
It’s hard to know whether Helen M was making serious points, or whether she was just another feminist unable to get off her pet hobby horse when faced with a real crisis. Handing round feminist books for others to read at that time suggests the latter. Feminist fiddling while Rome burns.
It certainly seems that Cummings, and her other colleagues saw it that way. And that’s how I would see it, if told that dealing with covid had been put on hold while they all caught up with their feminist reading.
While reading the bit about the McNamara-Cummings face-off, a viral Tweet sprang to mind:
“Jane Austen’s works are timeless classics because she knew the real horrors in life are having to listen to men who think they are better than you and receiving unannounced visitors.”
Yes, quite.
To me, he always seemed like an odd-bod who got very lucky because Johnson was such a poor judge of character. Apparently he did some good work on Brexit, but thereafter was gripped by the delusion that he is some sort of genius. His blog shows this – the only people interested in it are those who want to pretend there is something meaningful in self-promotion and obscurantism.
There was a time when people hoped that he was some sort of political wizard, able to run rings around the likes of “traditional” operators who wanted to derail Brexit – the likes of Barnier, Grieve, and Lady Hale. When things looked bleak, I really wanted this to be true.
But that idiotic trip to the North East, and then his appalling performance in front of the press in the Downing Street garden; it convinced me there was simply nothing to him. A tough-talking, swaggering Beta male. The same applies to the WhatsApp messages. Apparently this expert in communication and technological platforms didn’t realise that they would make him look like a fool in due course.
You have given a perfect example of what Cummings is complaining about, that politics is reduced to who behaved nicely with whom, who had inflated ideas of their worth, who was odd, who had dished whom.
Absolutely no engagement with Cummings’ main arguments that nobody involved could use statistics to support their evaluation of policy. Instead of anybody ever thinking, everyone is always just feeling.
I disagree with the Downing Street garden – he sat in front of our best media hacks who were allowed a free rein on live TV to question him. Only one reporter got close to laying a figure on him – the DM who asked some awkward questions – but the rest were ineffective. The sad state of our media.
We all know that whatever you write in emails/texts/whatsapps can easily come back to haunt you. So why were these senior politicians so loose with their language on whatsapp? To what extent were they simply naïve, or were they knowingly creating a written record for posterity (or at least for the inevitable public inquiry)?
I assume they thought WhatsApp was off the record (or forgot to turn on disappearing messages)
People running the country need to be able to have free & honest discussions, the alternative is Tony Blair’s “Sofa government” where you meet informally with no civil servants present taking notes.
ironic now everyone works from home, but the cabinet will need to meet in person behind the bike sheds in future
The Scots figured this out, hence their recent inability to find relevant chats.
It’s the infantilism which strikes me the most. Not because it is new to me, but because I’ve seen the same thing amongst senior managers. Childish nicknames that sound like something out of a public school novel. As if the mentality of the playground is extending itself into the supposedly serious world of adult responsibility.
Clearly it’s not with Gen Z that this failure to grow up began.
I appreciate a well-written article, and many acute comments below. But I think they don’t reach the nub of the problem revealed in the workings of government. I start from the assumption that the UK State is dysfunctional. This is based on a) direct experience of the process, and b) observation of the outcomes.
When nothing much needs to be done, we have a purring machine doing nothing much. People are politely ruthless as they pursue their careers. There’s plenty of room for internal process, like more safety, more fairness, more mental health. The result is an absence of outcomes. What has the British State achieved in the past 20 years? An absence: of nuclear power stations, of educational attainment, of trains and tracks, of health services.
But, unlike the electorate, a virus does not wait. When faced with Covid, the State simply fell apart. When things fall apart, people revert to self-preservation. The safest thing to do, for careers, was to enact a lock down. The idea that you can personalise this to Johnson, or Cummings, or MacNamara, or Carrie, or Hancock is just silly. They were the flotsam on a wave of hysteria, led by the BBC and fuelled by anyone who could provide a plausible narrative. The chaos is not attributable to the psycho-drama of a few characters. It is attributable to a deeply dysfunctional State.
The fact that Kathleen Stock expresses herself so articulately — smart, insightful, funny — rather makes her point that manner of expresson is important. I’d read her writing about grass growing.
PPE is ineffective if you have a beard – so arguably anti-male. (Of course this is also a nonsense.)
I think a man could shave his beard off if worried about a mask not fitting properly. However I don’t think a woman could grow bigger hands or head so her PPE would fit better?
Unfortunately, the Oxford PPE seems to be rather effective if you are a certain male wanting to be in government.
PPE is a rather pompous way of saying General Studies. A perfect degree for a butterfly brained sociopath such as Boris.
Except that Boris took a degree in Classics.
Oh course, how stupid of me to forget that, thank you!
However even reading ‘Greats’ made NO difference!
PPE course was intended as modern(ised) Greats (ie Classics).
Until 1920 one had to pass a paper in Greek to matriculate to Oxford. Many minor grammar schools did not teach Greek so it was dropped and PPE started in 1922. PPE became very popular with Left wingers. Until WW1, English was not taught. The teaching of English and PPE coincides with the decline of Britain from 1922.
I got a B in General Studies. Do you think I could become a Minister in HMG?
Definitely.
If you know how to use an Atlas you will be too good for the FCO.
Ok, so he actually read Classics; nevertheless, you are otherwise perfectly correct, Charles.
Who was it who described someone as ‘intellectual but stupid’?
I just wish Sir Humphrey was still with us. I am sure that a man of his skill and charm would have kept Westminster on course through the COVID Affair.
The author is unaware how much The Thick of It has influenced people who choose to work in No 10 and the Cabinet Office. It’s like Italian-American mafiosi aping Goodfellas and The Sopranos.
The notion that Helen MacNamara became Deputy Cabinet Secretary with a “self-deprecating and tentative” personality beggars belief. The quoted messages could be interpreted as hyper-passive aggressive and the “fist-bump” message might’ve been written out of pure fear of HR.
Well said sir!
Spot on. The handing out of books to people, during a crisis, when she didn’t get her own way, is pure passive aggression. And now we’re getting the standard line (remember Lehman Sisters) that it all might have been better with more women involved! It is the calibre of the people, not their gender, that was the problem.
The competence of the Civil Service is largely due to the members who served in combat in WW1 and WW2. A family friend who was in the Malayan Civil Service /FCO was good because he was an ex Gurkha and Chindit Officer who fought at Kohima. He cheerily explained how a few weeks before Kohima he had been knocking tennis balls across the nets and then found himself throwing hand grenades. I doubt he would have panicked during Covid.
I think you are right and this factor is not emphasised enough. The phase when the U.K. civil service was its peak in effectiveness and earned its reputation as a Rolls Royce system was roughly 1940-80. This coincided with the period when most senior civil servants had started their careers commanding a platoon in wartime. If in the 1950s permanent secretaries had worn medals to committee meetings it would have been impossible to hear what was being said for the clinking of MCs. These earlier experiences gave them a sense of perspective, a resilience and a greater ability to make things happen that individuals who joined directly from university lack. There is a reflective speech given by Sir Ian Bancroft just before he retired in c 1980 which dwells on these themes.
Working daily with any toxic colleague is hugely limiting. Team performance only goes one way. The gnome should have been disciplined then sacked before he was recruited
He has always reminded me of a certain type of gay man who talks a good line on hookup apps, in order to harvest free imagery from you depicting acts he’d never do himself in a million years.
If Rik Mayall were alive, he could play him.
Both Cummings and MacNamara are using the inquiry to virtue-sigal and cover their arses. They both broke the ridiculous lockdown rules because THEY KNEW THEY WERE COMPLETE AND UTTER BOLLOCKS! And yet they were happy to have lockdowns imposed on everyone else – aside from MacNamara’s very specific tear-dabbing concern for abused women (not children or the elderly dying of neglect, loneliness and midazolam…)
Suppose you find yourself having to work with someone whom you sincerely believe, on good first-hand evidence, is totally out of their depth, indecisive and/or making deplorable decisions and withal dishonest, what should you say and how should you say it? The senior members of the civil service might recommend ‘a quiet word in someone’s ear’ while observing the usual courtesies. But that approach has not, I suggest, been a conspicuous success. A foul-mouthed tirade might be deeply unpleasant but more effective, especially in a national emergency.
Cummings fancied.himself another Californian transhumanist and he was foremost jn pushing for extended lockdowns during the British epidemic, playing off craven state bureaucrats against and letting young egos run rampant in political terms, thinking of Hancock and Sunak. He crushed Johnson’s natural instinct for liberty too.
So much more balanced and perceptive than Bardosh’s article of 2 November, which even managed to misquote Lee Cain’s brilliant comment about Covid being the wrong crisis for Boris’s skill set. Commentary generally misses DC’s statements to the inquiry that if the UK had been decently prepared for a Covid-like crisis, months in advance, the first lock-down may not have been necessary: don’t blame the lock-down on DC! The inquiry itself, in the hands of the snail’s paced Hugo Keith, failed to drill down into the second lockdown, which would have been more useful given that we had already had DC’s comments on the Feb/Mar 2020 events in a previous grilling. As it was, HK’s inappropriately adversarial approach in what was supposed to be a lessons-learnt session failed at times to get beyond the psychodrama – and struggled to keep up with what DC was telling him. The contrast with Helen MacNamara’s testimony is surely key to understanding Feb/Mar 2020. When the world around is nice and calm and ordered, HM’s civil servant approach carries a lot of value; but we were effectively on a war-like footing for a while, and at such times short cuts are necessary – and we need the likes of DC if not DC himself. He is an easy target for commentators, but alongside noting the “superficial signs of cleverness” we might also note that he did get a 1st at Oxford. But a really good article (as always), thank you KS.
They all have a god complex, of course, but Matt Hancock’s turns out to have been something else. Hancock is already without the whip, but is Boris Johnson still a member of the Conservative Party?
Basic fees for Eton are £49,998 per annum. Fifty grand. A quarter of a million in total. Johnson thought that he could kill Covid-19 by blowing a hairdryer up his nose. You are no more shocked at that than I am, and the same goes for the confirmation that on no day did Downing Street adhere to the Covid-19 regulations.
On 3rd March 2020, in what was then Johnson’s fanzine, since it had gone downhill since my day, Jeremy Warner wrote that, “Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the Covid-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.” It is no wonder that Hancock wants immunity from prosecution. He and Johnson should be arrested immediately.
The Johnson Premiership will be something of which one did not speak. People being born around now will grow up with the understanding that they were never to ask about it. Yet the position of the Labour Party is that it was better than the alternative.
Hancock is a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. I became aware of him when he had the remit for Further Education. It was obvious then he was clueless. How the hell did he end up in such an important job. I’m sure he had his eyes on the job of prime minister at some point. At least we’ll be spared that!
It’s fine pointing to Eton, but Matt Hancock came out of Oxford with a First – in spite of showing all the signs of being not just incompetent, but actually quite stupid. What is going on if our supposedly best universities are failing to filter out the rubbish? Even Hancocks arrogance is unconvincing – he comes across as a weak, ineffective man completely unaware of his own obvious limitations.
He’s a good horseman and amateur jockey.
The funny thing is, he even looks like a jockey 🙂
Apologies to all the atypical jockeys out there!
a new answer to the old joke “what animal has four legs and a c… in the middle of its back?”
I wouldn’t bother about Eton, since the sacking of Mr Will Knowland nearly three years ago it has “gone to pot”.
No more than a worm eaten edifice of its former self, it should be renamed WOKETON or preferably dissolved.
David Cameron demonstrated that Eton had “gone to pot” when he, on the anniversay of the Battle of Britain, he admitted he hadn’t realised that the US was not then involved in the war.
When public schools were concerned with producing boys with character, they produced leaders; Shackleton, D Stirling and L Cheshire VC would be excellent examples . Wellington said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton because it was there initiative, pluck and stoicism were developed. A new prisoner were being marched into a Japanese POW and was greeted by inmate saying As Athur Bryant ( Attlee’s and Wilson’s favourite historian ) said – A gentleman was expected to be able to clear a lane with his morleys.
Now they educate the affluent and effete and gentlemen and scholars appear to be very rare.
Sir Adam Smith was Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader’s wingman. Smith said during a dogfight over N France Bader radioed the base and asked for the squash court to be booked for 7:30 pm that night as he had forgot to do so in the morning. Smith said Bader’s voice was icily calm which gave everyone massive confidence.
The test of leadership is grace under pressure, to make life or death decisions and get it right, when everyone else has collapsed from terror or exhaustion.
Perhaps the best way to understand what Britain lacks is to compare those involved with Covid and Captain Dudley Mason GC who commanded SS Ohio during Operation Pedestal which lasted 12 days.
Dudley Mason – Wikipedia
Napoleon said Britain was a nation of shopkeepers. I suggest we have become a nation of effete clerks.
Cummings was always an abstractly intellectual narcissist with an impenetrable blog. His willingness to sweep aside boring and stifling norms is appealing, but it seems to be all he’s got. The more of him that gets surfaced the more he seems more like a 15 year old student prodigy than a serious operator. I can, however, forgive him for everything now that I’ve learned that he called Johnson ‘Trolley’. Especially given Johnson’s eventual fate as the fat man pushed off the bridge. Thanks Dom !
Nobody’s mentioned it so I’m going to. Class war. Once the election was won the knives were out. Cummings was got rid of by the patrician types using Carrie to prise Johnson away before the hard rain that DC promised the blob began to fall. Pure snobbery to rid No.10 of the despised oiks.
I read his education policy manifesto on his blogsite. Like Gradgrind on crystal meth. He was hoping for some good euthanasia results from Covid and he got them. Nasty, nasty piece of work. I did enjoy all those hoodies and trackies in photos of him going into Westminster.
More of the sort of feelings-driven politics Cummings deplores.
Gradgrind or not, the Gove/Cummings reforms of 2010, which were and are so much disliked by the education blob, have coincided with a rise in England’s performance on the PISA benchmark tests. What standard are you suggesting instead? Isn’t it just something that feels better and kinder to teachers. Sure they have a professional opinion, but in a nationalised system they do not have the constraint of having to please their customers except via this sort of top-down imposition.
If parents had vouchers for the education of their children and could take them where they wanted, the schools in the blob consensus wouldn’t last five minutes.
The continuing political division over Katherine Birbalsingh and the Michaela School is all the proof you need. In 2023 it was 1st in the country for the second year running on the Progress 8 measure of achievement. Its results are stellar, and it is still being hated by the educational blob for its discipline and its Gradgrindian approach.
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The Michaela School, Wembley. The best school in the country that is being carefully ignored by the educational establishment. They are operating out of a small converted office block, yet they are still beating every other school in the country year after year.
Disappointed by seeing someone I admire spell out the most offensive (to me) swear word of all. It rhymes with(and reminds me of) grunt – ie: the. most primitive form of communication.
“As the Trolley knows all too well by now”
I’m confused. What does ‘the Trolley’ mean?
Trolley was Cummings’ nickname for Boris Johnson.
Thank you.
The analogy was with a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel crashing from one side to the other of the shopping aisle i.e. Boris was incapable of taking a decision and sticking to it.
Shopping trolleys are always hard to direct but Cummings in action was such a trolley.
Anyway know them by their parents.
His father was a manager of giant projects abroad.
What about Boris? Was it wife beating/punching, or am I mistaken?
Bear in mind that Boris, Hancock et al have the kinds of background and education that would have given them access to all sorts of top jobs – had they chosen not to go into politics. There are whole cohorts of people just like them, out there, at the top levels of British society and raking in the cash. And we wonder why we live in a failing country with a productivity problem.
Surely we must move on from the failings and failures of the generalist politicians. We need to interogate the very first disaster caused by the supposed professionals in the NHS, OHR and the vast Health Bureaucracy. They had a duty to prepare a plan for a pandemic. They told the world we had the best plan. But there was no plan, no PPE, our defences were down. And so panic swept in. The first and greatest responsibility for the crisis sits with that cohort, still hiding behind the Boris baiting and giggles over Cummings profanity.
In a sense, in the area of health, Covid came along and called their bluff. Suddenly we found that people in highly paid top jobs had simply not been doing what they were paid to do. In fact, were probably not capable of doing those jobs.
How many more people are taking the money, but no crisis has come along (yet at least) and no inquiry, to show them up for what they are.
Brexit was just like that, too.
Good question. Alas we know already. Food security is set to vecome a crisis as we have no national plan; national resilience does not happen when you are 1 in 27 and ruled as part of an Empire. And Energy is another terrible mess No nukes. And the real data and exaggerations on real costs of renewables (unconnected to the Grid doh!) is as terrifying as Covid.
See ‘End times’ by Peter Turchin (or see the Unherd event which hosted him, from earlier in the year); it is symptomatic of overproduction of elites and is very worrying.
We have a productivity problem because we have a bloated poor quality arts education system onto which is tacked a pure science system onto which is attached a an engineering and applied science system.
Wealth generation comes from engineering and applied science. Pure science may produce Nobel Prizes but not wealth. Japan has won few Nobel Prizes.