June 28, 2024 - 5:15pm

Purges of Government departments were the only way to get anything done in the dysfunction of Whitehall and “massively improved morale”, Dominic Cummings claimed today. Speaking at a Civic Future conference at Royal Holloway University, Boris Johnson’s former top adviser criticised the inefficiency at the heart of Westminster, insisting that many Conservative MPs are “fundamentally not interested in power” and long-term projects but instead are “completely absorbed in 24-hour news”.

Cummings has previously been an outspoken critic of the mechanisms of the state and general culture of mediocrity that he believes stifle progress. From the slow progress on major transport projects such as the ill-fated HS2 axed by Rishi Sunak, to the decline in quality of MPs, Cummings has been at the vanguard of calling for Government reform in all areas.

In a discussion with Labour peer Lord Adonis chaired by former head of Number 10’s Policy Unit Munira Mirza, the former Leave architect spoke of how to increase the efficiency of a Government department. “When we arrived, the department [for Education] was completely dysfunctional, things blowing up almost daily,” he said. “The most important things we did were: replac[ing] the permanent secretary, replac[ing]the top five people and replac[ing] roughly 15 of the top 20 people.”

When asked how he managed to achieve this purge given that firing civil servants is notoriously tricky, the former head of Vote Leave said: “It was a very difficult process. Replacing the perm sec was a nightmare. So he resisted and resisted, as we expected. Once you replaced the perm sec it became easier to move some of the other people. But it was difficult. It required quite a lot of skullduggery and not everything was done according to the Ministerial Code, for sure. But it was necessary for actually getting anything done.”

Lord Adonis jokingly added that as secretary of state he never had any such “Stalinist powers”. The two have previously disagreed on Brexit, while in 2019 Adonis described Cummings’s “interminable blogs on Bismarck, eugenics and American fighter pilots” as “actually dangerous”.

Today’s conversation primarily focused on how to improve Britain’s state capacity amid a national feeling of creaking infrastructure and stagnant economic growth. Cummings warned that the system is designed to prioritise the interests of lawyers and consultants over project delivery, resulting in delays and cost overruns. In his view, governments before the internet or modern technology were far more efficient.

Cummings concluded that MPs have the wrong priorities and lack the will to make things better. “Tory MPs have no interest in government. If the MPs fundamentally don’t care about the process of government, a lot of the questions about what is the right policy are not really relevant. No one will grip these questions while the political class remains the joke that it is.”


Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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