How the Deepstate Fails Britain | Dominic Cummings: Start Ups and State Failure

[Music] Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this Faros conversation with Dominic Cummings. I'm grateful to our friends at the college for hosting us, to Dominic for traveling up from Oxford, and to all of you for coming tonight. My name is Patrick Nash, and I'm the founding director of the Faros Foundation, uh, which is based here in Oxford. Faros was founded on the premise—excuse me—Faros was founded on the premise that Western Society will never escape the culture wars if we cannot produce serious culture at scale. It's all very well to talk about free speech and inquiry in the abstract, but freedoms and principles mean little if they're not embodied in institutions with the will and appetite to act on them. Our ethos, then, is to move fast and build things accordingly. Faros has begun funding, to American standards, the very best research projects at post-doctoral level across the Arts, Humanities, and social sciences, uh, which would not otherwise receive funding. And we're building a world-class program of public education to bring lectures, courses, and conversations from Oxford to anyone anywhere with a love of ideas and the fortitude to have their own assumptions challenged by the world's best minds.

Our speaker tonight needs a little by way of introduction. He was born and raised in County Durham, read for a first-class degree here in Oxford in ancient and modern history, uh, he worked in Russia for several years before becoming the most distinguished political campaigner in modern British history. From 1999 to 2002, he was campaign director for Business for Sterling, which kept the UK out of the euro. In 2004, he ran the successful campaign against the creation of the Northeast Regional Assembly. In 2016, he led Vote Leave to victory against the Remain campaign. And in 2019, he masterminded the Conservatives' landslide victory in the general election. And he has extensive experience across government. Uh, in between, he writes a famous blog on anything from institutional failure to Bismarck and run Sew Limited. So tonight's event will turn to a Q&A, but to get the conversation started, uh, please welcome Dominic Cummings.

So thanks very much for coming, everyone. Uh, I think it's more useful to do Q&A than for me to talk for very long, but I'll just say a few words, um, and then happy to answer questions about anything, um, time in government or, um, referendum or, um, anything that anybody's interested in. Um, let's give a sort of picture of what I think the big picture of the of this current situation is; why politics seems to be so crazy. It seems to me that we're going through a process very similar to what happened, um, in the mid-19th century. If you look at the correspondence of people like Metternich, um, in the 1840s, you see these constant themes of this old generation that had gone through the Napoleonic Wars, who had seen the bloodshed and chaos of that 20-year period up close. That generation was starting to die out in the 1840s, and as they died out, they were writing to each other, and in their letters you can see them talking about: there are all these dangerous new ideas spreading, ideas of socialism; the universities seem to be increasingly crazy; there are all of these new technologies spreading. Of course, you have this period—you have the railways and you also have the the telegram, um, Telegraph, um—and a feeling that the old ideas, the old international security order, old conservatism, uh, old regime, all of these things, old religion—that all of these things were basically kind of feeling that they're crumbling. Then you suddenly have the big shock in 1848, and then you have a wave of regimes toppling, being recreated, um, new countries being formed, obviously with Germany and Italy, uh, characters like Bismarck coming through and essentially saying the old conservatism pre-1848 is dead, in his famous words, that they had thrown the Earth on its own coffin, and that a new kind of conservatism had to be created. And by the time you get to the 1870s, you've got essentially a completely new world, new international security system, um, and you have Dostoevsky's novels coming out about the kind of spiritual crisis of the West.

I think it now seems very similar to this, to to to to to that episode—that the generation that went through World War II has died out, um, and all the elites now are kind of completely baffled as to what as to what's going on. They all feel like there's these crazy new ideas spreading, the universities are insane, there's all these new technologies, um, the old international security order from built after 1945 with NATO and the EU and the UN and all these things is clearly, um, lacked, um, and I think that we're going to have a similar—we're kind of like what we we we are experiencing what happens repeatedly in history with these cycles where you get like X decades of like relative peace and stability, and then the old systems, um, kind of, uh, uh, you have this sort of, um, elite blindness as to what's changing, slow rot of the institutions, then sudden crisis, and then fast collapse, and then regime change happens. So you just see this pattern over and over again, and I think that that's what's what what's happening now.

Um, if you look at the kind of if you look at this the the sort of rot of Westminster, you see, um, a few different things. You see kind of pathological bureaucracy that's grown like one of these sort of algal, algal, algal floods, you know, the blooms that sort of like take over a whole ecosystem, and these bureaucracies have grown, um, in a way now that are kind of like not in anyone's control; the system is running the people; the people aren't running the system. Um, constitutionally now, the only person who's actually able to do a lot of things in these broken systems is actually the PM; he's the only one with the constitutional legal authority to do things. So you have this like one person at the top who is the only person that can actually, um, take decisions as a live player to say we're going to do something different. Um, that's one of the reasons why Covid was so crazy and why there are so many very odd stories involving me in Spring 2020, um, because so many, um, so many completely crazy situations couldn't be resolved other than in the PM's office. So to give one obvious example, in March 2020, I was suddenly, uh, actually on the day, the day itself of, um, that uh, the PM tested positive for Covid, um, that morning I was pulled into a meeting at Number 10 where we were told that, um, all the PPE, the NHS was on boats was going to be put on boats and shipped over, and that meant that it wouldn't arrive until probably July. But of course, if you looked at the graphs, the big crisis for the NHS was going to happen over the next three or four weeks. So I said, "Well, why is it not arrive until July?" "Well, it's being shipped." "Why is it being shipped?" "Well, that's because what all the rules are." So only the PM's—so I said, "Obviously, well, call the airlines, tell them that we're taking—" because at that point, obviously all the planes were grounded—"call the airlines, tell them we're taking all their planes, fly the planes to China, load up all our stuff, fly all our stuff back down." And the PM's private principal private secretary had to put that in writing to tell the system that the Prime Minister was authorizing overriding a whole bunch of different things: EU procurement rules, treasury spending rules, all these different things. But it gives an indication of the kind of complete institutional rot. Now imagine that those kind of decisions and those kind of problems multiplied by thousands every day all through the system, but people just felt like they had to do the standard thing because they would escalate it and their boss couldn't do anything and their boss couldn't do anything and their boss couldn't do anything, then the perm sec would say, "Well, we can't do anything either."

Um, so you have these pathological bureaucracies that basically no one is in charge of, um, and the MPs are terrified of of fighting with. You have incredibly strong conformism; you have incredibly strong, um, mimetic kind of mimetic behavior through all of these, um, through through through all of these institutions, um, and it renders, I think, if and you also have, of course, this the vast talent talent collapse over decades. So you've got a so a social phenomenon whereby, um, if you look back—I've been recently looking at and blogging about the 1790s, 1800s with Pitt and everything—it's it's it's genuinely amazing because you can see in Whitehall of like 1795 what Whitehall of 1795 was more like SpaceX today than Whitehall of 2024 is like SpaceX today. Whitehall then was a was a thing that could actually move fast; it had very close relations with business; it actually took things like procurement and contracting incredibly seriously; there were huge parliamentary inquiries about it; and they could build things, and building state capacity at speed was central to what was happening in that 20-year period as they were dealing with the French Revolution and Napoleon everything. Incredibly striking contrast. But also, if you look at the people, what's happened—and this is not just a British thing, obviously—is that over decades elite talent has stopped going into public service, government departments, the political parties, and the old media. So all of these things together—parties, bureaucracies, media—they're all failing at the same time, and they're all failing partly because elite talent has all gone off to do to do other things, and then you've got a lot of beta, gamma, delta people rattling around in these things, um, uh, that are broken, and obviously they can't fix them, so they become pathological. The reason why I use the word pathological is because the more they act to try and do something, they basically drive themselves every time deeper and deeper into into crisis. But you can see that most obviously, um, in it possibly with procurement in the over the last five years, right? You have this, um, before 2020, I write blog after blog, say during the referendum the EU procurement system is a complete disaster; when we have the next crisis, it will kill thousands of people, blah, blah, blah. 2020, where it happens, procurement system does kill thousands of people. Westminster spends all of 2021 complaining that we, me and others, went too fast and that actually what's needed is to restore the old system and strengthen the old system—complete complete insanity. What do they do with with, um, on vaccines? They actually close down all the things that could move quickly on vaccines; they instead of publishing all the information, they go back to secrecy, thus, um, uh, massively undermining confidence in vaccines. America's done the same thing. So you have this constant pattern, and then they hit Ukraine, and you again you have this like this weird sort of disjunction. You have the entire political leadership herds behind a completely stupid policy, but their stated policy is that they go to actually help Ukraine produce all this stuff and give it to Ukraine so that Ukraine can fight, but their own bureaucracies are so completely broken that they can't actually do this. So how does this—how does it net out? It nets out at completely deluded rhetoric about we're going to do ABC, but in reality, the Ministry of Defence is even more broken and even more pathological and even more destructive than it was four years ago. The revealed preference is that the system actually completely prefers to maintain a pathological and disastrous MOD system that extends also right into highly classified nuclear enterprise, which is an over 50-billion-pound complete enough to a [ __ ] show all the way through the entire infrastructure for the nuclear weapons program, some of the details of which have, um, have leaked out over the last last few years.

Um, so I think, uh, that's how I sort of summarize, um, summarize the big picture, um, I think I'll probably stop there, and then we can just do Q&A.

Sure. Uh, so so just to kick us off, how much do you think something like PPE is to blame for the formation or the malformation of elites? So you did ancient history in Classics at Oxford under Robin Lane Fox. Do you think that's a much better—if if you were to start in Oxford retraining elites, what would you what would you have them study?

Yeah, I think PPE—we all—so I know some people who've done PPE, um, uh, who, uh, particularly did the economics bit of it, um, you've come out like very good economists, but I think the idea that PPE is a degree is good training for actual political leadership or to be the perm sec of a department or something is just completely completely laughable. And it encourages the kind of David Cameron approach to government, which is just like: PM is super-bluffer, super-pundit, right? It's sort of, "Oh, yes, um, the next week is such and such," and read a few books, you know, bluff your way through onto the next thing. Um, it doesn't, uh, it doesn't teach intellectually the sort of things that you need to know, I think, if you're going to be in one of those top jobs, and it also is doesn't give you any of the other kind of training, uh, and exposure to certain kinds of, um, environments. So if you look at people like David Cameron, George Osborne, K D—you just look at the entire cabinet now, in the entire Shadow Cabinet, um, there's probably not one single person anywhere in there who's ever been part of an actual high-performance entity ever. So they these people just have no kind of comparisons. If you if you talk to people like, um, Borne or or or Oliver Letwin or that whole kind of old Conservative establishment crowd about various things going wrong inside Whitehall, they just look sort of completely astonished, as if, "What do you want about? I mean, that's just sort of what the system is." They have no—the idea that it could be something radically different just doesn't feature, hasn't featured in elite conversation, um, in either party, uh, and that's, you know, that's probably because of this this talent thing—talent's gone elsewhere—and then these things become very very self-, very very self-reinforcing.

You can look at Covid—in the Covid crisis, we brought in lots of very very, uh, able people, volunteered to come and help. Uh, we had former commanding officer of the SAS came into Number 10 to actually get a grip of testing because Hancock and and DHSC had screwed up so badly. But like a sort of immune system, the system pushed out those people. So if you look at the kind if you look at the people, say if you take the 15 people who saved the most people and were most right about Covid in the first half of 2020, not one of those people, uh, is still like anywhere near the center of power. Um, almost all of them are not even involved with Whitehall anymore; a lot of them, they were either encouraged to leave, pushed out, briefed against, trashed in the media, etc., etc. If you look at the top 10, 15 people who did the most harm, who were most disastrously wrong, uh, with I think without exception, they got they've been given honors, peerages, knighthoods, all kinds of gongs and awards and promotions, um, in the system, and, um, no. Look at the two most obvious successes that we had in 2020: one was getting the vaccine task force going and actually thinking about how to do vaccines much faster than before, and the other was the, um, sewage monitoring—sewage monitoring, uh, was such an obviously good idea that all around the world it was copied, right? And then what was the reaction of Whitehall? Well, they closed it down in 2021 to save some trivial amount of money, because it cost almost nothing, they closed it down. Then they realized, then enough scientists said to them, "What are you doing? This is insane." So they said, "Oh, we we should sort of restart it," but they went to the company, an AI company who friends with me, who actually built the original system, and they said, "We want you to bid to rebuild the thing we just stupidly closed down." But you know what they said to them? They said, "The team that built the first thing, so well, which is now copied all around the world, are not allowed to bid to rebuild it because that would be unfair. Unfair on who? Unfair on DOSE and all of the kind of parasitic management consultancy companies that normally Whitehall goes to to—to bid, right?" So the people who actually knew how to build it and build it fast and build it cheaply specifically prevented from doing it again. And so these things just show how the system really works, how it's actually deeply pathological, but also how everyone inside the system is basically happy with this, right? This is—it's not accidental that it keeps that these sort of things keep happening; their their revealed preference repeatedly is they would much much rather have these complete disasters, and the system itself is locked in at every every at every part of supporting it. More interesting though is I think it's not just a British, right? This is something deep in Western institutions generally because the same crazy stuff happened with Operation Warp Speed in America; the system there closed it down. Look at Fauci, look at the extraordinary level of lies and cover-ups involved from the Fauci network there and across Western Europe; you have this, you have a similar sort of thing; everything gets from the Covid shit show has been basically memory-holed, and no political party pretty much anywhere thought that it was at all advantageous for them to say, "We've been governed by institutions that have completely failed; we actually need to have transparency on the reasons why; publish all the information; publish all the emails; get get this all out into the open and actually change these institutions." Basically hasn't happened anywhere. So I think, um, I think it's important also that we realize that that this is not just a British thing; this is a general problem with the West.

Okay, we'll take the first question, got the back, and then we'll come come to come to, uh—

Thank you very much. Um, I was actually, uh, a Spad just, um, before and a little bit during and then after your time in government as well, and I can—excuse me—completely, uh, corroborate all the horrors that you discuss. Uh, one horrifying thing comes to mind where during Omicron the Department of Education tried to send back loads of air purifiers for schools because they had European plugs on, rather than just going and buying adapters. So you know these things, as you say, are manifest. Um, you also talk about how—oh, it's it's horrifying—and you—the fact that you've got four or five Spads and a few ministers and now 8,500, I think, civil servants in that one department alone. Um, you also talk though about how certain bits of the administrative State, uh, the sort of administrative state or deep state or whatever you want to call it, actually do defend against some of the madder things that politicians do, and so there's that kind of fine balance between the two, and you—people like the young people are in, say, the Prime Minister's private office who do a lot of the good work to stop even worse things happening at the behest of politicians. So what is the optimal outcome if you get—with a magic wand—of what the Civil Service looks like? What's the ratio of political appointees? Do they have any executive power? What should a good Civil Service look like in the 21st century?

Yeah, I mean, I had many conversations with very good officials, particularly in the private office, who would come to me and say, "Dominic, um, you're Secretary of State for blah blah wants to do X, and this is obviously will be a disaster. Like, how basically how do we scupper them?" So, so, um, the kind of the Humphrey Appleby type machinations are not all for the bad; sometimes they are by good officials trying to stop appalling ministers like Hancock doing crazy things. I mean, for example, there was a brilliant official called Hannah who was the kind of coordinating official with the Home Office and MI5 and whatnot, and she came to me in in March 2020 and said that the Secretary of State for Justice, Buckland, wants to basically empty the prisons. So there was an actual serious proposal in the in the J for Buckland—Buckland went along with—just to like literally empty the prisons and let all these people out—completely insane, completely insane.

I think the fundamental thing is going back to the 1790s analogy; I think the the the core thing that went wrong is, um, Northcote-Trevelyan and the permanent civil service that is a cancer that metastasized across the entire system, and it can't be fixed; it has to be ripped out. A source I came across recently—a fascinating quote from, um, from a letter that Palmerston wrote to Queen Victoria in 1830—is 183, early 1830s anyway—in which he basically says the Europeans are are revolving towards a system where they have these permanent officials, uh, and a permanent bureaucracy that is not and never could be the way that the British system works; it's just absolutely doomed. And of course, I mean, I think he—by—so I basically think the way that the system worked during the during Napoleonic Wars was 100 times better than the system we've got now. We went through a historic disaster with Northcote-Trevelyan, um, uh, and the the Northcote-Trevelyan system of permanent appointees essentially created this cancer at the heart of the system, um, uh, and if you rip that out, then you go back to a situation where the ministers are actually responsible, right? Because if you look now, everything is fake. The civil service has fake meritocracy where it where, um, it says that we're a Rolls-Royce machine and we're all about great talent, blah, blah, blah, but the reality is it basically excludes close to 100% of the world's best talent. So you have fake meritocracy, and you also have fake responsibility because you have these ministers go into Parliament and yabber on about, "I'm responsible for this, and I'm my department," they say, because they love saying that, "and the department I run," blah, blah, blah, but it's all complete nonsense; the ministers don't don't like really run almost almost nothing. I mean, I'm often asked now by by academics like you guys questions about, um, "What did the Foreign Secretary think or what did the such and such secretary think during 2019 on Brexit," for example, and the actual honest answer is I don't really remember because it just wasn't relevant. The the person in the—so if you think of, um, two roles, right, Foreign Secretary in Great Britain and the private secretary in the PM's office responsible for foreign affairs—an official whose name has never been in the newspapers—that person was like 10 times more powerful and important than the Secretary of State was, and I think this is something which people just don't really realize, and and it's part of like how the whole system has just has become fake. So you have fake meritocracy, fake responsibility, and then fake Cabinet Government. So they all walk up Downing Street, the cameras are there; they pose; they smile; haha, "I'm going into the most powerful meeting, aren't I, great," but it's all nonsense; the Cabinet is just a kind of stage theater, and actually officials in the Cabinet Office have already decided it all.

Um, when you when you sit in Whitehall now, right, in meetings, they are literally scripted. So when the Prime Minister has a meeting with ministers, what happens is that before the Prime Minister has that meeting, officials go into the Prime Minister's study, and they give them a folder, and in the folder at the front is a thing called Chairman's Notes, and that's the script, and that's what the Prime Minister reads out, and the conclusions of the meeting in the Chairman's Notes are drafted before the meeting happens, right? So the the Prime Minister says, "Hello, Secretary of State blah," then all these officials sit around the sides on chairs around the around the edge of the room, and then the MP, the Secretary of State, all look down at their folders because they've all got their scripts, right? And it's—this is why I use the NPC meme, right?—because then the Prime Minister reads out, "Well, we're here to discuss blah, blah, blah," and then he goes around the room, and then the Secretary of State for Justice or the Foreign Secretary reads out his bullet points, and then he reads out their points. If anyone goes off-script, you see the official sort of go and I look over at the other official side room, kind of—that means we'll come back to that after the meeting and make sure that that doesn't happen. And then at the end, "Was fascinating, great discussion, thank you so much for your wonderful insightful original contributions," and then he reads out the conclusion that are all drafted in advance, and it sounds like a parody, but it is literally how the British State functions, um, and and the MPs are happy with that.

Right, well, how does the psychology of it work? The officials are happy because they have almost all the real power. The cabinet secretary is now 100 times more powerful than any cabinet minister apart from the PM, and the MPs are happy because this whole system pretends that they're in charge. So both sides are basically happy with the with the with the fake version of the government.

And what happens in the case of P? No one is—if something really cast goes wrong, what what procedure or anything kicks in? Nothing. I mean, you see for yourself, when's the last time that anything seriously bad happened to any senior person? I mean, you have disaster after disaster after disaster in the MOD; everyone just gets gets knighthoods and and awards, and then they and then they go on to BAE Systems where they get a fat check again. It's like basically corrupt, but no one would have—um, we have a system now where a lot of these officials sign contracts with BAE and then hop out of the MOD and go to BAE where they collect um cash, and the and the MPs just don't—it's a non-subject.

Supposedly, in the more corrupt days 200 years ago, which is what we're all told, there would actually be—there were actual investigations. All through the Napoleonic Wars, there were constant investigations and scandals and people fired, disgraced, jailed. Never happens now. So the only way—but this is what this is the problem with system failures, right? System failures mean you can't fix it in any in any simple way because the entire system is broken. So you've got to you've got to get rid of North Trevillian, but what kind—but like completely laughable, the idea of one of the current two political parties trying to do that, right? Because look at the caliber of the MPs, and you have to change the nature of the MPs and the and the ministers.

Um, so if you actually want serious government, two fundamental things have to happen: the quality of the MPs has to go back to being elite talent, um, and the North Trevillian system has to be thrown in the ash ash kind of history, and we and and and get rid of the fake meritocracy and fake accountability and return to actual meritocracy and actual accountability.

And what does does that process look like? Doge apartment kinding in the US? Well, that actually—like in practice that process—um, well, I think the do the Doge remains sort of unformed at the moment. Who knows how it's going to actually come in come into effect? Um, I mean, I hope it's the radical version where Elon actually goes in and just fires 90 95% of U of officials in various ways. They pass legislation to do that; they have some—they hire great lawyers to um deal with inevitable judicial reviews and and and everything else, and then they build new startup things to to to actually get certain things done. And I think—I mean, there's no doubt that a lot of people in Silicon Valley want to do something like that, right? And if you look at the the sort of models for reform, what the standard model is, well, this the Pentagon or something is completely broken, so you have to put in new people and then reform it. But history shows that this is practically undoable, partly because the permanent state simply has to delay everything um because they're there forever, and the political people aren't there for long. So what happens to every reform event is people don't even need to fight it; they just delay it, and if you can delay anything for two years, then it basically is dead. And some free and Co can delay almost anything they want to for two years.

Um, so I Elon and Co have a lot of the same sort of system problems that that we've got here. Fundamentally, what it—here it's easy to do in certain ways than it is in America, as we showed in 2020, partly because the British constitution, being such an odd thing, the Prime Minister does actually have a lot of power. Um, a huge part of the system now though goes to trying to train the PM into not realizing what power they've actually got. So I'll give you an example again of like how the system actually works. Every Friday in the PM's red box, he gets a stack of documents, and these documents are—er appointments, and what the what the officials do is they put a whole bunch of things like church appointments on the top, so these are things where—possibly like the last per PM who actually did this was say Gladstone, right? Since then it's all just—it's just kind of ceremonial. The PM signs them off on behalf of the queen, but it's fundamentally ceremonial appointment. So they put all these things first, so the PM's in the habit of just going tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, right? And then underneath that is, oh, we're moving the director general in the treasury who's responsible for coordination with MI6 and GCHQ uh and MI5; we're moving them to put them in charge of special educational needs or um dairy farming in Defra. And the PM goes tick tick tick tick tick.

In 2020, I um I put a stop to some of this and started to get the PM to write on these forms, "no appointment, not happening." Complete chaos inside the system; cabinet secretary goes crazy with the principal private secretary: "What the hell are you doing? Like you've lost control of the PM. What the hell's—" He's he's actually not signing off appointments. "What hell?" PPS comes to me and says, "What's going on with the PM? He's rejected this DG move." Yeah, well, this—I mean, it's obviously crazy. This official's great; they're in this job; we're doing all these things—why the—we move him off to to Defra? You can't do that. Just complete—go complet—the P prime minister doesn't get involved with appointments like that. "What what exactly are you saying? Are you saying that um the system's fake and he's just like writing all these things on, but actually you're you're seeking approval, but approval in name only? Is this like the Bishop of Leicester?" Well, no, no, no, Dominic, I'm not saying it's like the Bishop of Leicester, but come on, I mean, you can't have Boris signing off, you know, whether this DG. So again, you see, so the system is evolved to have all these kind of f things to kind of train the PM into thinking that he has an alternative. B himself was completely shocked when I said to him, "Well, you can just say no." "Can I? I mean, what will happen?" Well, I mean, the cab secretary, PPS will go crazy, but that—but like your prime minister, you can. So there are ways in which—but that problem itself shows how hard it is, right? Because literally only the PM can stop a lot of these things. The chancellor has nothing to do with the fact that one of his crucial director generals in charge of some of the most serious things in the whole state system is suddenly going to get moved to Defra and put in charge of cows. Chancellor is not consulted; chancellor has no say. Chancellor can winge to the perm of the of the treasury, but perm could just smile and say, "Um, opinion noted, thanks thanks very much, chor." That's it. So you have this thing where basically now there's only one person that can that can do it, and therefore it's impossible to do system-level changes when it's like that. So you have to have basically you have to have a PM that says, "Right, I'm breaking the whole system; I'm breaking North Trevillian." That means a mix of primary legislation; it means using reserve powers that the Prime Minister exercises on behalf of the crown, etc., etc., a whole bunch of things at the same time. But that goes back to the core problem, which is the MP the MPs are happy as NPCs, and if you've got a political system where the MPs are happy being NPCs and they don't want to have actual responsibility, then it's a mood question saying, "How do you fix it?"

From what you're saying, Dom, it sounds like the plan was obviously to get a startup party, right? Get new MPs and a government that's and a PM that's serious about driving systems change. I'm assuming that's that we can do that, and we we can spin that up in in time for the next election. Where would you even start with kind of a a problem as as serious as that within 5 years? You just go for a full—obviously a mix of primary legislation like you said—do you go for like a full reboot of the system and kind of start afresh, or do you do something more gradualistic? How do you I suppose work the art of the possible, right, um to to achieve the outcome you want to without stalling the engine?

I think the second the second bit first. You have to do you have to go fast and hard. The only way to do a a lot of these things is for a prime minister to say that they're going to do it, to put it in their manifesto, so there is a democratic mandate for it to do um what we did in the Department for Education 2010. But in 2010, before we went into the department, we got some lawyers secretly to actually work out legislation ourselves, so that as soon as we arrived in the department, we could say, "We're passing this legislation through. Not everyone have a think for two years and have consultations and round tables, blah blah blah." So you have to figure all all of this out in advance; you have to win the election, and then on day one, you call in cab secretary and you say, "A, you're fired; B, here is your here is your replacement; C, here is the primary legislation which is um which is starting, and this is going to Parliament today. In the meantime, I'm making the following changes: so and so is fired; so and so fired; so and so fired; so and so fired." You have a hit list; you sleep out a whole bunch of people; you bring in a new bunch of people. As I said before, because the British constitution, there's lots of sorts of things like this that you can do in ways that Trump, for example, can't easily do legally because he's controlled by Congress and various other laws in in certain ways. Um, so that's that's how you do it; it needs it needs a mix of primary legislation and using reserve powers that that the Prime Minister has um and all the kind of funny little luny and gaps in the system that the that exist.

Thanks. Um, this is startup related, so are you okay to talk about that, or do you want to focus on politics for now? Okay, uh, great. Um, I'm CEO of a company called Homeow, which incubated 1.3 billion worth of companies uh in Oxford, over the Homeow—I think—yeah, yeah, you did—yeah, yeah, you did a while ago—yeah. Um, we've come on a little bit. Uh, yeah, sorry, I think I've broken your microphone. Um, anyway, uh, we think part of the reason we've done really well is we've aggregated extremely talented people and put them in a very very intense atmosphere for an extended period of time. Time, but also we've built massive companies in areas that have aversive mtic reasons for building in them. So in the examples of crypto, it's because it's not the most buzzy thing; in the example of cryptography and cyber security, it's because it's boring and very very hard. Uh, another area we're particularly excited about, and we'd like to kind of aggregate talent around, especially young talent, uh, is defense tech and kind of building like—what's the thing that that breaks BAE? Like what's the UK—what's the UK paler? Um, I can't really think of anyone I'd rather take advice from on like kind of getting that off the ground, given your your interest in the topic and obviously your experience in in government. So I guess what would you do?

Goodness, I think we should probably talk about that slightly off um off off camera. Um, I think that is one of the most important areas. The the combination of the terrible MOD and BAE is obviously a disaster. Um, one of the things that's just that's most sort of tells the story of the nightmare of the old system is the combination—is what's happening on drones now, right? So 2020—so 2020, we began a uh a extremely secret process. This secret process involved key senior officials at the MOD, a handful of people from the cabinet office and the finance director of of the treasury, uh and a few outside experts. And what we did was we kind of—we just kind of created a tunnel through all of the existing um system, including the spending review system, the treasury's normal system, and we had a process in the cabinet room whereby we went through all the major MOD programs and inside—as in the MOD—this process was partly inspired by Mr. Siski sitting here in the front row. What we did was we went through all the major programs with the the insiders, and here was the basic deal: the deal was, "You guys admit what's completely broken and knackered and should be closed down; we will get the treasury to fill the MOD black holes, of which they're a legion. There's the huge conventional black hole; there's also the super secret super disastrous nuclear black hole. We will get the treasury to kind of do a reboot of the budget. The MOD has not had honest numbers in living memory; in Whitehall, all published budgets are fake—that's all lies. So you admit to all the failures that will close; we will get you new money. The new money must not go into the failures; the new money must go into the new things." Some of the new things obviously are AI drones. Ben Wallace, of course, did not want any of that; he Ben Wallace was not involved with this process, partly because Ben Wallace leaked everything. Um, so we went through this whole process, and we identified a whole bunch of things. At the end of this process, in October 2020, we had what the cabinet secretary and the perm sec of the MOD and the finance director of the treasury agreed was the first ever um honest numbers for MOD budgets in at least 20 years. The day after I left Number 10, all of these documents were shredded. And if you then look at the announcements that were made in quarter 1 2021, what they did was they took all the money for the new things like drones, and they put it—obviously you know what's coming, right?—they put it into all the completely broken things, lots of which are still being funded now; in fact, almost all the big ones are still being funded now. So that's how the system works now. Everyone with eyes can see that drones are changing warfare in Ukraine. It's all over YouTube. 2020, this was much more controversial when me and others are pushing it inside the MOD, but now a lot of the intellectual arguments have have obviously changed enormously because it's just a practical reality. But if you talk to people—the MOD obviously is sending people over to watch what's happening in Ukraine, and obviously the people who come back from Ukraine say to the senior MOD people, "Yeah, all of these things we're putting money into are completely knackered; they all just get blown up by super cheap drones." So all these programs that we're investing in, which we publicly are stating is the future of the MOD, are actually completely um useless waste of time and money. And what these people are told, of course, is, "Shut your mouth if you want to keep your career, and you must not tell senior officials this, and you must at all costs not tell any MPs this." So you have again this kind of very odd thing, right? Anyone in this room can go on the internet and see what's actually happening in Ukraine; you can read a lot of interesting things about what's actually happening, but the official story inside the MOD is, "We need more bigger tanks, and we need more money out of the treasury to put into all the things that we actually know ourselves don't work." So in this envir—and my prediction is you then put on top of that the nuclear disaster, which then cannibalizes the conventional budgets in secret from the kind of back end. So a lot of the money nominally going into these broken things isn't even going into the broken things; it's actually going into the broken nuclear enterprise to prop up the budgets for that, which are complete massive scandal. What's happened successively is that each prime minister is given, on yellow paper, what's called strap three and above, which means the most classified documents; they're given the actual budgets for the nuclear project, and they blink and they gasp and they say, "This can't possibly be true; this this this can't be real." And they're told, "I'm afraid, prime minister, it is real." And then they're given a choice. I gave this choice to Boris 2020, and of course Boris said, "Holy [ __ ] this is unbelievable, but why am I going to be the one like at the end of the past past parcel? Theresa May just classified it and punted it to me, and Dave classified it and punted it to me, and Gordon Brown did the same, and bl—why am I going to be the idiot that stands up and says all of our official budgets are completely fake and all the OBR numbers are fake, and by the way, we've now got really really really difficult decisions to make because we've got tens and tens of billions of money to find if we're going to have honest budgets?" So Boris said, "I'm going to do the same as everyone else; I'm going to classify it and punt it." My prediction is that K Sta will either has already or shortly will do the same because they're now going through a spending review; he will have the same secret budget numbers on yellow paper, and he'll read it and think, "This is just absolutely unbelievable what's happened," and he will classify it further and punt it again, because the alternative would be publishing it all and having the most almighty uh actual public scandal and all the MPs being faced with having to have actual public hearings and explain how on Earth this could have happened for 25 years. So that's the context for your question. Um, I think what we do about that is probably best discussed off off camera, but I do think that there is obviously—there's huge scope, and also—it look, the Trump thing is also relevant here, I think, because there is a reasonable chance that what they do now in Washington is um sort of similar to what happened with JOCK and the creation of classified Special Forces. They didn't try and reform the Army, right? They created JOCK, and I think there's a reasonable chance that what they'll do here is that they don't try and reform the US Air Force in lots of ways; they actually say, "Let's just create a new drone force, and let's actually hire people from the Valley and put them in charge of it and build a build a new thing um with new legal authority, new staff, P, new mentality." Um, and the idea that obviously would be, "Well, we're going to build a drone force that actually renders a lot of these old platforms basically irrelevant; we're going to—how do we build a drone that we can build way cheaper and way faster than um our current fifth sixth generation planes are and the Chinese and Russian?" Because all of these cross curves, right, have been on—if you look at—there's a great graph by Dara which shows aircraft since like 1940 is, and you see during World War II this incredibly fast cycle of um of new designs, and then it sort of graphs time for completion against the budget, and basically from the 70s the line is sort of like that, and then the line basically goes like that, which is what we're on now, which is this exponential upwards thing where the F22 and the F35 and whatnot basically like 20 30-year programs uh of trillions, and it's completely unsustainable, right? If you keep going with that graph, the next one is going to be like 50 years, and one plane is going to be a trillion dollars, which even the Mad old system can't do. So somehow you've got to get off this exponential curve, um, and the drone stuff is the obvious way, I think, that that's that could happen with Trump coming in, and a lot of the Silicon Valley people want to go to Washington; that seems like an obvious thing that that they'll do.

Hello. Um, I I wanted to ask the question that you posed on Twitter to, you know, get us all together. Um, what what do you think is the political opportunity today and over the next 5 or 10 years to do something about it—not just to get the mandate but also to organize enough talented people to do, you know, to to disrupt all of this dysfunction?

Um, so some of the things that I've been talking to people about, I think, are going to become public over the next um few weeks and months. Um, so I won't go into um all of that right now, but I think like in big picture terms, Starmer is already in a flat spin from which he will not recover; who has no idea how to do the job; the team in Number 10 is rubbish; system is broken; he will just thrash around failing. Um, the Tories will do the same; the Tories will not recover; the talent inside the Conservative party is appalling; the machine is broken. Also, if you talk to people um uh who are around kind of MP conversations, it's very striking how they say there's basically no appetite to discuss why the whole party was such an appalling disaster 2019 2024. They don't want to face the reasons why. Um, so I don't see—I see very little chance of kind of realistic discussions inside the party, and that's that's to be expected, right? Where you have the kind of talent collapse that's happened. Look back historically, right? After 1997, Tories smashed the—for four years they put William Hague in—complete joker—flashes around for four years, completely delusional party. They listen to the Mail, Telegraph, Sun; they say to everyone, "Oh, the polls and focus groups are all Blair, right? Nonsense; it's not real. Uh, William's doing a great job in PMQs," and then they lose the next election by the same amount. 25 years later, the quality of the people is much much worse than it was then, and it was already dire. So I think as a base case, why would you think that they're going to do a better job in the next four years than they did 1997 to 2001? Seems to me very unlikely. So on the other—so a huge question I think is what Farage does, because Farage actually does have an opportunity to destroy the Tory party if he hires some decent people and turns Reform from uh what it was, which is kind of a virtual party—didn't really exist, right? Nine months ago or something—uh it was a kind of online—it was like a website, but it wasn't it wasn't an actual political party all around the country. If he hires some good people and actually builds grassroots, then you could easily—I'm a situation—the next election where all three parties are basically like sort of around 25%, causing complete carnage in first-past-the-post system. Um, for—is in second place in lots of seats—can't remember the exact number, but like roughly say 70ish or something—is it? Yeah. So um you can EAS situation in which um like they don't have to do—so they have to get any more votes—like they just have to be more efficient at where they get votes. But easy to imagine they get both more actual votes, but also they um target lots of these places where they're in second place, and quite easily you could imagine that the Tories actually don't make any progress, may even go backwards again, and Farage goes up, and then you've got like three parties um and and and it's then at that point it's obvious that that the system is going through a kind of change that hasn't happened since after World War I, and then questions about actually—this the the Conservative party is just the Cons party is the biggest block to like um to a political force which is not mad—not which is not Farage actually governing. Um, that seems like a reasonably likely possibility. I had assumed that Farage wouldn't do that and that he'd kind of go to America, but I think I was wrong about that. I think that I was wrong, and my hunch now is that he actually does build Reform into something uh which is potential extinction for the Conservative party because it's obviously impossible for the Conservative party to go anywhere if um if you've got a party taking like 20 25% of the vote, um most of which would have vote vote for theist. I think that um so—question for people who are not—

In any of those parties, therefore, is like, what can you? What can you do? Um, the the West, the think tanky world, is basically um completely dead/a block to progress. Um, so think tanks and whatnot like that are not not an answer. I think that fundamentally what's needed is you need to build the best political campaigning machine in the country. You need to run campaigns and build mass support through various different targeted efforts on particular issues. So you've got a bulling campaign machine, you've got mass support that you build; you could very easily, I think, get more support than both parties put together, and then you start to take over some of the local um, start to take over local government. You take over London. 2028, uh, St's been sorry, not starm, um, what's his face, Sadiq has been there eight, uh, 10, 12 years. C will be a massive issue; he only beat a joke candidate by 10 points. If you have a great campaign in London, uh, and a decent candidate, I think you'd, um, independent candidate, I think you take over London.

So you can imagine a situation where you have a great campaign machine, mass support, you start taking over various mayoral places and whatnot around the country and demonstrate that you can do government differently: fire a bunch of people, cut local taxes, improve services at the same time, demonstrate that if you actually know what you're doing in good management and whatnot, you can actually do these things. Um, if you build that kind of system, and then the next election is, uh, well, a potentially like, who knows what's possible in 2029 election, but I think going into that with a new party is probably not the best idea. But I think if you build this thing that does all of these things in parallel, and then you get a situation where um, reform theories are basically kind of like getting roughly the same number of votes and kind of neutralizing each other in first past the post, then um, there's going to be a huge there's going to be a very, very strong push from a lot of people to say, okay, the Conservative Party should basically be closed down, and um, uh, and something new has to take over this whole space.

Um, you could also imagine that the whole party basically imploding, right, because a bunch of the kind of Damien Green figures would say, I will I I will never basically, we're happy with K sta, like we're much more happier with K sta than we are with either Farage or kind of Vote Leave type government. And then a bunch of the um, e people say, well, we should merge with Farage. So you could imagine the Tory party actually kind of cracking up in that environment, and with kind of two very strong forces pulling them in opposite directions. Can I ask a follow-up? And this you ask a follow-up later because there's so many other people. Yes, ly.

Going back to what you said about the government meetings, uh, run as through scripts, what what is their view of what the purpose of those meetings are, and why is it unthinkable to just send the scripts as emails or something? You know, what what's the purpose of actually meeting in person? Well, the the whole psychology of the system is set up to make it to to that everyone pretends that the meeting is real and the ministers are deciding. So at the end of the meeting, obviously the official conclusion is not the MPC signed off their script, uh, as designed by the officials; it's the Secretary of State made a valuable contribution, and the Prime Minister agreed that, you know, the following decision was made. So the whole psychology is that the M the the meeting is real, and the MPs are happy with that as long as it as long as the the pretend version is that they're in charge; that's fine. Also, remember that's the only thing they know; they don't know anything different. Most of these people, and they're only exposure in government is that that kind of. So for them, like, well, this is I mean, this is what government is. If you say to them, this is all complete madness, then they just look completely completely baffled.

Um, most of them have never seen anything operate in in a different way. And as I said before, most of them have never operated in any kind of actual high-performance entity. They've never been in a meeting room with people like Jeff Bezos actually like handing out documents to read and then having an actual discussion and then figuring things out and then making a decision in the way that great companies do or um, some parts of the deep state do. That's they just have never seen that happen in their lives, so they have nothing to compare it to, so it just seems to them completely normal. It's why outsiders always go in, and then they're just completely stunned. So I wrote a blog about some of this stuff in 2014, and what happens every time someone new, like some business person gets appointed, put in the House of Lords, something they say to me, I read your blog about 2014. I thought before I went in that like it obviously had to be crazy, but now I've been here for a month, it's like you actually completely understated it. I understand why because no one would have believed if you'd written a blog about how this place works. And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, um, when you leave, you won't say that. When you leave, you'll say, I must applaud the extraordinary work of the Civil Service. I couldn't have done anything without them. And they laugh, and they always do that, and not one of them, MP, say the truth ever about their actual experience. Yeah.

Assuming a best-case scenario of a totally reformed government in everything, uh, it seems to me like there's a certain level of cultural erosion that's happening, obviously due to like runaway immigration, things like that, um, so I just sort of wonder if you feel like there is a that it's a reasonable concern that if a government was to very much take seriously, um, you know, like, uh, immigration control and specifically deportation, um, that we could end up dealing with sort of serious kind of civil upheaval that's kind of maybe orders of magnitude worse than what we ended up with in the aftermath of the South po stu. Um, so I think that um, actually getting to grips with legal immigration, illegal immigration, and fake asylum and the ludicrous boats and whatnot, it's only actual con actually conceivable if you do um, what I'm talking about in terms of gripping the Civil Service and changing various primary legislation because the system is set up now in such a way that the system will simply do what I mean, you've had a demonstration of it, right, with Rishi Sunak. So I was it's now been in the media, but I had two secret meetings with Sunak, one was December 22 and one was August 23, and in the first one, December 22, he said that um, I'm going to I'm going to, you know, I'm really going to push on, say I'm going to stop the boats. I said, oh, I said that's interesting. Well, um, so how are you going to campaign on the how you going to do the repeal of the Human Rights Act and get to deal with ECR? Oh, I'm not going to do that. But in 20120, we went through all of this with all the the government lawyers, and we red-teamed it with brilliant lawyers outside the government and whatever one's views on immigration and whatever one's views on the ECR, it's just a legal fact agreed by all intelligent parties inside the system that it's impossible to do a whole set of things that you need to do unless you have primary legislation dealing with the Human Rights Act, ECR, and actually some other International rules. You have to have primary legislation that states explicitly the government is going to do various things notwithstanding ECR and notwithstanding various International treaties. Um, because if you don't do that, the courts say, well, you haven't explicitly stated your desire to do these things notwithstanding these International things, therefore we will infer that your parliament's actual intention is to abide by these things, therefore the government's action is unlawful, right? This gets into a whole way in which judicial review and the Supreme Court was evolved with Brexit and whatnot, the end of the doctrine of implied appeal and all of these kind of complicated constitutional things. Anyway, Sunak then went through this whole process of of of legislation, uh, um, and and um, destroyed himself by passing this pretend legislation, telling everyone that there was a way through. The officials were basically sort of thought the whole thing was ludicrous but went along with it and went along with encouraging his delusions about the ECR, um, and it had the inevitable outcome, right? It it all goes to Supreme Court, the officials all say you you won't win, even if you do win, you won't be able to get any planes off the ground, the whole Rwanda thing is a complete disaster, blah, blah, blah. So the only way of actually doing it is if you can grip the Civil Service and therefore fire Home Office officials and appoint people in the Home Office that will actually grip border control, and you pass primary legislation with a whole set of notwithstanding clauses, including HCHR and including other things. That's like step one; otherwise, you're simply stopped in the in the courts.

Um, now if you have a government that is determined enough to do to to to actually deal with the problem such that they are prepared to do that, then you might also have a government which is prepared to build all the other things that you need to do and to change the police and deal with the courts and everything else which you would actually need to then have proper border control. People stop the boats landing, do what Singapore does, which is in my opinion the correct approach. Lee Kuan Yew said when he had a boat's problem, no boat will land, no person will land, nobody will acquire any legal rights in Singapore, zero, zero. And of course, he enforced that, and as soon as he did that decades ago, sort you don't have a problem because everyone then knows it's completely pointless trying to go to Singapore, right? So everyone goes somewhere else. You could actually grip this problem. So I got some um, some of the punchier parts of the uh, of the military to look at this problem in in 2020, and the conclusion was from an actual operational point of view, stopping the boat is trivially simple. Of course, it is, right, because it's just a few stupid dinghies. All the problems are fundamentally legal and constitutional that mean that the Prime Minister can't deploy the Armed Forces to stop the boats, um, at the moment there is absolutely no appetite inside Whitehall at all for gripping any of these problems. Their basic attitude in Whitehall is and the mean that they want everyone to believe is they wanted they want everyone to believe that Britain that used to have the world's strongest Navy that dealt with the Armada, dealt with Napoleon, dealt with Hitler, this country it's quote impossible unquote to stop the boats. That is the official line from Whitehall; it's just physically and legally impossible to do. Therefore, the only thing you can do is rename everything, obviously. So the official approach is you rename all of the illegal boats as legal, and then the problem with the legal immigration is dealt with. Again, when discussing Whitehall, it seems like it's sort of sort of a parody, and it could be true, but that is actually how the system thinks, and that's what they'll believe, and that's what I think will happen. What you'll see happen in the next couple of years, they'll just rename the whole boats thing, and they'll create legal routes so that all these people could just come over, um, we'll just fly them in and import them all and then put them in hotels. So we should get someone from the back because they're poor people at the back. Yet, who who's that gentleman there? Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much.

Um, I work alongside ARIA, who I believe owe their existence to some extent to you, and uh, I work on deploying some of their AI fellowships, and I just wonder whether that model might be more of the practical approach to addressing some of the issues with Whitehall that you've eloquently outlined. Yeah, I mean, I think um, so go into sort of background of ARIA. I blogged about it extensively, um, the fundamental idea was that um, if you look at the original ARIA before it became DARA, um, it did uh, it did two huge things, obviously; it did the internet and it did personal computing with with um, ARPA funding Xerox Park and whatnot. And the idea was to create something that could operate in the same way, and I read an amazing piece by Alan Kay, one of the original ARPA people, um, an essay which I strongly recommend you guys reading; it's called the power of the the power of the context, I think power of of context, maybe there's a the in there, and there's a very it shocked me when I first read it because there's a sentence in there where he says something like, if you consider the extraordinary things that this project did, right, they're world-changing, and the whole world spends huge amounts of time talking about the internet and personal computing and blah, blah, blah, but how it actually worked, how it was funded, and what the bureaucracy was and what the management was gets essentially zero interest, which is sort of amazing. And I read that and I thought, wow, that is really, really weird. So then I ended up going reading a whole load of books about it and talking to people like Alan Kay to find out how how it actually worked. So the idea was to basically just replicate that concept in the UK, have something that is outside the disastrous procurement rules in particular, that's outside normal Treasury funding rules, that's outside UKRI, that's outside all the DEI madness, that's outside FOI, that's out all the various sort of bits that currently make science funding such an appalling system and make it so hard for young researchers to get money and whatnot. Um, and it sort of comes back a bit to what we talked about before with things like J and drones and and reform versus startups. I do strongly think that um, there are some parts of the system that that like an incoming serious government, you have to grip and actually change; you have to just sort fire people, purge people, will change the thing and rebuild it. Um, you can't just close it down, but there are also other things where the startup model just clearly works much better, and one obvious thing is drones, one obvious thing was ARIA, and I do think there's a lot of other things like that. Um, it's just cleaner, right? It goes back to Warren Buffett's um, some of the more famous lines from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger when they're asked, you know, about about turnarounds, and they say, we don't really do turnarounds because turnarounds just turn out to be really, really hard. It's incredibly hard to buy a company that's broken and then turn around and make it work. Um, and I think there's a huge amount of as often with the Buffett Munger letters and whatnot over the decades, there's incredible wisdom in there, and I think that applies a lot to to to government. So although although you although you can't do it completely with startups, I think that your kind of bias should be towards that for sure; that should be what your starting point is.

Earlier when you were talking about how we fix this mess, um, you referenced needing something new; you also referenced reform. And I was wondering if uh, in your mind they were the same thing or whether you think there's going to be a new political party that um takes the other 25% you didn't mention in your explanation. Well, as I said, I think if very it's very hard to make predictions about this sort of thing. I think that as I said, if Farage hires some good people and tries to build a real party and takes it seriously, then I do think there's a reasonable chance, like probably more likely than not, that the next election, therefore, is like everyone kind of like three parties locked in in the 20s, and and that just means chaos inside the first past the post system. And I suspect that what emerges out of that um will be will be at least one new party and maybe more than one new party. Um, I don't think that like the I don't think that like in 10 years' time, the thing that's fighting the left will be either the old Conservative Party or Reform. I think it'll be something new. Um, but God, I mean, you know, lots of other scenarios are obviously possible, right? It's also say Farage, you know, I don't know, what gets an offer from Fox News to go over there, and he ends up spending his time over there, and Reform just kind of goes downhill. Starmer is in a flat spin, maybe the Tories bounce back in some way, but for what reason? You've still got the fundamental thing that the party is just a joke. So I can't um, well, one thing I'm completely sure about is that the existing Conservative Party with the people it has, the ideas it has, and the machine it has can't be anything other than a failure. Um, they could like seem relatively in a better position than in summer 2024 simply because the government implodes in various ways, but I can't see them being a force that is attractive to elite talent. I can't see them being something that um overcomes their basic core appalling brand problems with voters, particularly young voters. Someone texted me the day that from various polls that um the Tories were in fourth with people under the age of 25 or something, fifth is it? Yeah. So again, I think you see so I do I mean, know what you guys think, but my my impression going around and doing events like this this year has been that and it's been my view's been strengthened by the results in in America that um people between like 15 and 23 or something now have actually had a kind of reaction against the millennial craziness. Um, and I think that's obviously happened in the States. You can see that a lot of young men in particular have been basically so alienated by the kind of Cal AOC Democrats and everything being just just described as toxic masculinity and everything is racist and everything is fascist and blah, blah, blah, when they can see it's fake, right? The Democrat Party tries to pretend that Joe Rogan is part of some kind of like Neo-Nazi movement. Joe Rogan was for was for Bernie Sanders. Like the Democrats have just completely like shot themselves in both feet on this whole thing and try to pretend that people like Rogan and Theovon and whatnot are part of a Nazi movement has not discredited Rogan and Theovon has completely discredited the establishment and has pushed all of these own people into a different ecosystem. So I think the same sort of thing will happen here because why wouldn't it? We're downstream of American culture in so many ways. We followed the madness of San Francisco on the DEI insanity. I think we'll follow to some extent the reaction against the insanity. Um, but I don't think the Conservative Party will be the vehicle for it. Um, and again, you know, if you just if you look at like what are the things that are vibrant in in America that you've just seen over the last few years or even 2024, um, the whole kind of Rogan podcasting network and ecosystem, it's just a a completely different vibe to the old Conservative Party, and I don't think people from the old Conservative Party can have any real understanding of what these things are, who these people are, how they think, how they talk. Um, so I suspect that that kind the sort of 15 to 20, 25-year-old here looking for something new in politics will gravitate to to other things. Back corner there, Jenny, is that Jenny?

Um, thank you so much, Dom. Um, I have two questions which are slightly linked. Um, well, and actually just to highlight a bit of a contradiction in that you managed to reform the Civil Service; you came in with the Conservatives, and you actually managed to deliver fundamental reform that was incredibly successful in the system. So question, do we need more Doms to come in and sort of blow it up from the inside? Wouldn't that be more effective? And secondly, um, you know, you go on Conservatives are [ __ ] show, and you know, they have been, but would you ever consider going to work for them again? Because I know you work for Michael; you did go to work for Boris, and are there any conditions in which you consider going to work for the Conservative Party again? I know I, for one, would really welcome that. Um, so in your first point, it is true that we managed to change quite a lot inside the Department of Education, but I think there's an aspect of that which which tells an interesting an interesting story, right? The official story in Westminster that everyone believes and people write their op-eds about is, well, the DFE changes prove that when you have a secretary of state with a clear idea who makes a lot of speeches and communicates well to the media, then the system falls into line and delivers, and that's what happened in the Department of Education. Totally fake story. Total and utter nonsense about what actually happened. What actually happened is Michael's speeches and communications were largely a failure, and that the way we got things done was by purges. We got rid of the Permanent Secretary; we got rid of four of the top five people; we got rid of 15 of the top 20 people; we purged the private office, and we got in a set of almost all, as it turned out, really, really able young women to run a new private office. And the combination of purges, new private office, switched the whole department from a kind of vicious circle of failure and hate to a positive feedback of, this team actually wants to get done school reform; we want to help them; they've also like taken out our bosses, okay, let's get with the program and try and do something different. But of course, no one in Westminster wants to discuss that true story because that points in a very alarming direction that the only Conservative Party domestic public service reform that actually happened happened because of purging the civil service. So no one wants to talk about it, and that shows you why. Um, and if you look at the 2024 election again, a very, very striking thing is I assume that the Conservative Party would have an extremely bad, rubbish, not true attempt to claim educational success because I thought in the election they would have, well, you know, everything was such a disaster; they the one public service where they'd actually changed anything, you'd have to have something for it, right? But the Conservative Party is so extraordinarily rotten, they didn't even try to do a job; they just completely ignored it, and most MPs don't even know what happened. That's how rotten the the the party is. So um, I don't think they also let I'll tell you another classic story, right? 2022, the then secretary of state was um, oh, I'm so bad with names, is what's his name? Nadhim Zahawi, Zahawi published a bill; the bill would have undone done a huge amount of stuff that we did between 2010 and 2014. Various people involved in 20120, 2014 called him and said, N, what are you doing? You're publishing this; that's undoing all of these reforms. Oh, am I? Said I had no idea; I mean, I haven't read the bill; I was just given it and told to take it to Parliament. So again, that sums up the Tory party, right? They're so unserious about power that the Secretary of State doesn't even bother reading the bill; he just takes what he's given. The officials obviously give him a bill which undoes a bunch of stuff which they never liked, and they want to go in a different direction, and the guy just sort of cluelessly like a pure NPC goes into Parliament and says, oh, here's the new bill. So they let the new schools network get closed down. So there's loads of small ways in which you can see that the party just fundamentally didn't even care about the one public service thing that had improved; didn't care at all. So I know it's I can't see that that's an entity that's going to like learn correct lessons from what happened 2010-2014 because they're simply not interested in it because they're simply uninterested in power; they're not interested in how the system really works; they're not interested in how in how power works; they're not interested in how to exercise power; they're interested in who's on the 8 or 10 slot on the Today program; that is all they really care about. Um, and therefore, like, it's would I work with them again? I work so the the only two I worked

With them were a on the school stuff, because I knew that Michael was actually serious about it and did want to do things, and therefore I thought there was a reasonable chance of getting something useful done. And secondly, in 2019, because I thought the alternative to going in and trying to sort it all out would be, um, Corbin as prime minister in a second referendum and a complete and utter disaster for the country. But you know, there's no point in just going to work for any of these people for the sake of being part of the of the Westminster game; it's such a Napoleonic game. Like, why, you know, there's only a point of being involved with it if there's actually a route to changing things, um, and in the current party, there, right, um, you've sort of skirted around it so far; we, um, is the question of the media and these new cultural figures. So people like Joe Rogan and people like Theon—they are—that's an example of the US very quickly and efficiently developing a countercultural media that was a that in reaction to—you said the Kamala—di, whatever, whatever—yeah, we don't seem at the moment to have that; we still have quite an entrenched Legacy Media. Um, you know, there are touches of it with ideas of Anglo-futurism, but I think they're still very nent is this, and and reform as well, right? Reform came out of TikTok largely; they're far less of a campaign. Yeah. What does a—I suppose what what is the work that goes into providing a media, because obviously most people receive their information second or third hand through these mediators? What is the work that needs to be done to provide that cultural landscape to allow these effective operators not to just be harassed from day one?

Um, so I think it's a there's a couple of different things that—so if you just think about the American thing—but part of the part of the reason why so Rogan and people like that are not fundamentally political, right? They're getting a lot of coverage at the moment because of the election and because of them having Trump on and the whole question of, right, would Kamala do it or not, and the whole interesting question of actually the Democrats have got themselves such a position that they put a nominee in who you actually couldn't put on Rogan without probably self-high, right? If she actually went on it—imagine her on Rogan for 3 hours—it's just going to be spectacularly appalling disaster. But they're not political, like fundamentally political things. Like, for those of you who are fans of those, or you'll know that a lot of it is like they discuss sports, they discuss life, they discuss addiction, they discuss all kinds of things about life's problems, and politics is quite a sort of um, just kind of like flows in and out of it ad hoc; they're not political things, like the really big ones. Um, so the the effect there is somewhat different; it's that the Democrats from kind of 2016 in particular went down such a disastrous cultural rabbit hole that they just made a whole s of of that ecosystem kind of out of bounds, right? When Bernie went on Rogan, he got attacked by a lot of the Democrat establishment and the and was and the attitude was these people are Nazis, these people are transphobes; you shouldn't be legitimizing them by going on. Democrats shouldn't legitimize these things by appearing on them, with the kind of the mainstream establishment attitude towards it. So they kind of created this, they kind of deplatformed themselves from a lot of these things and left the field open to Trump and Maga people to who were just prepared to engage on it, and it was um, extremely bad disaster for the Democrats, great for Trump because I anyone who knows who watched Trump um Rogan thing, for example, if you're a normal person, you watch that, you don't watch that and then look at the ads from the Democrats saying he's Hitler and go oh yeah, this is Hitler, right? You might say he's an [ __ ] but you don't but he just obviously not Hitler. So that whole ecosystem kind of undermined the core message that the Democrats and the mainstream is, and also they look at it and they go oh, that's the official, that's what NBC news says, but here's what I actually saw when I listened to him for three hours.

I think another thing is important thing there is what Rogan himself said, which is something which I think it was true for a lot of people—a surprisingly large number of people including in Silicon Valley, right? One particular thing: if you ask most politically involved people in Britain what they think about Trump's um Charlottesville remarks and the very fine people on both sides, most politically engaged people in Westminster would say oh yeah, that's when Trump said very fine people about the Nazis, about the neo-Nazis; that's what most people think, right? But if you look at the actual full clip of what Trump said, it's actually obvious that he didn't say that; in fact, he's meant the opposite of that, but the entire mainstream media ecosystem created edits that are completely fake lies, right? Now that's just an objectively true statement of fact; doesn't mean you have to be Pro-Trump, doesn't mean Trump should be president, that's not what I'm saying; I'm saying it's a very very very clear example of this phenomenon whereby the people who describe themselves as the serious people and against disinformation almost uniformly created complete fake news and then told everybody that this was the truth. But as Rogan said, with the internet now, people can like look on Twitter and they see these two clips; they watch the NBC version, they watch the BBC version, they watch the ITV version, they watch the all the official, then they watch the actual full version; they go huh, well, in that case, what else are all these people lying to me about all the time? Maybe vast amounts of the views is actually just as fake as that is. So I think that is something which is—sorry, I've kind of wed off off topic—but I think these are all sort of like connected with what you're talking about.

I think in Britain, um, I think two things: one is there needs to be a a very deliberate thing particularly from young people to create these alternative voices, create alternative podcast ecosystem etc etc, and a kind of just alternative news ecosystem. I think this is going to happen also because I looked at some figures the other day, um, and it's very very striking—again, I I think totally not really um understood in Westminster—but if you look at young people, they watch now basically zero normal British news, like zero. So the old days which people like me running campaign and whatnot we're constantly fixated on what's on the 6:00 BBC TV news—that's the thing where everyone's watching—audience of 18 million or whatever—that world, you know, it's still there a bit for older people, but for a whole set of people under—I comment what the age group was—but like certainly most people in this room, um, I mean, put your hand up in this room if you regularly watch BBC 6:00 TV news live. Zero. Okay, zero for people watching on the video; there's zero people. Um, I don't think Westminster has kind of caught onto this at all. So I think what two fundamental things need to happen for the forces against the Mad Left: one is create, build this new ecosystem over the next few years, and I think it'll get great cultural headwinds behind it and great audiences for it. But secondly, it's also a question of how people with certain political things go and engage with this ecosystem which is not political. So it needs some new political things, explicitly political things being created, but you also people like me are going to need to have to go on um all kinds of other weird things. And I'll give one example: I did a podcast with a guy called Chris Williamson uh about I can't remember like say three four four five months ago or something. I've done all kinds of media in my life; I've done things on the BBC TV which are watched by audiences of like over 10 million people; I've never had as much feedback from literally random people walking out on the street as I did from doing that podcast with Chris Williamson. Now if you said to the MPs, I would bet like a handful of MPs if that even know who that guy is, right? But I had people stopping me all over London for months afterwards saying I what you on that thing, in a way that never happens from anything that I've done on any kind of like normal BBC ITV thing. So again, that made made me think that there's something very powerful in that whole ecosystem that's growing that um the Westminster doesn't get, and I think building building on that is one of the critical tasks of the next few years. I'll try to answer the questions I've time for one more uh in the corner. Hi. You've said that one of the uses of AI agents you see in campaigning is to do what people like Adam Curtis and Carol Cadwall thought you did in 2016, but for real. If you had within normal budgetary constraints, how would you what would you do to maximize the potential of that happening? As Tom Cruise says in Top Gun, I could tell you, but then I have to kill you.

Um, I I think that um uh so I'll mention two things that I think are um are now becoming obvious. Um, one is um so in 2022, September 2022, I went over to um Silicon Valley, uh and with me was a guy uh called Ben Warner who did data science for me in the referendum and then did came into number 10 to data science AI team and in number 10. Um, we had various meetings with people at the the three big companies, and Ben had uh the um thought might it be possible to do a kind of synthetic polling and synthetic focus groups inside these LLMs. Like, are they kind of synthetic people in a way, like trapped these po people, and is there is there a way in which there's kind of like synthetic people inside the models and you could poll synthetic people and therefore run kind of synthetic focus groups and fing huh? The people in this company said that's an interesting idea; that would probably work. Anyway, he went off and did some experiments and it clearly does work. Weird as it sounds, you can actually run um you can run market research inside LLMs to the extent that you can look at focus group focus group transcripts of synthetic people, right? So you could say create create um run a focus group of women between 30 and 50 without a college degree who live in Pennsylvania, click, and it walks outs back to you a transcript. If you read the transcript, then you read a transcript of an actual focus group, and you you could basically like most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two things, which is pretty crazy, right? Um, I think that so Ben's doing a startup now to do that, and I think that that is something I think that'll work, and just at the very least you're going to have that means that a whole bunch of things that were very expensive and took a long time are suddenly going to become basically—you can basically get a synthetic focus group now in like 30 seconds, and instead of having to think um oh, like call a company, they have to recruit real people, you have to give them money, you have to give them sandwiches, you have to do this, and it takes two weeks, and I think people like Liv to Crosby charge like 7,000 quid or something for six or eight people and then you get feedback in maybe two weeks; you could basically like just squash all of that to—if Ben were here now with his laptop, he'd just be and it would just pop straight up. So I think that kind of compression of cost and time in market research is obviously going to be a very big deal. Um, I'll probably stop there. Yeah, that's great. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thanks Dominic for coming.