Dominic Cummings Answers Your Questions | Q&A | Durham Union

[Music] We now proceed to the main item of business, which is an in-conversation with Dominick Cummings. Dominick Cummings is a political strategist who served as Chief advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson between July 2019 and November 2020. Before working in Number 10, he was a director of Vote Leave, an organization which successfully campaigned for the UK to leave the European Union in 2016. Between 2007 and 2014, he was a special advisor to then-Education Secretary Michael Gove. Growing up in Durham, Dominic worked as a doorman at the nightclub Clute as a teenager. We all join, meet in a round of applause, uh, to welcome Dominic to the chamber.

So, like any good interviewer, I'm going to start with a softball question. We just want to hear your response to the sad news of Clute shutting down, and can you just give us a few anecdotes of what it was like working on the door in the late 80s?

Tragic, tragic news. Um, can everyone hear me at the back? I was told that sometimes the mics are a bit funny. No problems. Um, so like most things in the media about me and the fact that I was a doorman at Clute is actually fake news. Uh, what I did do was, um, so my dad and his uncles set it up in I think 1973 or 1974. They called it Clute after the famous Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland movie. Um, if you haven't seen the movie, uh, it's a 70s classic. I strongly advise you, you, you watch it. Um, so I wasn't a, I wasn't a doorman. What I did most of the time was I would stand at the door, tell people's money as they came in, and then hide behind the doorman, uh, when trouble kicked off.

So now we've got past that, we're going to go into the main sort of topic, which is a bit more political. Uh, I don't want this to sound like a job interview, but the first question is, why did you enter politics? And, you know, if you're looking back at your whole career, what do you think is your greatest achievement? You know, be it taking the UK out of the EU, your work in Number 10, uh, even before that, the reforms with Michael Gove on education, you know, what do you think has been your biggest achievement? What will you look back on with sort of the most, you know, fondness and pride?

Well, I, I fell into it really. I never really had a very clear idea at University what I wanted to do. Um, I went to Moscow when I finished college in summer 1994. I went to Moscow just because I couldn't really think of anything better to do, and it seemed like, uh, Moscow in the mid-90s was one of those sort of historic moments of weirdness and change, so I went there, tried to make money, totally failed, had an interesting time, came back, and then really by chance I got involved with the campaign to stop Blair, uh, taking us into the euro in 1998, and I worked on that. Um, and that's what got me involved with it. Um, but I learned some, I learned something in the first campaign, um, which was that, so when I, when I first got involved with politics, I had the view, which I think is the completely standard view, that obviously the people in Parliament, at the top of these systems, must be super competent and really know what they're doing and take government really seriously, be able to build great teams, be really interested in policy, and also be really interested in the voters and be brilliant at, um, communication and running campaigns and things like that, the sort of the standard theory of how the system works. And then in the very first thing I did on the Euro campaign, I did some market research into attitudes on the Euro, and it turned out that all the things which the MPs thought about how people thought about the subject were completely wrong. And I rushed off excited to tell them, thinking that they would be very interested and pleased to know this, right, because we all thought blah, but now we find out that blah was false. So I, I naturally assumed they'd be happy, and in fact, they were all, um, enraged and, and didn't want to hear and were very crossed that I'd raised the subject. And that's when things started to hit me that my kind of the official story about how the system works is not correct. Um, and as I dug deeper and deeper into it, all, all the way into the deepest darkest corners of the deep state with nuclear secrets, uh, you just find more and more, all the way through the system, um, you find that the official story is not correct.

And so just, uh, sort of jumping on the nuclear stuff, you've written a lot since you left Number 10, um, obviously a lot of this is classified, but about the sort of the sham, basically the disaster that is Trident, that is the UK's nuclear deterrent, um, and this sort of all leads into, into your huge amount of opposition and criticism of how we procured defense in this country. You know, obviously you can't tell us, you know, it's on the record, you can't tell us the most exciting stuff, but, you know, one of those sort of anecdotes, examples of where, you know, the UK government just gets it so wrong, uh, either with nuclear or just in general with anything.

So I think that, I think, um, there's a tendency to, to think that, well, maybe politicians, you know, don't pay so much attention to X or Y that's in the news, but it's not a huge, huge priority, but obviously on the biggest things like nuclear weapons or bioterrorism and stuff like that, well, there, obviously these things will be taken incredibly seriously, and there'll be brilliant people working on it, and it'll be a huge priority for the system. That is not at all the case. Um, the, the, the truth is that not even things like nuclear weapons and bioterrorism are now taken seriously. And why is, oh sorry, sorry. So on, on, on the nuclear stuff, pretty much like all the way through, through the system, um, a lot of core infrastructure that's needed to, to, to, because obviously it's not just about firing weapons, as a whole infrastructure that that's built to deliver these things and maintain them and everything, there are problems throughout the entire structure, and they've been building for, for, for actually for decades now. Um, it's a huge problem; it's many, many tens of billions of pounds worth of a problem. Um, it also means, of course, that all the figures that you see in the OBR, all the figures that you see the politicians talking about now in the election are all completely fake figures, because all of those figures, including all the OBR figures, do not take into account the fact that there was multi-tens of billions, uh, hidden because of the broken nuclear enterprise and the way that each government basically repeatedly has classified the horror show, punted decisions down the road, and then gutted more and more of the MOD's conventional budget to kind of backfill the nuclear budgets. So, um, the nuclear enterprise is kind of cannibalizing, uh, a large part of the national security budget. Um, MPs show absolutely zero interest in it, um, and, uh, the cycle of classify and punt has grown and grown.

Um, one of, of course, the very first day that Starmer becomes PM, one of the things that will happen is someone will walk in with a briefcase chained to his wrist, so for Starmer to write his, um, his letter to the, to the submarine commanders, uh, about what they should do in the event of a, of a war. And then shortly after that, he'll be shown, on, on the yellow paper, for classified documents, all of these horrific budgets, and he'll be given the same choice that Cameron had, that Theresa May had, that Boris had, that Sunak had, and it'll be a very interesting early test, obviously. What he should do is what I told Boris he should do, which is, um, go to Parliament, publish it all, um, admit the truth, and then have a national conversation about what the hell to do about this. Boris's view was, well, if everyone else has just cheated and punted it and kept it secret, I'll do the same thing. Um, it'll be a very interesting early test of Starmer to see, uh, what he does, because of course, after 14 years, they have the ideal opportunity to say, they, the Tories have hidden all of this thing, it's a complete debacle, it means all the numbers we argued about in the campaign are complete nonsense, here's the truth, publishing it to MPs, we need to face this as a country, about what's going wrong. Um, I suspect Starmer, being what he is, he will, um, classify and punt the way the others have. And going on Starmer's government, and we are talking about as if it's already happened, um, and we will get on to Rishi Sunak. I know you had some conversations over the past year where you might have been drawn in to, uh, help Rishi Sunak out, but what do you think the big challenges that Starmer is going to face in the sort of upcoming year? If you were walking into Number 10, in, you know, as well, an advisor to Keir Starmer, what would you be telling him? Here are the things you've got to sort out.

Well, obviously across the whole public realm, um, system after system is crumbling, um, because of bad management and bad incentives. The Tories have constantly punted these things, haven't, haven't wanted to get to grips with them. Um, I mean, the absolute core of the problem really is that, um, you've got a bunch of MPs who are not up to the job being ministers. We now have a sort of fake constitution in which ministers pretend to be in charge and pretend to have responsibility and pretend to answer questions in Parliament, but in fact, practically everything is, is run by officials. And also, we've seen a huge decline in the quality of officials over the last 40, 50 years. Um, elite talent has increasingly moved to things like a combination of maths, money, VC startups, tech, hedge funds, things like that. So the quality of the people at the top is, is very, very different than it was 50 years ago. Um, and you have these kind of pathological bureaucracies now in Whitehall that we saw in COVID, you can see in, on Ukraine similarly, where they basically operated for the benefit of the people in the system, not for the benefit of the country. Um, the only, so on issue after issue, Starmer is going to be faced with the fact that incentives are badly aligned, the management is rubbish, Whitehall refuses to change, uh, uh, and he'll have, um, very, very hard choices. Either you just pump in more and more and more money and break all the promises he's made on spending, um, which will be one argument. The only way out of that, uh, is to actually change how these things are managed, and that involves saying to senior civil servants, uh, if you don't accept the following things are changing, you're, you're fired. And everything about Starmer that you can see so far is that he is not that kind of character. The most obvious example was in 2022; there was that horrific case where the, um, where the Met Police officer had kidnapped that woman off the street. The entire country was basically saying this is the latest in a long line of horror shows from the Met; the Met is clearly a dysfunctional organization. Boris, for his own corrupt reasons, couldn't fire the CR of the Met, so the biggest open goal in British politics was simply for Starmer to go on TV and say, obviously the senior management at the Met have to be fired, this organization has had one nightmare after another, this is the final straw. Don't know what Starmer did; he went on TV and said, I stand by the Prime Minister and the management of the Met. So I think that tells you what Starmer's instincts are, you know, he's grown up in the system, which is always, always, always defend the system, uh, and that's why I think he'll fail fast and hard.

So you talk about the quality of MPs, of senior civil servants, the people that are running this country, why is the quality declined? Why, uh, you know, what is it with the system that we have that means the top talent that you have always tried to bring into government just, you know, doesn't want to go? Why is it that we end up with these lackluster politicians? And is that why, you know, we are in the mess that we are in this country?

You know, it's a mix of things, and, and once some things, once certain dynamics get established, it's very, it's very hard to change. I think, um, smart, smart, able people have a lot of options about how they can spend their time, and they know that now, um, not only the job of being an MP is largely a fake job, the job of being a minister is largely a fake job. Um, you know, 50 years ago or 150 years ago, being Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary, whatever, you actually were in charge, and the jobs were real. Now those jobs are, are very largely fake, um, and talented, able people don't want to spend their time in, in, in those kind of fake jobs. That's a big part of it. Another big part is obviously a big social shift over time whereby, uh, financial reward, kind of the sort of ratio in financial rewards between public service type jobs and what you can make in hedge funds, what you can make in VC, what you can do building your own company, etc., that ratio is grown and grown, um, so that's another reason. Another reason is the craziness of the media. So if you think, do I want to do a fake job for a lot less money than I could make doing other things, um, and have to deal with the insane media? It's not very appetizing; it's not very, not very appetizing, um, combination for able people, uh, and therefore you have kind of a reverse selection effect whereby a lot of people who want to be MPs are exactly the people that you don't, we don't want being MPs. And then similarly in the Civil Service, you got a very powerful anti-selection effect whereby what happens is the extremely able young people, of which there are many, very largely leave in their 30s because they look at the middle management above them and they say, I don't want to spend my time like this; I don't want to become my boss. The system is pathological; it's awful. They leave, and the worst kind of HR people, who are lazy, they don't want to do anything, uh, are highly risk-averse, um, they're the ones who all get promoted, and they're the ones who then take over the HR system, and they promote in their own image. So you have this reverse selection whereby, um, the great young talent leaves pretty early, and then the top jobs are now filled by people who are just completely incapable of doing them, as we saw in COVID.

So, speaking of COVID, you know, that was the, the, the key part of your time in Number 10 advising the, well, our former Prime Minister during that sort of crisis. How do those failures that you talk about, of a failure of quality cabinet ministers, quality senior servants, could you share with us a few anecdotes of where, you know, the people at the top, the people you were having to deal with, you know, have adversely, negatively affected this country, um, through their incompetence, through their sort of vanity? You know, what were, who were the big people, um, who were blocking, who, you know, hurt this country, um, and, you know, what are your sort of views and reflections looking back on that?

Well, I mean, it's a huge subject, uh, uh, hard to know, hard to know exactly where to start, but I'll say, I'll say two things that kind of illuminate broader problems. One is that, um, late in March, I was in the cabinet room when officials came in and said, uh, well, the NHS is going to run out of PPE next month. Why is the NHS going to run out of PPE? Well, we put the orders in, but it'll be months before they all arrive from China. Why will it take months? Well, because that's how long it takes for the ships to get from China to here. Why are we shipping it? Well, these contracts have all gone through the procurement system; it's always done by shipping; that's what the rules are. Okay, so we're going to run out of PPE for NHS staff in the next 3 or 4 weeks. The peak of COVID is going to be in about 3 or 4 weeks, and all of our stuff's just going to be on boats. Yeah. So I said, call the airlines, tell them we're taking their planes, fly the planes over to China, load all of our stuff onto the planes, fly the planes back tomorrow. And to do this, I had to get a letter written by the PM's principal private secretary saying the PM would take personal legal responsibility for the inevitable judicial reviews and all the legal, I'm saying this was illegal and blah, blah, blah, blah. Now imagine this kind of problem multiplied by like tens and hundreds and thousands. It shows, shows something very, uh, deep about the system. Why was I having to make a decision, an obvious decision like that, in the cabinet room on behalf of the PM? The reason is because the system now is so pathological that no other, everything is vetoed everywhere; nobody can do a lot of the simplest things that you would expect in any well-run organization because of a combination of rules, legal advice, HR people, and vetos from other parts of the system. So, because of that, all of these things end up bubbling up to the top in a completely kind of tragicomic way because the PM ends up being the only figure in the constitutional system that can actually override all of the madness and just say, no, just some planes. But of course, that's a disaster because there are hundreds or thousands of things like this every day, uh, and it's impossible for Number 10 to solve them. So I think that, that, that gives you an idea of the kind of interlocking problems you have: like mad procurement laws, legal advice which is extremely risk-averse, Civil Service you say, well, our number one goal, even in a crisis where thousands of people are dying, is optimize for obey legal advice, vetos everywhere, etc., etc., etc.

The second thing is in the autumn. So we realized, take a step back, it turned out subsequently that in Spring 2020, a bunch of excellent young scientists figured out that these rapid tests, like pregnancy tests, would work. The information on this was blocked from coming to Number 10 by the Department of Health. They found a way around and came to us in the summer and told us that these things would work. So we started a project to secretly go around the world and buy up whichever of these tests where we could find them and also buy all the parts of the supply chain that we would need to actually make our own. We had to do it secretly, of course, because constantly throughout COVID you have these problems of, um, supply chains, uh, basically breaking and countries just, like, breaking contracts and keeping stuff. So all the supply chains were breaking; even Trump was sending the CIA over to gazump people on airfields in, in China. So he did all this thing secretly. I brought in this brilliant guy who had been, uh, the commanding officer of 22 SAS; he was in charge of this project. He came to me and said, said the Civil Service basically won't let me hire a team. So I got the Cabinet Secretary, all the heads of commercial procurement, legal, everything, HR, in a room, cabinet room, with the Cabinet Secretary, and said, the Prime Minister wants us treated in like a wartime situation; this could kill another 100,000 people in the next 12, 16 weeks; we have to do this immediately; we have to do this quickly. Alex Cooper has the authority of the PM to hire whoever the hell he wants, to charter planes to fly around the world to get all the stuff that we need. If we can pull this operation off, could save tens of thousands of people's lives and mean that we can, like, dodge another lockdown, etc. Is this all clear? Everyone nods their head. Three days later, the SAS guy calls back up Number 10 and says, yeah, no one, everyone just says we've all still got to stick to the same rules. So I had to go back, have the same meeting with the same people, and say, if Cooper doesn't get what he wants the next 12 hours, I'm going to tell the Prime Minister to fire everybody in this room. Then things changed. So you see the incredible friction and difficulty of, like, the most, like, common sense, simple things, and how the system itself will fight even when you have me speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister with the Cabinet Secretary, the single most official important official in the country in a constitutional position, with the five crucial next civil servants, all in charge of their departments, and you say it's a war, wartime environment, and the Prime Minister will take responsibility for everything, do it now, the system left to itself will just shrug and go, well, let's see if they actually are serious; we're not, we're not going to get rid of our HR rules just because of that. And I think that tells you an awful lot about, about why so much is broken; that if even in that extreme situation people behave like that, and these bureaucracies are that pathological, then of course, in normal times they go to do completely stupid things and not work properly.

So now moving on to the current election, uh, Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives are about 20 points behind in the polls, uh, I think most people have sort of think that this election is already done, but, you know, you've already had, you know, since Rishi became Prime Minister, you had two meetings, I think it was, uh, with him where he tried to basically ask, would you come back to sort of help him? You know, that didn't work out, um, and we'd love for you to go into the detail of those conversations, but, um, what would you advise is now, sort of 30 days until the election? What would be your crash course to try and narrow that gap? And do you think there's even any possibility of, you know, I don't want to say Conservative majority, not total wipeout for the Conservatives?

So I had two conversations. Um, Sunak asked to see me twice, once in December 2022 and once in July 2023. My conversations basically were, were very similar each time, and I think again show the basic problem with the Tories and the wider system. He said, can we do a deal whereby you come back to Number 10, help me dig ourselves out of this nightmare hole? Um, I said, maybe, but only if you, um, only if you will do various things that I want you to. And the things that I, that I demanded were things like getting on top of the nuclear weapons enterprise, getting on top of bioterrorism, a whole bunch of things in the deep state that we'd begun in 2020 had been essentially stopped by, said all those things have to be revived, and you actually have to take a concerted effort to do what we promised in the referendum and what we promised in 2019. Both of those elections, Vote Leave won because we promised very, very dramatic change, and the country wanted very dramatic change. Yeah, after Boris decided to cheat his deal with me in 2020, they then just sat there for two years canceling everything, doing nothing. I said to him, you've got to actually commit to doing what we promised, and that means radically, radically different direction for the country in all sorts of ways, whether it's on the economy, productivity, um, whether it's on, uh, the MOD and national security and all that sort of stuff, whether it's on public services. But he, his basic answer was, um, if I do what you want, then, uh, the MPs and the media will go insane, so I can't, I can't do that. I said, well, if you don't do what I want, then you're just going to be going to an election where it's 14 years of Tories, nothing works, it's time for change, and you're completely knackered anyway, and the party might just even blow up. So why not at least try to, to just be a good government and then see where the chips fall, uh, and instead, of course, you know, as you can see, he spent two years following the same model that everyone's followed since Thatcher, apart from when I was in Number 10, which is run Number 10 as a media entertainment service, not aimed at, how at actually what's important for the country and not what voters actually are, are interested in. He spent the entire time tacking, day after day, to what this faction of MPs wants, or that faction, or what the Daily Telegraph wants today, or what the Daily Mail...

Mail want tomorrow? Um, and of course, it just means, uh, it means strategic failure. And in the end, he's united everyone in thinking that he's rubbish, but he's acting, he's acting in exactly the same way that Theresa May did, that David Cameron did, that, that, that Gordon Brown did. There's something very deep now in the MP psyche, which is that they just, they cannot imagine doing politics in government in any other way than Number 10 as a media entertainment service.

And you know, in your Substack, you've known, you've made your displeasure with the current Conservatives very well known. You've, you know, discussed a lot of the Startup Party, I think is the name as of at the moment. Um, you know, it's, it's your idea, not for this election, but for 2029, to basically replace the Conservatives. However, there's another key figure in the Brexit story who is also seeking to replace the Conservatives, and that's one Mr. Nigel Farage, who just this week's become leader of Reform.

Um, a lot of what he said, his launch on Monday was, uh, you know, the Conservatives are done, you know, they don't, you know, 14 years of what, uh, we need to get rid of rotting government. You know, the thing with Reform is that they are, or Nigel Farage particularly, is a great communicator, but there's not really sort of an intellectual spine. Um, I know with sort of the, I know with the sort of Leave.EU and Vote Leave campaigns, there's a lot of sort of, sort of, uh, disagreement on the direction to take the campaign to leaving the EU, but would you ever consider, you know, parking Startup Parties to the side to sort of provide that sort of deeper thought, deeper vision to a party like Reform, who is well on the way, um, if you sort of look at the polls, to replacing the Conservatives as the main right-wing party in this country?

No. Um, I would not. The reasons are that, um, Farage is essentially, Farage is popular with like maybe 15-20% of the country, but deeply unpopular with the rest of the country, so there's a natural limit to what he can do. He can certainly, um, over the next month help push the Tories into double-digit seats, uh, and maybe destroy them, but, uh, there's no way that he can win 40-45% of the, of the electorate, and, uh, uh, and for government. Um, but I think at a deeper level, Farage is, Farage is just a sort of different branch of the same phenomenon. Farage's obsession is the Today Programme and the Daily Telegraph, the same as the Tory MPs is. Um, it, it's not, it's not a project to actually change how the government works; it's, it's a kind of, um, it's an, it's an anti-immigration pressure group essentially, uh, and a vehicle for him, and also so that he can increase speaking fees in America, but it's not a solution to, it's not a solution to our problems.

If you, if we want things to change, then there's the, the absolute core aspect of it is that the quality of people must change in at the top of the, of the political system. Uh, it's pointless talking about systems, um, and incentives and all these other things if the overall system carries on being run as it is now, where it excludes roughly 100% of all the most talented people in the world. You have to, you have to find a way of getting able people in at a political level who are then prepared to essentially rip up the current system of the Civil Service. I just say one thing about the Civil Service: the fundamental principle of the civil service now is that it recruits almost entirely internally. So it's story is, um, "We're a Rolls-Royce Civil Service; we're open to the world's talent," blah, blah, blah, blah, but it's completely fake. Almost all appointments are internal. So this, all of these things end up being run by an internal cast of people who are a very particular kind of person: extremely risk-averse, extremely anti-entrepreneurial people, and almost all the people who can actually build things, whether if, if you're an entrepreneur who can build a company, if you're a scientist that can do research, um, all of these people are, by design, unable to be hired by the system, and they want it like that.

Now, if you go, if you, if you look back in summer 2020, one of the things that we did was we pushed through the vaccine task force. Um, it was obvious where, and the officials brought this, so the Plan A was we basically begged to be allowed to do the Brussels program, but we looked at the Brussels program, and obviously the Brussels program was just everyone having PowerPoint meetings with McKinsey and BCG for a year and nobody actually doing anything there. The EU itself admitted later it was a complete disaster. So we said we're going to do it differently: build the vaccine task force. How the vaccine task force worked: it brought in actual experts who knew what they were doing from the outside world, and we basically chopped off all the bits like normal HR process, uh, uh, and things like that. Lo and behold, surprise surprise, ends up being a huge success. What was Whitehall's reaction? Whitehall's reaction: "Oh, this is wonderful, a Great British success; we can now double down on the success, move on to the next generation of vaccines that actually stop people getting the disease, great for Britain, great for the world, we can make money, save lives," blah, blah. No, of course not; they killed the vaccine task force as soon as they could, because it was seen as a disaster in Whitehall, 'cause it showed everyone up, showed up the old system for the fast that it is, so they killed it.

Now, if you're going to, Farage and people like Farage are not an answer to this, to, to, to, to these sort of problems. If you're going to solve those sort of problems, it needs the system overall needs refreshing from, um, the most able people who are almost all now currently doing other things, and that's the, that's the big challenge. Now, of course, another problem is that the more, more mad conventional politics get, the harder it is to persuade people here and in America to get involved, right, because the costs to them get higher and higher. Um, so it is hard for sure, but if it's ever going to happen, you know, now is probably, now might be the best chance in since the 1850s to, to, to, to get rid of the Tory party, which I think would be a great thing for the country.

Okay, we will now move to questions. Uh, please state your name and college for the minutes. Uh, who'd like to go first? The gentleman standing up at the back. My question is very party of and Reform UK, and I should be quite critical of the Greens, and I've seen that your, um, uh, you got your Startup Party without W be taking the election, um, Tak off tool. Um, so I was wondering, will you still be voting Conservatives, and do you have kind of any sympathy for people who don't vote at all if they kind of don't feel any of the candidates are appealing to them?

Um, I certainly will not be voting for the Conservatives. I can't see why one would do, after, after this, because they're not even pretending, they're not even pretending to have any kind of serious way forward for the country. Um, you know, like often in, often in politics and in history, you see parties say things you to think, well, they are, they're probably lying, or the people are too rubbish to be able to do it, but at least they've got some kind of spin B of theory, is God. I mean, they've got, I mean, absolutely nothing to offer anybody. Um, they've just, they've completely given up and sunk, completely given up, which is why this stupid thing's happening. So I would vote to, I can't see why anyone, why anyone would do. Um, I suspect the turnout will be pretty low, and that a lot of people will say, actually, they all look pretty rubbish. Next question.

Herei College. Uh, so like, with regards to Brexit, do you think it was actually the best thing for the country, or were you just doing the job that you were assigned to do?

So all the political things I do, um, uh, I never, I never do any political projects unless I actually believe in them and think they're a good idea. So I have lots of people trying to get me to do kind of foreign elections and whatnot, but, um, I've never done any of those because, uh, I just think life's too short. Um, I thought the Brexit was the, was the right thing; I'm even more sure about that now than I was back in 2016, and even happier now that we won than I was in 2016. Um, the basic, there's the basic reasons why. Oh, one of the problems, of course, with Brexit is that the reasons why me and the people who actually ran the campaign did it were extremely different to the reasoning of, um, the Tory MPs who you often see on TV talking about it, but let's say something very, very quick about it. So our view was, if you look at the European situation, you have the rise of the far right, you have free movement driving that, you have a, um, uh, a Euro which is institutionally has all kinds of problems, and it's going to drive stagnation and all kinds of economic problems over, over the long term. You have the European Commission, which is anti-science, anti-technology in all sorts of ways. The trajectory of the EU looks like it's going to be a bad thing, and it's increasing political extremism. You got, I think in Austria in 2015, something like a third of the people voted for an actual, pretty much Nazi party. So our view was, if you actually have democratic control of immigration policy in this country, you'll kill off Farage, kill off UKIP, immigration will shift from being the number one political issue to being a low-ranking issue, attitudes towards it will improve, you can be more, more friendly towards high-skilled immigration, less friendly towards low-skilled immigration, and the country have time to build the infrastructure after this huge wave of immigration that's been going on for 20 years. At the same time, it will force the country to go down a different path, off the Tory and Labour economic path, whereby you actually take science and technology seriously, um, you, and also you revive the political culture. Instead of having a political culture whereby the MPs are constantly blaming Europe for everything, they will actually have to take responsibility, and we'll know who's in charge when things fail.

I think if you look at the, the dynamics in Europe, I think all the things that we said back in 2015, 2016, um, have basically continued. The problems with the far right have got worse and worse. If I had said in the referendum that you'll see a, you like, close to Nazi party in Germany, close to leading the polls, the FD and the economists would all have laughed and said they're completely insane, but of course, that's now the situation. So I think those dynamics in Europe are playing out exactly as Vote Leave feared that they would do. Similarly, if you look at regulation on things like AI and biotech and stuff like that, the Commission is basically crushing technology and startups in, in the EU. That's going to have massive consequences for, for, for, for, for Europe. Whereas, out of that, we have the opportunity to do things differently. Now, of course, in practice, what's actually happened is the Tory government has not even got rid of the bloody cookie popup box from computer screens, you know, after eight years since we voted, five, four, five years since the 2019 election, they can't even muster the gumption to do that. So, of course, a lot of the possibilities, um, to do things differently, the Conservatives have chosen not to do, and it makes absolutely no. So there's a reasonable case for saying, I think we should remain; there's a reasonable case for the Vote Leave argument; there's absolutely no case at all for what the Tories have done, which is leave and then just let everything stay the same. Um, so of course, that's sad, but you have to look at the question like the EU over, you know, this is a question that will be argued about for decades, um, and, uh, I think that as people watch more and more what's happening in Europe, everyone here will become more and more convinced that we're better off out of it. Next question. Lady over there. Can you speak up?

Lou L Brown. If you, it your Number 10 days, is there anything that you would have changed about your legacy?

Changed about my legacy? Legacy? Um, I think probably, um, I mean, obviously, so the whole question about, um, um, realizing through February and early March that, um, the whole spin from the Cabinet Secretary and the Civil Service that Britain's the best-prepared country in the world, everyone's going to copy what we're doing, vaccines will never be relevant, um, herd immunity over the summer is the only path, blah, blah, blah, blah, the official story. Know me and some others started to realize with the growing sense of dread that we were being led into a complete disaster that might kill hundreds of thousands of people, and we shifted. Um, if there's one thing I could change, probably would be to go back in time and like try and force that change earlier, because even if we, even if we pushed it through, you know, two, two or three weeks earlier, that was like multiple doublings, thousands of people would have lived instead of died, the lockdown would have been much less, and therefore the economic damage to everyone and all the other bad effects would all have been, um, would all have been much lower. Um, so yeah, that's probably, if I could. Of course, it was extremely difficult to get the thing to shift at all when we did, around kind of like 12th of March, and there was massive resistance to it. Um, so I'm not sure whether we would have been able to do it earlier, but if there's one thing that I could try and change, that would probably be it. Next question over there. Yeah, no, you can go; it's fine.

R WX van. Um, I want to talk about the Ukraine war. You're on the record for blaming the Ukraine war on the West. You talk about the Bucharest Summit, about how we dangled, um, NATO membership to Ukraine, um, provoked Russia, and then we are where we are now. Um, but then, on the other hand, once the war started, um, you're on the record for calling Ukraine a hole that, um, nobody cares about. No, a hole, um, that doesn't matter at all. You wouldn't, Dr., any military aid to Ukraine. You don't, you don't think we should help Ukraine. So I was wondering how you can reconcile those two viewpoints, because you accept that we're responsible for tens of thousands of Ukrainians dying, but on the other hand, you don't think we should act on that responsibility.

So I think if you, if you, um, look at the context on Ukraine, right, if you go back to the early 1990s, after the end of the Soviet Union, there was huge debate in policy circles at that point. A lot of the people who'd actually been around at the beginning of the Cold War, the late 1940s, were still alive, including two of the most senior people, a guy called George Kennan and Paul Nitze, who wrote a lot of the original documents on containment in the late 1940s. There's a big debate about what to do in the future, and those guys who'd actually won the Cold War said unanimously, well, the most stupid thing that we could ever do would be to, um, start expanding NATO towards Ukraine; that would be the fastest way to be back in another Cold War and back to Cuban Missile Crisis type scenarios and possible nuclear conflict. But it's such a mad idea, like we don't have to worry about it. That was the conventional wisdom in the early '90s. Fast forward 2007, 2008, the exact same people who lied and totally screwed up the whole Iraqi adventure persuaded Bush and Cheney to start this campaign for Ukraine to join NATO. It was completely misconceived; we should never have begun that whole process in 2007, 2008. So you have this spectacle where, on the one hand, we were, we began to encourage Ukraine, an extremely corrupt Mafia state, same as Russia, to start thinking he could join NATO and the EU, while simultaneously Britain, partly because of the pressure of a bunch of lawyers and finance people, was the official laundry for the whole KGB, Mafia operation, undeputed in Moscow. London's nickname is literally the laundry and has been since the mid-90s. So we allowed that whole racket to continue because a whole bunch of lawyers and bankers were making a fortune out of it, and the Treasury was happy because we were then skimming off taxes from the whole thing simultaneously as well. We allowed Putin to send over KGB hitmen and whack people on the streets of Britain, and we did nothing about that. So we did like the worst possible combination of policies: we provoked Putin by pushing for the mad Ukraine joining NATO whilst acting in a way that made Putin think they're a bunch of weak, useless idiots who won't actually do anything. They don't even do anything when I send over a KGB guy to whack, to literally chop people's heads off on the streets of London, which he did.

Now, what's the, so are we to blame? We are partly to blame, therefore, for, for, for, for this whole situation. Now, at the same time, Putin is a terrible person; it's not all our fault. Having done, having got ourselves into this st, what situation we now got ourselves in with, with, with the sort of, um, approach that you would expect from countries that delivered Co response. Here's what we've done: we've escalated a war of attrition, number one; number two, we've simultaneously provoked a fight with China over Taiwan and got rid of a 78-year bipartisan policy on one China towards Taiwan, thus pushing the world's biggest manufacturing country into alliance with our enemy whilst we've got a war of attrition; and number three, we've left in place the exact same combination of disastrous procurement rules that killed tens of thousands of people in Covid. We've left all of those rules in running in the MOD, guaranteeing that the MOD can't build anything, can't bu anything. The MOD fiasco continues, right? It's hard to imagine a more stupid combination of policies. The massive winners from it obviously are China, who are completely laughing at this because China is now selling all of their stuff to Russia at massively inflated prices to blow up all our in Ukraine for free. Like, you literally could hardly imagine such a stupid combination of policies. Meanwhile, media coverage of all of this, as usual, is zero, zero. After the Co fiasco, what did the media do about procurement and killing thousands of people? Zero. Now we're literally in a war where nuclear threats are being made and calculated, still there's absolutely zero coverage of the fact that the MOD is a corrupt disaster zone, can't buy anything, can't build anything. So I think our attitude should be peace abroad, Bo regime change at home. We should be trying to change our own regime here from the disaster that we've had, we, we have, and stop trying to think that we can run complex Imperial Adventures as if we've got people in charge like Otto von Bismarck, with generals like Helmuth von Moltke from the 19th century. We haven't; we've got an idiocracy in charge, and idiocracies can't run empires, and they particularly can't run Imperial Adventure Wars. Next question. The guy in the baseball cap at the back. Could you speak up, please?

Cast College. Um, you've talked a lot about government contracts and how they're procured. My understanding was that bureaucracy was kind of put in place to prevent corruption and people giving contracts, contracts to their friends, which was kind of one thing that Ukraine suffered from, and we sort of saw during Co with Michelle O'Neill affair. What would the ideal government procurement process for contracts look like, and how should it work?

So the, the, the system, though the EU proc, sorry, the UK procurement system, um, in 2020 was a mix of mostly EU rules with some Whitehall gold plating on top of that, making most of things worse. So I don't want to, um, uh, it's not fair to say that the whole thing was an EU problem, um, for sure our own Civil Service made some of the core problems worse, but the fundamental framework for how procurement happened was, were, was the EU framework. It, it wasn't really, it wasn't created primarily to stop corruption, which is not the number one PR priority in Brussels. Uh, the framework was originally constructed, like everything to do with a single market, to enhance the power of the European Commission and Brussels over the EU system and to operate as a structure for the EU single market. So it wasn't set up with kind of British corruption and, and, or British MPs in, in mind. Um, I mean, obviously, it's a massively complicated subject, but in a nutshell, I would say this: if you go back to how Britain, America, and other countries did procurement in the war and just after the war, you see that they operated on completely different principles than they do now, and they also could build everything much faster and much cheaper than we can now. If you look at some of the things that, that, that are currently, uh, underway, we, we, I started a thing in government called Project Speed, which is to investigate the incredible length of time on some projects and to see how to speed them up. One of them was the A66 dualling, to take 30 years to dual-carriageway 18 or 19 miles of road at a cost, obviously, of billions, completely, completely insane. And the reason for that is because you have a whole set of things operating sequentially, so you have first, first decision-making cycle taking years, then you have the first planning, then you have the appeal on the planning, then you have a judicial review on the planning, then you have the environmental thing, then you have the appeal on environmental, then the judicial review on environmental, then repeat that for another two or three cycles of the same thing, each of which take two, three, four years, and then before you know it, a project that we would have done in 1950 in like a year, it's taking 30 years and at a vast expense. It's a problem across the West, though; it's not just a problem in Britain. America's got, has got, uh, very similar problems. Um, it started a lot of the rot in the '60s, where essentially the systems that were fast and efficient that we built in the war were replaced, partly under the pressure of the Vietnam War in America, they were basically systematically replaced with the, with the nightmare that we've now got, and has been resistant to all attempts at change subsequently. Um, and I think Covid and Ukraine have shown just how deep the rot is, right, and how pathological these institutions are, because normally in history, the things, normally in history, things that are broken carry on being broken until either a pandemic hits or a war hits, and then that's what forces change, and then you rebuild things. So like, in the mid-19th century in Britain, the Victorians built a whole bunch of public health infrastructure after various diseases. We're in so much trouble that we've had the worst pandemic in a century and the worst war in Europe since 1945, and everything is carrying on exactly as normal, and all of Whitehall's happy, and all of the media's happy, and all the political parties are happy, and it's a non-issue. Next question. Lady, identify people and what people?

Sorry. Um, so the things you identify ising problems with is the people and bureaucratic systems. Yeah. So to give it the chicken and egg treatment, which one do you think needs to change first? People, because there's no point changing bureaucracies if you've got the same people in charge, because the same, the same pathologies just continue. The only way that any of these things, the way to do it is basically what Elon did with Twitter, right? And the response to El, what Elon did with Twitter is itself shows a lot. Elon went into Twitter, found a completely dysfunctional organization, fired 80% of the people. What happened in the political world? The political world all said, right, this is the guy who built SpaceX. The political world and all the media laughed at him and said, "Hahaha, this idiot doesn't know what he's doing; he doesn't understand anything about management," right? This is, this is British Pol MPs and journalists saying this: the guy who built SpaceX doesn't know what he's doing. 58% of the PE, of the people, obviously everything is improved, and the rest of the valley is now firing 25-30% of people in company after company after company. So like, historically, you see the same, same thing all the time. If you actually want to change these things, you basically need purges. Stalin was right; you got to start with a purge, uh, if you're going to, if you're going to change British government, you have...

Need someone to go in and do what we started in 2020 and say we're going to start getting rid of large fractions of these people, both the Senior Management and bringing great people from outside. And then just there are just tens of thousands of jobs which are non-jobs, right? Especially now, GPT-4 could replace all of those useless emails to each other. You don't need all of these people to do these things. But the answer to the chicken and egg thing is the real answer; the chicken and egg thing is the MPS now don't care about government. That's the fundamental thing, right?

So people often argue, think that in Westminster everyone is like arguing about what's the best policy for that, what's the best policy for that, how to improve this, and it's just not how people spend their time. It's not what the MPS do all day. The MPS gave up thinking about government. What happens now is you have a fake system where the MPS walk up Downing Street, the camera, the media reports, rousing cabinet about the following is you. The MPS leave; they smile, and everyone pretends that cabinet is where power is and where these decisions are. It's all completely fake; cabinet is fake. The people actually running things, more than 99% of everything, are the officials who treat cabinet as a complete joke because it is a complete joke. The MPS are happy with this system; they don't want to actually take responsibility for the government departments and run them, as long as they're presented on TV as if they are in charge and the fake story is preserved. And no one says, yeah, actually you're not in charge, the permanent secretary is in charge. As long as that doesn't happen, then it's like WWE, right? The fake story is the real story in Westminster. So you're never going to change any of this unless you get a political force occupying number 10 that actually wants to, that cares about government and wants to change. And we haven't had that since Thatcher was in, and even she wouldn't take on the civil service.

Next question, gentleman at FR. Hi, sorry, I don't go to college, Benn. Um, I just wanted to ask you about your behavior, uh, and obviously driving up, go and see, uh, I just wanted to ask, would you do anything differently during the pandemic, personally, obviously about the political aspect, but on a personal level, do you regret any of the decisions you made, and uh, what would you do differently if the pandemic came a year ago tomorrow?

Um, so as I said before, there were various things about how the pandemic was managed. Um, I think everybody involved in in handling the pandemic would say that there were like many, many things that we obviously got wrong and that we, um, that if we could change them now, then we could do, because there were just like mistakes everywhere, dysfunction everywhere. Um, so in terms of the government side of it, loads of things. Um, in terms of, uh, in terms of myself, no, like the fundamental reason why, um, so going backtracking back in 2019, I had to move my family out of my house in London twice because of death threats from psychos. This problem resurfaced in February and March 2020, and the week before I came up here, drove everyone up here, I'd spoken to the deputy cabinet secretary, the security people, and said, uh, uh, 5 days before I drove up here, I actually had a bunch of people outside the house saying we're going to burn it down. I was in number 10 at the time; my wife and child were at home, uh, while this was happening. Um, police were called, etc., etc. So I spoke to the Deputy cabinet secretary and said, everything is chaos; we're in the middle of Covid; I've got these nuts outside the house; I'm going to put them in a car, drive them out of here. Um, and that was all agreed and treated and regarded as completely, uh, reasonable and not a problem. The problem came, uh, after the media story came out. Um, the details of it are sort of endless, and we won't go into them more, but fundamentally Boris completely changed his mind on how to handle the whole thing and then suddenly said to me on the day, go and you've got to go and give a press conference and explain what happened, whilst the security people said to me on the day, don't talk about security issues at your house because that will just make all of the problems worse. So the whole kind of way in which that was handled ended up being just a complete disaster. Um, but it was kind of, you know, the kind of disaster that happened when you got a PM who just changed his mind 15 times a day, unfortunately, which was what was happening at that time on on everything: rapid testing, the border controls. One minute it was like stop everyone at the border; 90 minutes later it was open the border. So that was all part of the kind of general, general collapse. What happened with Boris, essentially, was that immediately after he nearly died, um, his attitude was actually like the best of the whole time that he was PM. Um, his attitude was the system was completely failed; it's all collapsed; it's all got to be rebuilt; we've got to rebuild the NHS; I've got to fire Hancock; I've got to fire a whole bunch of people; we've got to turn this whole thing around. And he had that attitude for about, I would say, four to six weeks, and that was the zone in which we pushed through things like the vaccine task force and a bunch of other things that work well. Um, unfortunately, after that, that kind of mentality that he had dissipated, and by the end of the, um, and by kind of like late May, June, um, uh, he was he was in in a very different place.

Next question, lady over there. Yeah. St. Colge, do you think that given, um, all of the characteristics that set the UK apart from other EU member states, that, uh, UK membership of the EU was a mistake from the very start, that it could have been done right under certain circumstances? Very good question. Um, I think that as the structure emerged in the form of the Treaty of Rome, which we ended up joining, I think that that it was already a bad idea for us to join, and we should never have joined that in the first place. Uh, I think it was bad for us and also bad for them. Um, partly just because of the mix of legal systems and administrative systems that just, just don't work well. Um, having a common law system with EU law. I think there's another question though, which possibly you're, you're, um, uh, suggesting which is in the late, so between kind of 1945 and 1950 when Monet first started getting going with the whole idea for the European coal steel community, for the defense community, for the political community and everything else, the foreign office was basically incredibly arrogant and very foolish in how they dealt with him. They basically treated him as like the stupid Frenchman with his grand plans, and it's all hot air as usual from the French, and they all come to nothing, and we were very disdainful and kind of ignored it. Uh, but Monet was really a political genius; wasn't just full of hot air; was incredibly able and managed to get the White House on board with what he wanted and obviously then actually pulled off an amazing institutional, a creative institutional feat in getting the thing going. But I think if we'd engaged immediately after 1945 and said, here's our picture of how a free trade area and other kinds of cooperation could work, and it taken seriously that some kind of European institutional architecture was needed and tried to shape it, particularly given the German government at the time in the late 40s, um, I think that, you know, that is one of those counterfactual, interesting counterfactual things in history. I do think it's possible that that the whole architecture could have been developed in a different way. Um, there would have been much more suitable for us, uh, and for Europe. Um, yeah, obviously a mass of questions, but next question, uh, the lady in the jumper. Hi, Toby, bi from college. Um, so I think Boris Johnson envisioned himself going down in history as some kind of Winston Churchill-like political figure. How do you think history is going to look back on him?

I don't think it'll be very kind to him. Um, I mean, unlike most of the Tories of the last like 30 years, he will actually be in the history books because, um, obviously Brexit will, Brexit will be is such a big deal that Boris and the role he played in it is obviously going to be analyzed an awful lot for many decades to come. Um, I think the big, for me, like the big historical turning point really was summer 2020, and I think it's it'll be an interesting thing for historians, particularly as, you know, if the Tories completely implode and disappear, which they might do over the next few months, that in summer 2020 you had a weird confluence of things. You had a worst pandemic in a century; you had the Vote Leave team in number 10 who were committed to radical change and wanted to do it, and it's why we've done the referendum; you had the senior civil, the senior civil servants around number 10 and and 70 Whitehall in the cabinet office had seen the system themselves completely collapse around them in total chaos and disaster; and you had an 80-seat majority; and you had a prime minister who nearly died and blamed the Civil Service and the system for nearly killing him. So you had this moment of summer 2020 when everyone kind of agreed, right, everything is going to change; we're going to fire Hancock; we're going to rebuild the NHS; we're going to need a whole new economic plan; the whole center of how of these, these core deep state institutions at the center of number 10, treasury, cabinet office are all going to change in in in how they operate; a bunch of people are going to get fired; a bunch of people are going to get hired. I got agreement from the cabinet secretary to say that the fundamental principle of the Civil Service since the 1850s of this promotion internally is going to end, and all appointments will be opened by default, which is a revolution in British government. All of these things started to happen over a kind of 8-12 week period, and then Boris basically got looked at Starmer and said, Starmer is so bad at politics that I don't need to do all of this stuff; doing all this stuff is going to antagonize a lot of people; I don't actually need to do it; Starmer is so bad that I'll be able to win the 2024 election anyway. And secondly, of course, Carrie wanted rid of me and the Vote Leave team and wanted her own Spads running things because she was sick of trying to run things via WhatsApp from the flat upstairs. Um, another historical counterfactual is that if, um, if Boris had stayed with his first wife, like the whole history of the last four years might have been different as well, because his first wife, Marina, highly able lawyer, very, very smart, um, and during the referendum, like, so Boris is a character that kind of goes like this, right? He sort of like bounces around all over the place, but Marina kind of compressed his behavior and kind of stopped the peaks and the troughs from going to extremes; she modified his character in very important ways, whereas what Carrie did was she like exacerbated the kind of extreme bouncing around and the craziness. Um, so I think there's like a reasonable argument that, um, no, history often turns on such things that if he hadn't, if he hadn't ditched Marina, then, um, the history of the the last four years might have been, might have been very different.

Next question, lady there. As you said, the deal, it's barely mentioned because Starmer is obviously running an extreme safety-first effort. Uh, he thinks that, um, he, he wants to win back a whole bunch of the red wall seats that we won in 2019; he thinks that any mention about Brexit simply undermines his message in those crucial swing voters and crucial marginal seats; therefore, the less said, the less said about it, the better. The Tories, of course, have done nothing, so they've got nothing to say. Um, as I said before, they haven't even managed to get rid of the stupid cookie popup thing, so if you can't do anything, um, what's your, what's the story going to be? I mean, there obviously there are some things they could talk about, the vaccine task force and blah, blah, blah, but but Sunak and the Tories have so collapsed, they haven't got any message about anything, so why would they have a message about Brexit, right? They've just completely disintegrated as a political force.

College, uh, what is your take on the next European election and, uh, the political landscape that might emerge from it, and in particular, what do the, like your view on the possibility of having a coalition between Georgia Melone and the E, and in particular, what this could mean for the EU-UK relationship? Thank you very much. Um, so I haven't really been following it and don't, don't really have anything interesting to say about, about the European elections. Um, I think though, obviously, there is a trend of far-right parties on the up across Europe. Um, as I said before, it's bad; it's been getting worse over years. Um, unfortunately, I think it will continue because of a combination of economic policies, free movement, and the inability of the EU to grip its southern and southeast border. Um, so I think all of those problems are, all of those problems are likely to exacerbate, and, um, also the way in which the commission and a lot of governments are, uh, just increasingly hostile to technology, um, and are kneecapping their own tech sector in various important ways, uh, spells more stagnation and more, more problems for, for the whole of Europe, which is bad news, bad news for all of us. But, um, it's [Music] a, there seems to be very little opposition to the, to the current dominant views inside the commission, even after, of course, you know, they brought in GDPR, which is an interesting, interesting case study. The EU in GDPR thinking that it would, um, smash Google and Facebook and Co, when me and others pointed out to them that it would have the opposite effect, that GDPR would actually help, um, Facebook and Google smash entrepreneurs and small competitors, the commission all laughed and thought that they got it right, but everyone can now see what the actual effects of GDPR are. The idea that it was a disaster for Facebook and Google is obviously laughable, but they have, but they don't learn from these things; in fact, they seem to just double down on, on, on a lot of this. The story now on AI is Europe is going to be a leader, not in the technology of AI, but trust in AI, um, which is extremely bad news for European citizens because it means that they're not going to, their only choices are going to be which foreign countries to buy from; they're not going to have their own, their own companies.

Got in the green polo there. Oh, no, well, I couldn't see you, but yeah, you, um, Harry Bell, Hatfield College. Um, you've mentioned briefly at the start about how you spent time in Moscow after graduation, and of course, uh, that had only, uh, recently before you went been under, behind the Iron Curtain, and so you would have been there under the Yeltsin administration, which had its own problems with mafia and corruption, and I was just wondering to what extent, if any, uh, that was formative to your, uh, views in your career.

A lot, I think, in various ways. Um, so I tried to, the various business ventures I tried in Russia were, uh, unanimous failure. Um, nothing I did worked, really. I had a very interesting time, but, um, uh, I tried to, I worked with some people to try and get an airline going between Samara and Vienna, which was a great idea in principle, but we basically got screwed by a combination of, um, EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the local KGB and CIA, basically chased out of town. Um, but I think, you know, you learn an awful lot from things like that at an early age, uh, and I think it's certainly, certainly in good stead for dealing with Westminster.

Next question, gentleman there. Hi. Hi, my name's, question is, say if we managed to build a party of your kind over the next 10 years and was perhaps even more serious about changing the regime, how would you go about, um, deconstructing the civil service from the perspective of the party, is that, from the perspective of, from the perspective of the party, and secondly, would there be a struggle for legitimacy, um, in the sense that it could be seen as a coup, actually, really serious about it, um, both internationally and internally? How would you deal with that?

So I think you essentially, um, so the way you do it is you'd have a combination of, uh, a Civil Service Act to, to repeal the core features of the Northcote-Trevelyan system brought in in the 1850s and a bunch of other legislation that's come in subsequently. Um, and of course, the British prime minister has all sorts of powers that an American president doesn't have because he has prerogative powers, uh, on behalf of the queen. Um, so the part of the reason why everything is so bottlenecked now is that only the PM now has actual HR control of the government; no, no other political entity does. The prime minister is the only one that can say, um, whatever the perm sec of the MOD is a disaster, get rid of him today; no one else has the power to do that, but the Prime Minister does have a whole load of crucial powers like that. So if you basically pass primary legislation to strip out, uh, the, the core legal underpinning of the current Civil Service, um, explicitly empower the PM to control the government, um, and use the residual prerogative powers that have existed in the Constitution all the way along, then you can basically do The Purge super fast, um, and then get and, and, and, and then get moving. Fire maybe 80% of them, obviously, like depend a bit department by department, um, but none of those things can, can ever work when they're as huge as they are and as slow-moving as they are. Um, so you, it needs that combination of fresh blood from outside, from people who can actually build things, um, who are empowered to do that. A big, big problem now is that often politicians talk about getting in, you know, some great figure from business, but when the great figure from business looks at the actual job offer, he's like, well, I can't actually do anything in this job, like the first thing I want to be able to do, if you say go to the NHS, is fire a whole bunch of people and hire a whole bunch of people and change their incentives. Well, like those are the three core things, right? All three things, it's completely impossible to do. So you have to shift to a system where the government is actually in control of the government. Now we have a system where the government's not in control of the government, isn't trying to, and couldn't if it tried, just from legitimacy. Legitimacy will come through the enormous triumphs of the, of the new government. I think if it works, people are happy.

Uhon Bron South, so you, you talked a lot about, um, the civil service and, uh, just unnecessary bureaucracy in the foreseeable future. Do you see any government of any political party actually taking the fight you want on?

No, of course not, because they're not interested in it. As I said before, they're not interested in government and power and how to do anything. MPS now spend their, spend all their time trapped in the Westminster game with the media and about going on Today program tomorrow, um, and it's all just this incredibly short-term, frenetic, constantly panicky cycle, um, and it's just impossible to, to get them out of it. If, if you look back at 2016, 2019, right, Vote Leave team won both of those elections because we focused on reality and the voters, not on the media and Westminster. You'd think in a normal environment if people pull off elections like that, then other people will learn from what happened, but in fact, the exact opposite is the case; they completely reject the lessons of why we won in 2016 and 2019 and just absolutely carry on day in, day out with a model that doesn't work, and everyone hates it. It's so extreme that, um, with a few, few ministers came to see me in number 10 and asked for help, and I would say to them every time, but your department has three or four key things; stop giving interviews to the media; just focus on doing these three or four things, and if you do that in a year, two years, three years, you'll be a huge political success because you actually have achieved something, and just like switch your phone off from the journalists and stop talking to them. And you know what? Every single one of those MPS did, they would go back and they'd say to their friends, that guy Cummings, you know, I knew he was bad, but I didn't realize how evil he is; he's trying to get me sacked; he's trying to, he's trying to just completely do the, in that's, there, that was the MP's natural response to the advice, focus on doing well in government, don't focus on the media; they thought it was a trap to destroy them, and I think that tells you a lot about their, about their psychology of like how they spend their time and how they think their job, what they think their job really is. Okay, right at the back. Great. AR, you're dancing around, could you speak up please? The regimes that you admire today, the kind of regime you're articulating sounds a lot like China or Singapore or what Trump might want to do to the Deep State if you are re-elected. You've spoken a lot about what you don't like; can you speak about, I mean, I know you're a former PM, but are there modern examples of regimes that you do admire because a lot of what you talk about, like you had that interesting line, if it works, that's legitimacy. I mean, that's like the Chinese view, right? If, if you have enough economic growth, you don't need to be elected, so you just, I, I feel like you're dancing around this kind of anti-democratic aspect.

Well, it's not, it's not anti-democratic. I'm, I'm, I'm must, I'm must saying that, that, that we're going to abolish elections; quite the opposite. I think like our team is much better at winning elections than than than the others are, so, um, I'm not, I'm not, not worried about elections; bring on the elections, um, we'll smash the other parties as we did in 2016, 2019, um, but I'm saying that like the, the idea of the legitimacy of like really fundamental changes to the state, inevitably the voter's views on whether that's a good idea or whether it's justified are going to be shaped by what then happens, right? If we, if we purge the Civil Service, fundamentally change the system, tell everyone Northcote-Trevelyan was a historic error that led to the decline and collapse of Britain as the N Global number one power from the 1850s, and we're replacing it with a functional system, um, if that, if then what happens is the NHS falls over and things don't work well, obviously everyone's going to decide, well, that was a disaster, but if things work, then they're going to, then, uh, put it this way, MPS now don't care about management and don't care about the Civil Service and don't care about the wiring of real power, right? That's the MPS whose job it is, so imagine how little the average person thinks about the management structures of Whitehall, right? The politic, the BBC doesn't think about it at all; the heads of the St committees don't think about it at all; so like management is quite is a pretty esoteric subject. If we, if we do it right and it works, then everyone will be happy. As examples, you, you gave obviously like Singapore and China are extremely different, right? One is a nominally Communist Party, essentially a dictatorship, um, run on partly Stalinist lines; Singapore is extremely different to that. Um, now a critical thing of, of why Singapore has gone from a bogland, impoverish bogland with similar GDP per capita to, um, to Africa to somewhere considerably richer than us is because Lee Kuan Yew, who basically created the country, was a very similar sort of character to Elon Musk or one of these other like Titanic Silicon Valley figures. And if you look at what he did, like what, what I'm suggesting is not original to me, right? What I'm suggesting is, look, we should be doing what he did, and what did he do? He took extreme talent extraordinarily seriously; he made Singapore

Civil Service extremely friendly to the most able people, both in Singapore and all around the world. He paid them well; he made them actually responsible, and he gave them real jobs, not fake jobs. And he actually managed them, and he took power and he took management seriously. If you read Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs, you see an entire approach to how a country can work and how government can work, which is 180 degrees different than what our MPs now think. So yes, I do think that's a great—I do think that's a great model. I don't think from that that, like, the Democratic side of things in Britain should work the same as, um, as in Singapore, but for sure we could learn an awful lot about about how the Civil Service and other things should work.

And final point I'll make on that is that there's an incredible parochialism inside Whitehall, a kind of as if—as if Britain is still as well-managed and a beacon for management that it was in like 1890. In 1890, people from all over the world did look at what we did and say, "My God, like they're doing that better than anybody else; we should copy what they're doing." People are not doing that now. Now people are copying Singapore, but a lot of Whitehall acts like we're still the global exemplar for these things. And you could see that during Covid, and this incredible reluctance to learn from East Asia, even to the extent that when I suggested setting up a task force to actually go to Taiwan and Singapore and Korea and whatnot in 2020 to look at what they were doing, Civil Service were horrified and fought against it and stopped it happening. So yeah, I do think there's an awful lot we could learn from from things like that.

Okay, we're going to come on to final few questions. Uh, we'll take right in the back corner over there. Speak very loud. Hannah, great College. Um, you want to reform the civil service so that it performs as efficiently as private companies, but are you not worried about the incentives we have in place, that are there intangibles? So if you have a civil service filled with risk-averse people that don't submit to authority, will not like to be very concerning, corrupts, driven by politics, driven by ambition. So is it not better to have intelligent, risk-averse people, and then the dots of entrepreneurs like above them?

Um, obviously, it's a very tricky thing because companies fundamentally operate with um an extremely powerful mobilizing incentive, which is the profit motive. And it's therefore easy for them to optimize all sort of—sorts of decisions by saying, "Does this help us make, survive and make a profit or not?" Lots of questions in government are inherently much more complicated and difficult than that. Government is much more complicated and difficult—like puzzles—like what the hell to do about China, or what the hell to do about AI and nuclear deterrence, for example, are mysteries; no one knows what the right answer is. You're live dealing with things with just incredible uncertainty; there's no price mechanism to give you guidance. So you—you can't run the government like—like a private company, for sure. But what you can do is set up parts of the government with different kinds of incentives and different kinds of cultures so that they can have a large part of the dynamism of private enterprise. It's never going to be the same thing, because as you say, like the fundamental incentives are different. Um, but I think you have to try, at least in some areas at least, especially in things like how do you deal with crisis involving war or de—or death on a large scale. We—we—we must shift from those kind of huge big questions, whether it's like nuclear escalation with Putin in, you know, the next few months, uh, or the next pandemic, which could easily be worse. Bear in mind the democratization of Biotech Technologies over the next decade is going to make um pandemics much much easier to build and distribute. The only way—the only chance we've got of—of dealing with that is to create at least parts of the system that are explicitly authorized to operate in a very fast-moving, very dynamic, much much more entrepreneurial way, with actual people responsible who can build teams, fire teams, etc., etc. Not everything run through committees. And that is compatible with democracy. Britain's done it before; a large part of the British State used to—used to work like that. If you go back and look at how Whitehall worked in um in World War II, um a lot of structures were set up that—that work like that. Doesn't mean getting rid of democratic accountability, but it does mean changing things very dramatically from how they're done now.

Okay, penultimate question. Uh, [Music] Yeah, my name is C Thompson. I'm College. You've um been quite disparaging about the way this country is run. Do you think it will get better, or do you think uh sort of a railroad to destruction as it were?

Um, well, historically what tends to happen is that people, societies and cultures and political systems tend not to pull out of the kind of nosedives that we're in. And what tends to happen is that they eventually smash into disease, natural disaster or war. And then in that, the things that don't work get smashed up, and loads of people get killed, and then new things are built. That's the—that's the pattern of history. Um, it could well be that what's happening now, I think in lots of ways, is similar to what happened in the 1840s–1870s period. If you think about that period, you had the generation that had beaten Napoleon die out; you had this sort of tide of new ideas, new technologies. The old people in charge were thinking, "We're about to lose control of this; the kids are going crazy; the universities are going crazy; something's going to blow." It does blow; in 1848, regimes are toppled, wars start, new countries are created in Germany, Italy, all over the place. And by the 1870s, you have a completely—basically completely new Europe, um, uh, and the beginning of all kinds of like deep philosophical, spiritual crisis described in Dostoevsky, you can see emerge in that period that we're living with now. And arguably it's the same thing happening to us right; it's the war—the generation that fought the war was dead, um, new ideas, new technologies, governing systems are pathological and can't—can't adapt and can't cope; wars breaking out, can't cope with pandemics. And maybe we're just going to go this—you know, go through the same thing of um worse wars, worse chaos, uh, um, of course with nuclear weapons and other things as well, plus AI coming. So like there's no guarantee that things are going to—things are going to work out. Just because the '90s seem to be great doesn't mean that that's what's going to stay.

Okay, final question. Uh, right to the back on the right. Or my [Music] Right. Can you speak up please? My question's about civil servants and how you managed to keep a working relationship with them, particularly the senior Civil Service cabinet, because you led many media campaigns against civil servants, demonizing them, and very outspoken on your views of civil servants. So how did that work day-to-day in government and with policy?

Um, so bear in mind that most of the things that are written about that are fake news um and not true. The most famous thing I'm supposed to have said was that I threatened a meeting of 150 of them with a hard rain, which has been repeated in thousands and thousands of newspaper stories. Um, meeting never happened; comment never happened. So a lot of the things you read are not—not true. My relations with them were—so one interesting thing maybe for people here is that um a very kind of little-known institution is the Prime Minister's private office. So sitting within like 10–20 meters of the Prime Minister is a small group of maybe about 15 people, and they are um uh young; they're not very senior people, but they're recruited because they are thought to be like maybe stars of the future, and they do these jobs as private secretaries. Now the overall system um in lots of ways doesn't really make sense, but a lot of the people there are actually brilliant. I mean, I would go as far as to say if you swapped each of the private secretaries—they kind of mirror the area—so there's like one for Home Office, Deep State MI5; there's another one for Foreign Office MI6, etc.; another one for P blah blah—if you swapped each of the people from the PM's private office with the cabinet, it's like 100%, even though these people—a lot of them were like 30-year-olds—um, I would say unanimously it would be an improvement over uh over the cabinet for sure, and often by like a very, very big margin. CU some of these young people were absolutely amazingly good. So the—the environment was—was not the kind of environment that the media depicts of like we were all fighting—in all at war. There were some brilliant people there and working incredibly hard and working very effectively. The—the real problems were not between me and the Number 10 team, where relations were good; it was between the Number 10 team and the Cabinet Office and other parts of the senior civil service; that was where the real problems were. And in lots of those problems, me and the officials in Number 10 were actually on the same side; uh, we weren't on opposite sides; we were actually on the same side. Um, but going back to what I said before, very interesting thing, right? A lot of those brilliant people from that team are now—no—no longer anywhere around in Whitehall because they've looked around, and if you're very able, like as they are, there's a lot of other things that they can go and do, and a lot of them have left. And the people who failed and got things wrong in Covid have all been promoted; a lot of them got—have been given um awards of various kinds. Um, so yeah, so it's a—you know, it's a complicated—complicated, very mixed picture. But the last thing I'd say to you guys is like you're—you're all pretty young; most of you here are pretty young. Um, I think there is—so one bit of hope I would have is that my impression talking to—to people like you—so if you go back 20 years, a lot of the things I'm saying were seen as like completely crazy. Um, if you go and read the white Westminster reaction to stuff I wrote in like 2010 or 2014, the reaction was, "He's insane; we've got a railway civil service; the system is all brilliant; he's mental," blah blah blah. Fast forward to now, a lot of people realize that what I'm saying is correct, and I think particularly younger people realize that they've been lied to by the politicians; they've been lied to by the media. Thirty years ago, people like you basically like read The Telegraph, read The Guardian, saw the BBC and believed a huge proportion of what you read, even though it was—I think a lot of people of your age now realize that you've been lied to about all of these things. And you can see in your own lives like how difficult a lot of things are going to be, whether it's housing, all sorts of stuff, right? The system is badly—badly failed, and you're going to be paying the costs of the failures of my generation, and how my generation in senior jobs now has cocked up so many of these things badly. But you've got—so don't trust the media, don't trust the parties, don't trust the civil service. But you're young, and if you want things to go down a different path, you're going to have to go and build them; it's not going to happen with the people in charge now. So if you want things to change, you—you are going to have to find ways of building new things, in the way that has happened historically, where new generations of young people like you have looked at the situation created by older people who've got them into—got them into a war or some other disaster, and the young people have had to build—build a new thing to replace it. And that—and that's—that's your lot.