The Cummings storm
If Cummings is right about anything, it is that the machinery of government is not fit for purpose, and is staffed by poison-spitting incompetents. It is high time that this truth was given high-profile exposure.
On March 17th, much to the Government’s horror, Dominic Cummings gave evidence to the Science and Technology Select Committee on a new UK Research Funding Agency. The agency was Cummings’s baby. He had been arguing for years on his blog that the UK needed to develop a system of science research funding based on the United States’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. So important did he believe this matter, he had made it a condition of his employment as Boris Johnson’s Chief Advisor in 2019. Thus, the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency – the poetically acronymed ‘ARIA’ – was born.
The problem was that Cummings did not restrict himself to ARIA during his testimony. Cajoled by a few wolfish committee members, he moved onto one of his pet gripes – how Whitehall is essentially useless at everything.
‘Obviously, last year, we saw the Department of Health had a total disaster in terms of buying: how it buys, how it procures, how it does its science and technology. That is why we had to take the vaccine process out of the Department of Health,’ Cummings said.
‘Who’s “we”’ shot back the committee chair? ‘Number 10,” explained Cummings.
After just a month of pandemic, ‘the Department of Health was a smoking ruin’.
‘You had serious problems with the funding bureaucracy for therapeutics on Covid. [Chief Scientific Advisor] Patrick Vallance then came to No 10 and said [the vaccine programme] should not be run out of the Department of Health.’
‘Total disaster’… ‘smoking ruin’… insider information about who knew what and when… this was excitingly, solacious stuff. The press responded by not so much reporting what had happened as licking its collective chops at the prospect of Cummings returning for the Joint Lessons Learnt inquiry into the Government’s pandemic response.
Number 10, of course, would have been terrified by this prospect. The problem with Cummings, as far as Whitehall and Westminster was concerned, was not so much his ideas. It was his intolerance of the duffers who ran the place and his complete uninterest in the jobs-for-the-boys, SW1-adjacent career prospects usually deployed to keep such people under control.
Something, then, was going to have to be done to curb any desire he might have had to visit a future inquiry and answer questions in plain and honest English, rather than in the slippery legalese usually deployed at such affairs. For once, though, we can be glad our government is run by mentally indolent, panicky nincompoops who are pathologically incapable of fast forwarding the tape to see what might happen when they press play.
Number 10 decided to fire a shot across Cummings’s bow. It briefed the press that Cummings was bitter about the Government’s successes (an example of misplaced self-regard if ever there was one) and that he might well be the famed ‘Chatty Rat’ leaker, who had furnished the press with information about the Number 10 flat scandal, Carrie Symonds’s influence over the Government and private message exchanges between the Prime Minister and Sir James Dyson, the businessman, and, separately, Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
First, quite why allegations like this would somehow hobble Cummings, rather than force him to respond with the sort of denial that would only make things worse for Number 10, is one of those mysteries one finds oneself asking on an almost daily basis about this Government.
Secondly, another of Dominic Cummings’s peeves is that Westminster is populated by vipers who are more interested in poisonous leaking, briefing and gossiping than they are in the hard work of competently running the country. In other words, this sort of action was bound to get his heckles up.
Finally, if you are going to go at somebody like Cummings, you had better make sure you hit. Yet they had offered no evidence: just a suggestion that ‘if you join the dots, it looks like it’s coming from Dom’.
It was obvious that Cummings would spare nobody in his defence. In a post on his blog on Friday, he offered what might be called ‘a robust defence’.
Cummings wrote that he was not the leaker, and in fact, the Prime Minister sought to pressure the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office to stop the inquiry into the leak he himself had ordered. This was because, according to Cummings, it had fingered Henry Newman, then an advisor to the Cabinet Office, but also a ‘best friend’ of the Prime Minister's fiancé, Carrie Symonds. Cummings said that he told the Prime Minister it would be ‘mad’ and ‘totally unethical’ to try to stop the inquiry just because it might cause some bother at home.
On the refurbishment of the Number 10 flat, Cummings wrote that he had told Johnson that his plans to have donors secretly pay for it ‘were unethical, foolish, possibly illegal and almost certainly broke the rules on proper disclosure of political donations if conducted in the way he intended’.
As a final flourish, Cummings rounded off by saying he would hand over his phone to the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, and arguing that the whole affair should be handled by an urgent, under-oath, full-access Parliamentary Inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid crisis.
In other words, Cummings responded to the shot across his bow by launching a tactical nuke at Number 10’s position, and implicitly threatening that the megaton-range weapons might follow.
It is, of course, hilarious to see the preening roosters in Government brainlessly pecking at a perceived threat, only to get savaged by a fox. However, on this occasion, the Government’s idiocy has also done us all a favour.
It is of paramount national importance that a proper examination of our response to the pandemic be undertaken. How did the Government take a country that was a scientific superpower and one of the most prepared in the world, and plunge it into the disaster of the last twelve months? We must know the answer, because the proliferation of BSL-4 laboratories and ever-greater human contact with viral reservoirs in the natural world suggest that such outbreaks might happen as frequently as once a decade. We simply cannot have one year out of ten like 2020.
Furthermore, if Dominic Cummings is right about anything, it is that the machinery of government is not fit for purpose, and is staffed (both on the civil service and elected sides) by poison-spitting incompetents. It is high time that this truth was given high-profile exposure.
