Contra Cummings

Published on 12 January 2025

Dominic Cummings – Gove’s spad, vote leave architect and Bojo’s chief advisor – has a lot of interesting things to say about British politics. Many of the details he shares ring true, but his overall narrative always strikes me as rather incoherent. He’s forever trying to graft his own experience onto the ‘deep state’ memes from the US which don’t apply in the UK or other Commonwealth countries. We must be wary of the Americanisation of all political discourse, there’s no reason a-priori to expect their problems to be mirrored elsewhere. A remedy which might work well there might have a less-than-salutary effect elsewhere where the malady is different.

Some background we all learnt in high-school civics: the US is subsidiarist federation with ample power delegated to the states and municipal governments. It has a strong division of power between the executive and legislature, which is heavily balanced in favour of the legislature. The courts are very powerful but constrained by precedent and the text of the constitution. Within congress there’s a lot of power held by individual congressmen (i.e. those on important committees), and there’s further division between the two houses as well as partisan gridlock. There’s a chaotic jumble of federal agencies with overlapping and unclear remits which typically serve two masters as there’s a high degree of congressional oversight. Because power is so decentralised, NGOs, think-tanks and lobbyists all have reasonable prospect of influencing decision-making on pet-issues, so that you have a large and robust pluralist ecosystem in Washington.

It’s this extreme level of decentralisation which allows bureaucrats to amass power; the president typically struggles to get anything done given all the people he has to bring on board, he’s not going to start a fight with the FBI or the IRS. And his powers are very limited even if he did want to start a fight, congress has power of the purse etc. and so wields an unusual amount of power over the executive. The complex power-dynamics at play within congress mean that permanent bureaucracies can often play off different political factions against each other and have little to fear from comprehensive reform from above.

In contrast the UK is essentially an elective despotism. Over centuries the power of kings was transferred to parliament which has since been concentrated in the PM’s office. The only checks on his power are the rule of law, he needs the support of his party room and occasionally an election is held. That’s it. No wide-ranging judicial review based on the constitution, no states, no division of powers between the legislative and executive (he controls both with a majority, which is easy to achieve thanks to FPTP), the upper-house is a feeble house of review, etc. It’s true that in the past PMs have occasionally devolved power to local authorities, but this could be undone by an act of parliament very easily.

All this has happened in plain sight and yet somehow a lot of journalists and other observers have failed to notice. E.g. it’s common to bewail how much MPs focus on local constituency matters, like fixing pot-holes or dealing with bins or whatever. The implication is that they’re national legislators and their job should be legislating. But this is an anachronism, party discipline is such that no-one dares defy the whip, the job of MPs is to simply vote how they’re told. This leaves a lot of time to focus on potholes. With the exception of certain committees, parliament could be wholesale abolished without meaningfully altering the structure of power.

Similarly, a lot of people are under the profound delusion that the UK still has cabinet government. This is not true and hasn’t been for some time. Indeed, Cummings recently pointed out cabinet meetings are scripted. Even senior ministers are typically out-of-the-loop, ceremonial like the monarchy itself. This consolidation of power is mirrored in the bureaucracy. Observers often wrongly surmise that as the bureaucracy is so large, it must be very powerful; but this is the reverse of the truth. The unnecessary inflation of headcount typically occurs in parts of the bureaucracy which are defunct. They’re overgrowing like a garden no-one ever deigns to visit so that the fact the paths are no-longer walkable escapes notice.

The bureaucracy is tiered, as the powers that be constantly erect new, governments-within-governments to try to push their agenda through. It resembles something of a medieval city with its concentric walls, but the inner walls are newer in government, reflecting the fact that genuine power compasses fewer and fewer bureaucrats with each generation. Within the sprawling and mostly superfluous officialdom of Whitehall you have cabinet office, which arrogates to itself whatever policy areas the government deems important. If something is handled by an ordinary department or portfolio body it means it’s not a high priority. But cabinet office is still too large and unwieldy; successive control-freak PMs have instead tried to run a nation out of number 10, which is three small conjoint houses.

It’s worth noting that this is happening across the commonwealth. Where I am, number 10 and cabinet office are combined into the ‘the department of prime minister/premier and cabinet’. All decision making is done there. DPC have began to insert moles into the rest of the civil service, i.e. people nominally in the chain-of-command within a department are actually reporting into DPC and the premier. That this disrupts the operations of the departments themselves is irrelevant because, as I’m trying to make clear, they don’t have any power. Departmental secretaries and ministers both are often not even informed of major initiatives in their domain, much less consulted on.

One final aside, covid was an unusually large problem which required more hands-on-deck than occurs normally. The ‘all-of-government’ approach referred not so much to every domain area of government being involved, so much as the engagement of the ‘outer-rings’ of government in the health portfolio and elsewhere, areas which are typically too far-removed from the centre of power to really matter much. So yes, covid revealed the dysfunction of government, but only because it forced government to utilise cobwebbed areas of the bureaucracy that ordinarily would be avoided.

Given all of the context above, much of what Cummings says starts to sound a little absurd. For instance he argues that permanent secretaries were incompetent and overly powerful and, when asked why they weren’t fired, he laments that ‘only the PM can fire them’. With whom else should the power rest? If ministers were responsible for firing them then they’d be even more powerful, as ministers tend to go native in their assigned portfolios. Surely he’s not suggesting he should be able to fire them, as chief advisor he doesn’t have a constitutionally-defined role, his power solely derives from having the ear of the PM, which apparently he didn’t really have. There is a taboo against the PM firing permanent secretaries in the UK, although this has disappeared in many other commonwealth countries.

The real problem here is that Boris, and indeed politicians in general, have no interest in civil service reform. PMs have almost infinite power to change things in whatever way they want, but given that reforms typically result in negative headlines which is all they care about, they’re reticent to use those powers. Indeed the bureaucrats only have any power whatsoever because the politicians have no interest in governing. Just as slave-administrators often wielded a lot of power when the Roman emperor was busy in other pursuits, so too do bureaucrats wield power in the absence of political guidance. But it would be foolish to conclude that this means ‘slaves are too powerful’.

Even if ministers did want to run their portfolios, they’re much too stupid to do so. Cummings himself often admits they were the dumbest people in the room. Matt Hancock can’t run the health portfolio because he’s Matt Hancock, not because a cabal of powerful bureaucrats are preventing him from doing so. Anyone trying to disempower the civil service immediately runs into the brute fact that they have little formal power to begin with and there’s no-one competent to transfer their de-facto power to. Cummings’ own solution, 10ds, is merely an addition to the unelected bureaucracy he fulminates against; his bitterness at its disbandment by Starmer contradicts the central thrust of his narrative.

To put things in perspective, Cummings himself was probably the third most powerful man in government for a period, more powerful than any permanent bureaucrat. Insofar as he lacked the power to fix all the administrative problems he encountered, it was mostly because he couldn’t induce Boris to back all of his plans. There’s nothing wrong with the attempt, but to retrospectively claim he was thwarted by Whitehall is confused, he was thwarted by the fact Boris didn’t back him sufficiently.

Cummings’ ouster was supposedly because Boris’s girlfriend didn’t like him. This is a pretty common story nowadays in Westminster systems, anyone personally acquainted with a PM or premier has far more power nowadays than the bureaucrats, such is the degree of centralisation that’s occurred. My government is currently trying to ban 15 year-olds watching YouTube because a premier’s wife read Haidt’s book. It’s inconceivable that any bureaucrat in the country has that sort of power.

As the circle of people with power contracts, becoming an MP or a civil servant becomes less attractive as the likelihood one will ever attain a position where your work matters diminishes. Once upon a time simply becoming an MP was highly-esteemed, nowadays many senior ministers are mere figures of ridicule. Washington attracts bright young men and women because you can attain a position of importance without rising to the very top, Westminster systems are struggling to attract the same talent as it’s too big of a gamble to enter into politics.

Another frequent headline is that when a new government takes office they’re taken aback by how little assistance they receive. Starmer claims, upon becoming PM, that he was surprised that ‘there was no plan’. It’s really worth unpacking this sentiment, presumably Starmer thought it’d be like ‘Yes, Minister’ where the civil service would do all the real work. Those days are long gone, even if a PM wants to decentralise power back out to the departments he finds that their capabilities have atrophied from disuse. Here we see the exact opposite to what Cummings moans about, i.e. the lack of permanence because everything is managed from number 10 is degrading governmental performance. Starmer is, in effect, complaining that the permanent bureaucrats aren’t more powerful.

If I had to suggest a few small-scale reforms to the Westminster system, it would be something like this:

Political parties need permanent policy apparatuses which would allow them to devise policy from opposition and make them less dependent on the policy advice from the civil service.
Civil service policy advice should be published, which would fix a trend where PMs/premiers simply ignore all expert advice, then lie to the public and say they did such-and-such on the advice of experts.
We need to abandon the convention that ministers can’t criticise their departments, the convention which discourages PMs from removing secretaries, and we need further scrutiny of the public service from parliament and independent statutory bodies.
Cabinet collective responsibility also needs to be abandoned, so long as PMs are forced to own the decisions of incompetent ministers they’ll continue to deprive them of all power. One man monopolising all the power creates approval-bottlenecks where the government of the day can only do a few things at a time.
The transfer of decision-making from parliament to behind closed doors is a catastrophic blow to transparency. I’m not sure what the solution here is, but possibly long terms for MPs combined with greater powers of scrutiny. Parliament repurposed to air the disputes between politicians, advisors, departments and statutory bodies.
Greater affordances need to be made available to those who wield genuine power. The current system where you have huge departments for show while a tiny number of poltical advisors run things without any data is deplorable.
It’s unclear how to improve the talent pool that PMs have to select cabinet from, but the perpetual moaning whenever a party tries to parachute in a competent administrator into a seat that they don’t have ‘local connections’ is very silly. It’s not clear to me the American system where the president can select distinguished men from business and the military to head executive departments is all that successful either, typically they struggle to navigate Washington’s backrooms whereas senior ministers will have acquired relevant governmental experience as parliamentary undersecretaries and so forth.

This is hardly a bold or inspiring manifesto. But many of the problems are downstream of the fact that elections aren’t working to deliver quality politicians and the incentive structure is such that no-one cares much about governing well. It’s noteworthy that political campaigns are typically ran much more competently than governments, because people’s careers are on the line depending on an election outcome. The above reforms won’t even begin to fix the main issues with democracy, but at least the UK might hope to be governed as well as the US or France.