Dominic Cummings’s plan to reshape the state
Why Downing Street thinks that to get anything done it must first fix the machinery of government
THE SUSPICION with which many Brexiteers have long regarded Brussels has come to be matched by an equal mistrust of Whitehall. After repeated delays to Britain’s exit from the European Union, many Leavers became convinced that bien-pensant officials were out to subvert the will of the people. Yet for Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser and brains behind the Leave campaign, the frustration with the civil service goes back much further. The subtitle of an entry on his personal blog, written in 2014, sums up his outlook: “The failures of Westminster & Whitehall: Wrong people, bad education and training, dysfunctional institutions with no architecture for fixing errors.” Some Eurosceptics want to put a bomb under Whitehall in order to get Brexit done. Mr Cummings wants to get Brexit done so that he can put a bomb under Whitehall.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “The Cummings plan”
From the January 4th 2020 edition
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