Cynics are wrong to roll their eyes at Cummings

This isn’t just about a revolution in government – given the demands of Brexit, it’s about survival

In 2010, Dominic Cummings joined the Department for Education as a special adviser. He is still recovering. By his account, there were certain things it was very difficult to do there. Printing in colour, for example, was a no-no. Editing collaborative documents online, a practice widespread in all modern offices, was impossible. As for getting hold of paper maps that highlighted school locations, forget it. The education budget may have been nearly £100 billion, but basic administrative functions were simply off limits.

Even as Whitehall remains trapped in Kafkaesque stasis, the use of new analytical tools is spreading at pace in the wider world. Across the river from Whitehall there is a charity with a staff of about 50 operating under the auspices of Guys & St Thomas’ Hospital. For one project it has built a simple set of maps using public data. They show that whereas childhood obesity is at similar levels across north Camberwell, spending on the issue is concentrated in just three wards.

It would, of course, be possible for officials to deduce this from a trawl through public data. But anyone in government who wanted to whip together this simple analysis in order to inform a live policy debate would find themselves facing days, if not weeks, of bureaucratic wrangling. They would enter, in Mr Cummings’ words, Whitehall’s “entangled disaster zone of personnel, training, management, incentives and tools”.

So Mr Cummings does want a revolution in government. But it is not quite the gruesome revolution feared (or fantasised about) by his most vocal critics, in which the ruling mandarins are shot and their bodies displayed on railings in Parliament Square while uneducated “weirdos and misfits” take over and unleash a reign of terror. It is more the sort of revolution that results in frustrated officials and ministers being able to use a Google doc.

Westminster attracts and rewards charlatans, so it is not surprising that most people view this agenda with an overwhelming sense of cynicism and déjà vu. Who can forget the criminally vacuous twaddle peddled by David Cameron’s tech quack Steve Hilton? How many times have the public been promised programmes and initiatives to cut “waste”? How much has been spent by brutish “efficiency tsars” roaring about “private sector best practice” and “delivery groups”? Mr Cummings is not the first baldy with an untucked shirt to prance into Downing Street preaching about data or Silicon Valley.

Still, there is something different about it this time. For one thing, we are at an extraordinary moment. Brexit will stretch every sinew of government. It is a state-building project but rather than being conducted in the chaos of a wartorn, newly drawn country, it must transform a state of ancient, entrenched institutions and a sophisticated and complex economy. To succeed, it needs to break from a tradition that has generated a backlog of government failures, from HS2 to Carillion, Theresa May’s abysmal negotiation to the financial crisis, Universal Credit, an array of botched cuts in social care, prisons and courts, the housing market, the Iraq War and flatlining productivity.

Brexit itself points to broader currents that will sweep up politicians, economies and nations. The explosion in data generation, the devouring reach of social media, the tectonic shift in geopolitical power and the depth and breadth of environmental destruction will place unprecedented pressure on liberal democratic systems. It is no exaggeration to say that we must adapt or die.

What’s more, the world around us is already adapting – or trying to. In China, the state is investing billions in totalitarian surveillance and social engineering systems to inform its decisions and predict or create trends. In Taiwan, the sort of democracy China might have been, a grassroots movement of hackers has invented a new tool to enable participatory democratic policymaking. In Europe and the US, radicals on the Left and Right are seizing control from established institutions to circumvent authority, take over or destroy political parties and replace traditional media. We are entering an age of accelerating, chaotic experimentation.

Mr Cummings’ premise is that our institutions are terrifyingly unprepared. His blog posts about government reform are full of bizarre jargon like the need for “Seeing

Rooms” and “Tetlock/hanson prediction tournaments”. But his method is not actually revolutionary. He writes repeatedly about “lowhanging fruit”, rather than pies in the sky. He argues that government needs to apply practices that have been shown to work in other fields, like computing and the military, to areas in which it is failing, like procurement and policy development. Rather than making decisions based on gut instinct, media grids and social media panics, it needs to rebuild itself around evidence, informed predictions and meaningful trends.

Most Westminster watchers will roll their eyes, but this is the folly of the cynic. Firstly, unlike many other so-called “gurus” who came before him, Mr Cummings’ ideas demonstrate surprising specificity, depth and affordability. They are worth trying. Secondly, also unlike those other tsars, Mr Cummings has actually been in government before and understands something of its inner workings. Thirdly, and most compellingly, this is a man who has been at the centre of two political events that blindsided the establishment: Brexit and Boris Johnson’s unprecedented realignment of British politics. It is surely the height of complacency to dismiss him as another false prophet.

The likelihood, of course, is that he will fail. The malfunctioning elements of the Whitehall system did not spring fully formed from the minds of mandarins. They came from the intrinsic difficulty of balancing vested interests against one another, the near-impossibility of managing large organisations well and the successive vanity and shallowness of politicians. None of these factors has gone away.

Beyond that, it is a caricature of the civil service to present it as a one-way, failure-generating machine. It is home to thousands of experts, centuries of institutional experience and legions of talent. It has successes to its name as well as failures: the UK’S high employment rate; its strength in science; infrastructure projects like the rebuilding of London Bridge station; effective digitisation in many areas of government. If Mr Cummings’ agenda is to slash and burn everything that went before simply to prove himself right and destroy David Cameron’s legacy, then it is a project of disastrous nihilism and vanity.

All things considered, however,

I do not think that is his shtick. This isn’t about the revenge of the “weirdos”. It is about survival. That is no eye-rolling matter.

follow Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel; read more at telegraph. co.uk/opinion

This is a man who has been at the centre of two political events that blindsided the establishment