Dominic Cummings vs. Whitehall

This is the Cummings world view in a well-turned paragraph. This is classic Dom. The key to understanding his thinking is that he is anything but a conservative. The stress on freedom might align him as a liberal of a kind but Mr Cummings is better thought of as an iconoclast. The testimony that follows has him on his best behaviour – there are fewer rhetorical flourishes than he usually offers – but there are still characteristic flashes. Mr Cummings likes knocking things over. He is at his most fluent when he has a fool or a knave in his sights. That is why he was an effective campaigner for Brexit but addresses the committee from outside government. The very excess of procedure that he laments in this passage meant that he was himself ill-suited for the slow grind of government. 

This opening brings together two of his three big ideas – Brexit being the first – and displays Mr Cummings’s fear that one threatens the other. Not since Tony Benn ran the Ministry for Technology as part of Harold Wilson’s attempt to own the future has a senior political person spoken with such relish and, it has to be said, amateur expertise, about science. This is a genuine enthusiasm and there is something boyish and winning in Mr Cummings’s delivery. He also has a serious point; the importance of funding scientific discovery properly would unite him with unlikely allies such as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. 

But even if science funding can be sorted out, Mr Cummings’s real anxiety is that the delivery will be botched. Time and again in the committee proceedings he returns to the theme he opens with here, which is that bureaucracy is the enemy of invention and all the more so in a discipline such as science in which practitioners need to work unwatched by the regulators and the state. Just observe the language. Bureaucracy is not just an impediment. It is “horrific” and “very, very damaging”. It’s like a virus that targets creativity and kills it off.