Dominic Cummings is a dangerous man. Dangerous because he thinks he knows what he's doing and so does his boss, a man who is himself a fool. Johnson's huge parliamentary majority means they occupy positions of supreme power with little or no restraining influence or supervision to oversee what they're doing. After Brexit we will be beyond the reach of Brussels and the ECJ. The opposition will be helpless. Whitehall mandarins can only caution and offer advice or resign. I expect a lot of resignations.
Two significant things happened yesterday. Rachel Wolf, the person who helped produce the blueprint of Tory election pledges claimed in The Telegraph that many officials "cannot believe the Prime Minister and Dominic Cummings mean business", and "as a result, they seem woefully unprepared for what is coming". This is a call to arms, a warning that they really do intend to shake things up a lot.
It isn't just the EU that Cummings blames for our diminishing power, it's the entire civil service, the judiciary and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. We remoaners will probably be attacked soon - and even leavers who are only mildly enthusiastic for wholesale and radical change will come under fire. The number of the faithful who can actually see the Brexit light will eventually be very small indeed.
"Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Ms Wolf said reported plans for merging, creating or abolishing departments are just a 'tiny fraction' of the changes set to be implemented."
This is the British solution to any problem. Throw out the bath as well as the baby, the soap and the bathwater and start all over again.
Next, Dominic Cummings, on his own blog places what looks like an advertisement to recruit "weirdos and misfits with odd skills" to work in Downing Street alongside himself. It is widely reported this morning including this by the BBC. Cummings seemed to bypass the normal process and called for people to get in touch with him via a private Gmail address.
His 3,000 word blog post said:
"I don’t want confident public school bluffers. I want people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment. If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned."
Cummings obviously knows a confident public school bluffer when he sees one, having worked with Johnson for several years.
The most worrying thing is that Cummings has no track record in delivering good government policy and seems to equate running a referendum campaign with managing government. He cites Victoria Woodcock who ran Vote Leave as an example - "she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won. We need people like this who have a 1 in 10,000 or higher level of skill and temperament."
The Vote Leave campaign was a work of fiction. It is not the basis for a total rewriting of the manual for government.
Cummings has an odd faith in obscure psychological books and essays. His blog post begins with strange quotes from Eliezer Yudkowsky, Colonel Boyd, Charlie Munger and Alexander Grothendieck. I confess I've never heard of any of them. They could be experts on UFOs or parallel universes for all I know but Cummings laps up this sort of stuff. It's his equivalent of Johnson quoting tracts of the Iliad in ancient Greek. Everybody assumes you're smart if you can do party tricks like this.
Cummings and Johnson and Wolf are definitely acting like the new brooms. They are the public sector equivalent of a new management team being flown in after a takeover or merger of a private company. I have some experience of this. New brooms disrupt alright and they do sweep clean. Unfortunately, it isn't always the dead wood that goes. What tends to happen is the people you least want to leave get nervous - and leave, attracted by your competitor. The incompetents you really want to leave won't go because they can't find alternative work easily, and resort to tribunals or become a bit of gravel in the shoe on your journey to that brighter future - the one that never appears.
Let me take you through what happens when your company is acquired by another British or American company. Senior executives and managers are summarily dismissed or leave shortly after the takeover. A huge chunk of the businesses experience and instinct of the company is lost. A new CEO is appointed. He or she knows virtually nothing about the market, the company's position in it, the suppliers or the products they are making and selling.
Because the company is not performing well financially it's assumed a totally new approach is needed. Hence the new team at the top. I often see this written in The City pages as an indication of good things to come. It is, but only for a short period as the new team focus solely on the share price.
Decisions are made, almost always bad ones. Nobody at a lower level questions them for fear of losing their own job.
The downward spiral accelerates. Soon the CEO is asking advice of people way down the management chain and even on the shop floor. Their advice is ignored anyway. More good people quit because they can see the writing on the wall. More experience is lost.
After a while the new CEO might be fired and replaced with someone else. The whole thing goes through another iteration, more people are made redundant, even the yes-men who have been clinging to their jobs.
Eventually, the CEO starts to say all the same things and identify the same external problems that the original (now gone) management team used to talk about and we have come full circle but now with zero expertise to resolve anything. Once the organisation has been destabilised as Rachel Wolf seems to want, it is extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to recover. If she thinks the civil service is "woefully unprepared" now, wait until Cummings' 'reforms' are complete.
It will be far worse. We will truly be up the creek without a paddle.
The news breaking this morning that the US has killed Iran's military leader General Qasem Soleimani, in an air strike close to Baghdad airport will come as a sharp reminder that the real world beyond Brexit is very dangerous and we are likely to be dragged into it very soon. The Brexiteers favourite president tends to shoot from the hip first and think later - if at all. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has promised that "severe revenge awaits the criminals" behind the attack.
There are already more than enough psychopaths at or close to world-leader level, Johnson and Cummings are not going to improve matters, mark my words. They have yet to be tested by world events. Johnson will not be able to hide away from interviews when trouble starts and his honeymoon may be over very soon.
