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The Dominic Cummings approach to government: a beginner’s guide

The appointment of Dominic Cummings as one of Boris Johnson’s top No. 10 advisors caused a media storm last week, with the former Vote Leave strategist cast as some kind of shadowy Brexit Svengali. Cummings is seen by a certain section of Remain activists as the calculating mastermind behind the Leave vote – the man who turned a normal political campaign into a ruthless battle of data black-ops. Equally, his decision to freeze certain sections of what is now the ERG out of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign infuriated several Tory Brexiteer backbenchers.

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There have already been endless column inches devoted to what Cummings thinks and how that will play out in the Boris government. Luckily, our readers don’t have to speculate. Cummings maintains a sprawling personal blog where he lays out his views on computational theory, Cold War strategy and his hatred of chummy civil servants. So what can we learn from Boris’ chief strategist – and what a Boris government might look like – from his own words?

 

The Whitehall machine will be remodelled on the Chinese Communist Party

In many of his posts, Cummings argues that the civil service is ill-equipped to execute policy, and that ‘failure is normal’ because Whitehall has been built on a system of distorted relationships and incentives. In one section, ‘China: a culture of learning from systems management’, No.

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