News reports suggest that around 80% of people in the UK do not think that Dominic Cummings is a reliable witness. As a result they are likely to continue to believe that the Prime Minister has done the best possible job during the coronavirus crisis given that, they think, no one really knew what was going on.
I am no lover of Cummings, for reasons that I presume must be pretty obvious. I did however have three thoughts during his comments yesterday, which I watched in brief snatches and perforce having to rely on highlights others chose on occasion.
The first was that he seemed genuinely contrite. He may be a good actor. He probably is a good actor. But I had the sense that he was baring his own soul for good reason: he thinks he really did mess up. I have a golden rule when it comes to people admitting mistakes and offering apology, which is to always accept them. Experience has taught me that this is the basis for moving on. I think he was offering apology with the intention of personally moving on from an episode where he knows his errors were very costly, not least in tens of thousands of lives lost.
Second, I think he is genuinely very angry that others are not admitting their errors. I acknowledge all the peristalsis vendettas in this, and I am sure he is a man who can pursue them better than most. It is obvious that he hates Carrie Symonds, for example. Making that clear did not aid his evidence. But that, and his loathing for Matt Hancock, did not totally discredit what he had to say. Strip away the personal baggage and he criticised performance, most especially by Johnson and Hancock. Neither are up to the jobs that they have, the former because of personal vanity that makes him unfit to decide on anything, let alone govern, and the latter due to basic incompetence coupled with a willingness to pass the buck. It's hardly a surprising conclusion, but it was one delivered with some force.
Third, let's not forget that this is not a game. I fear far too many will be seeing it as just that. And as melodrama it does, of course, have appeal. But this is about something much more than that. This is about the fact that millions died, including up to 30,000 in care homes who need not have done so. And it is about people with long Covid now. And as vitally, it is about when we lockdown again this time, because case numbers are now rising again and the chance of there being another need to lockdown looks to be increasing. This then, is about a learning process. Cummings had experience to offer on that, and showed that a lack of preparation and a willingness to accept deaths as an economic trade off imposed an enormous cost on the country - from which many in the NHS will take a very long time to recover. The assumption that they are as ready for another crisis now may well be very misplaced.
So what to learn?
First, that we do not spend enough on the civil service: they had not done the preparation needed here.
Second, the obsession with the media newsround is utterly destructive of good decision making.
Third, Cummings is right that a political system that offered Johnson v Corbyn in 2019 was not fit for purpose. It is vital that we have reform.
Fourth, the Cabinet is not a functioning decision making body and so too much is left to the Prime Minister. The Cabinet should be much smaller to work.
Fifth, record keeping is vital.
Sixth, assuming minsters must be MPs is a mistake. There should be mechanisms to bring people with the right ability into office. The US has that: their Secretaries of State are not drawn from Congress or the Senate. In Norway ministers are appointed based on experience they have to offer and usually service single terms. We need to think broadly on this. The pool of talent amongst those who want to be MPs (and why would you?) is far too small.
Seventh, we need a public inquiry. In particular, we need to know why this issue was not taken seriously. I am baffled as to how and why I could work out by the beginning of March 2020 that we were going to require radical economic reaction, and published bogs saying so, and yet the PM and Cabinet could not see the issue.
Eighth, anyone who still believes in Johnson when the evidence to support what Cummings said about him in February and March 2020 is compelling, needs to ask serious questions about their own judgement.
Ninth, if we have another lockdown the time for Johnson is over.
Tenth, ask the serious question as to whether Labour could have done betterI? If not, wonder what broader political reform we need.
In other words, even if you doubt Cummings credibility and motives, see through them to the implications. They are unavoidable, and very serious. I think his evidence will have a real impact as a result.
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I agree with you about Cummings – though how culpable he is in any legal sense as opposed to the minsters concerned I have no idea – but he seemed to speak with candour.
As for Hancock – tell me – would you buy a used car from that man? Shifty – that’s what he is – he can’t hide it in his face at all.
The 80% you speak of? Tangible. After 10+ years of austerity we now live in a society of very low expectations. Even if Boris just got out of bed during the pandemic, too many would say that was good enough.
Why is Boris popular? Maybe because those who like him see a bit of themselves in him? Highly likely that he does not conform to the image of a modern politician in many ways – he’s disorganised, disheveled and shambolic presentation screams authenticity to people who have grown weary of the long line well presented but lying politicians who have told them that they can’t be of any help.
Hopefully upon reflection, the 80% will realise that disorganisation, dishevelment and shambolism are not really very good attributes to get you through a national crisis.
Shakespeare is always instructive. I see Cummings as Buckingham in Richard 3. A bad man but he had his limits. Just because a man is a liar and a rogue doesn’t mean that he is also comfortable with being involved in 100000 deaths. That requires a very special kind of narcissism.
There was sufficient of Cummings testimony which had the ‘ring of truth’ to be plausible. I mean by this testimony that acknowledged the fact that Taiwan (significantly, an island) had provided the ‘gold standard’ response, which had been ignored; and we failed to close our borders – and we failed to close them because the PM puts ‘trade’ before health. All this fitted with what we could observe or deduce from the evidence that had been provided through the pandemic. I know this because I wrote about the consequences that followed for Britain because of the failure to follow the Taiwan precedent in Bella Caledonia in January.
There was, however something even more important in Cummings testimony; that which was not there, that of which revealed the degree of failure in central Government, that even now Cummings did not factor into the reasons for the disaster that engulfed Government. I mean the fact that the British, and specifically the Boris Johnson, Conservative failure of leadership was not simply the result of policy failure made from the first January failure to lockdown, but the long term consequences of Conservative policies of austerity from 2010, that systematically dismantled the decentralised public health structure in Britain, and all the pandemic preparations, including PPE (see Cygnus Report that warned of the inadequacy of preparations in 2017); the restructuring of Public Health at the centre, and in an incompetent form that was incapable of fighting a pandemic. All that was left after that disaster (of which cummings appears still deep in ignorance) was the decentralised rump of public health left standing in communities, and the NHS at the front-line that had to fight the pandemic on their own: while Westminster pandemic policy melted down, and the neoliberals went on a catastrophic Government spending spree of private sector, non-productive self-enrichment.
This catastrophic failure of government was not the recent blunders, it was ten years in the making; and there is no hiding place for that appalling failure; for it was done in the name of Austerity, and it has cost us all dear in lives and treasure.
The irony is – the Taiwan model was far more decentralised than the disaster the Johnson-cummings-Hancock blunderers built in Downing Street. Scoltand needs to escape this lunacy as fast a s possible.
Thanks
Richard – kudos to you for bringing on the important points and rising above the personal regarding Mr Cummings.
It is not true that COVID was an entirely new challenge. The UK, working with CDC and the people and government of Sierra Leone built the digital infrastructure and processes for the Ebola response from nothing – just pause to imagine what that was like. Test, trace, isolate, preposition supplies, work through local health systems, link political and operational decision making and drive from the bottom up – it was all there. We knew Cummings’ approach was right and we knew the political layers were unmoored from realities on the ground. But there was no channel of communication through the SW1 thickets.
We now need calm, pragmatic, forward thinking, creative problem solvers from across the political spectrum prepared to level with the public and work together. Nothing else will pull the UK out of this belligerent, partisan, chaotic mess.
Cummings said he got it rong
I am not at all sure I follow your logic here
My clumsy phrasing, sorry. There has been a lot of noise about personal incompetence, and political philosophy, and humanitarian tragedy. But considerably less so about what exactly is broken, and where. Without this, it is impossible to assign responsibility let along judge individuals. So this is my ten penny’s worth of illumination from the trenches.
I support what Mr Cummings says regarding civil service having bright people but a broken process. Innovative ideas are there, and private interests are absolutely critical to achieving them. The issue seems to be the absence of a robust national framework manned by forward thinking people to tie the operational innovation in with the political aims and the public good, hold everyone to account, and manage the processes, especially procurement – in short, a good governance structure.
I think Mr Cummings is culpable in that he did not get this right. He hung off Mr Johnson in order to to achieve a position in which he could change something that badly needs to adapt, but came up against a wall of civil service structure that blocked him on one side, with Mr Johnson’s commercial interests and entourage on the other. Mr Cummings is very bright and a gifted conceptualiser, but lacks the range of negotiating skills, and is effectively dependent upon patronage – which we all know destroys proper governance. There are fantastic people on both sides of the mix. I can sympathise with his frustration. It is not easy.
COVID response required clear strategy, cross govt collaboration, and an infrastructure that enabled coordinated action and initiative. What we got was a mindset geared to commercial trade deals at the strategic level, a bun fight for competitive contracts at the top, an obscure but clearly contentious environment in SW1; mid level civil servants tasked with ‘making it happen’ with no mandate or support to innovate and zero experience in crisis management defaulting to protecting their institutional turf, and utter chaos on the ground.
The awful thing is that the secure infrastructure to run a live, operational crisis response at scale actually existed inside Govt all along. With experience working across departments and in an international environment, in managing a pandemic crisis. Not in the NHS, which is not geared to crisis management. Not in Parliament. Not in Whitehall. Not in Serco et al. In the FCDO and MoD.
If a proven mendacious evil genius – say a Himmler or for these who only live through tv fiction,a Davros – suddenly says they are ‘sorry’ whilst never admitting the whole truth; then I would say it is wise to NOT take it at face value.
When his interlocutors represent the same cause I’d say they should equally NOT be taken at face value.
What was done yesterday was a massive public brain washing.
By the Brittannia Unhinged machine with their head engineer – never elected for anything – getting a free platform for his mesmerism.
The Committee is as fixed as the Government it has no intention to ‘hold to account’ – I posted my thoughts on the previous article.
We must not forget Cummings is the architect who divided the country and families using foreign billionaires and DS high tech social media weapons. I agree 100% with your tweet yesterday about him. Let’s avoid buying into the new narrative and memory binning that is being undertaken through the compliant media.
He is just another mundane evil little arsehole and will be remembered as such in posterity.
I did post that he was an arsehole on twitter yesterday just to set the record straight
It was quite popular
Much of what Cummings said has a ring of truth, but as the Russian saying goes, ДоверÑй, но проверÑй (trust but verify). Let’s see the evidence, above and beyond the few snippets of documents and whiteboards he has shared. Perhaps Hancock is an inveterate liar, like his boss, but where is the proof? And then it is a partial account. Amid the layers of self-justification and self-exculpation, and support for his allies, quite a lot was left unsaid, eg about the role of Michael Gove, or Sunak bringing in the Barrington Declaration people.
Despite what John (correctly) says above about the hollowing out of public services, Cummings is still hostile to them. He said, explicitly and implicitly, that what was needed was small capable teams picked by a “dictator” at the head (and no doubt spending heaps of public funds with little oversight, and contracting everything out to the private sector, which is a recipe for corruption). In a sense, that is what Johnson represents – just that “capability” is measured in the ability to win elections, not necessarily achieving results for the people.
I am not sold on Cummings
I whole;ly agree he was selective
No one really pulled him out on Sunak and Gove was let off very lightly
BUT what he did say was largely capable of corroboration
That is what I am relying on
For the avoidance of doubt I agree with you about Cummings hostility to public services; this was what I meant by “that which was not there”; his deep ignorance of the real nature of the pandemic problem. The fact that the Johnson Government is incompetent provides no cover for the deeper truth; the ‘elephant in the room’: ten years of Conservative ideological obssession with the false god of Austerity, destroyed the capacity of the country to fight the biggest risk facing the country (and known to be the biggest risk for years): a pandemic. Cummings, like the rest of them still does not understand the problem. He too is lost.
His view of a “dictator”, and the 1% supposed ‘exceptional’ is itself absurd; but fits better with the fact that from the evidence of his blogs, he is a eugenicist. The deep irony here is that the decentralised Taiwan system is not based on dictatorship or genius: just competent government that develops the power to fight a desperate pandemic within communities; and by closing its borders, fast and firm.
Taiwan has a population of almost 25m; it is an advanced country, it closed its borders, it provides those who quarantine with personal support and services, it currently has few restrictions on ordinary life, the economy is growing GDP at 2%pa right now; and Taiwan has suffered a total of 9 (nine) deaths from Covid. QED.
I think we are violently agreeing that we would have been better off from day one with better public services. I doubt Cummings shares that view. He seems to see public services in general, and the civil service in particular, as the problem.
Taiwan is pretty exceptional like New Zealand: 5 million people, 26 COVID deaths.
But then Australia has 25 million people and under 1000 deaths. For all its early faults and missteps, South Korea has 51 million people but fewer than 2000 deaths. Japan, 126 million people and 12,000 deaths. It can be done. Deaths per million of 35, 38 and 99. The UK? Even if you go with 127,700 deaths, that is over 1,800 per million. We feel good, comparing ourselves to Italy or Brazil, or about as bad as the US, but we are doing 20 or 40 TIMES worse than some comparable places. Total absolute failure.
Hello
I didn’t watch any of this. My only information is second hand.
Is it true that Cummings basically said nothing about Rishi Sunnak and also Michael Gove?
If so, how is it at all possible that Rishi Sunnak does not have a similar level of responsibility as the rest of the cabinet, for the disastrous government response to this pandemic?
I’ve read that Cummings thinks Sunnak shall be the next PM and Cummings might well be wanting to keep his options open for a return to government.
Michael Gove is just a snake. He’s influential but makes sure he’s never in any position to take blame.
He’ll be manipulating things to his advantage.
I don’t know what to make of Cummings. He can’t be a liar only when it suits my political stance. Equally, what he says is plausible.
There was little on Sunak and Give was dismissed as peripheral
Sunak was key to the September delay
“News reports suggest that around 80% of people in the UK do not think”
Had the news report stopped at that point it would have nailed it.
Serfs, peasants, morons, groomed by the media, they voted toryscum 4 times in 6 years – they “own” in the fullest sense that choice.
The death toll of 140,000++ (gov stats always underestimate) is a direct outcome of this political choice, driven by the political/media system and the media grooming system.
The UK (soon to be FUK – former UK – I’m asking the Commission to make “FUK” the official acronym once Scotland leaves) will continue to spiral downwards.
At the risk of repeating myself: the latter parts of “Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” decribes an election in the 1900s, the description would fit the election of 2019 (or 2017 or 2015). There needs to be root and branch change – there will not be – short of a revolution.
Agreed, but would add number 11 – the need for criminal liability. The analogy I use is that of a gang that went around assaulting and killing members of the public. By now (16 months on) the clamour for police action would be overwhelming. Even at the level of corporate manslaughter I think that there is a case to answer. Moral hazard is clear: when there are no sanctions, behaviour repeats.
The rot started under Cameron and May who decimated the Civil Service, I am not convinced bringing in non MP’s as ministers is a good idea – look at David Frost for example – enobled and in the cabinet just because he is a Brexiter, not because he is good at anything
I’m a turning into a bit of an old codger too!
I’m afraid the rot started well before. It was a step change with NuLabInc under Blair.
Don’t forget sexed up Campbell and his WMD ; and don’t forget Adonis who destroyed free education.
Etc.
‘Spass’ came into their own from thence – no one talks about quangos anymore.
Spads I mean.
80% thinking Cummings unreliable seems fair, assuming the other 20% are those who take no interest in politics or government at all. That isn’t to imply the things he recounted were inaccurate, simply that he was so selective about what he said as to be deceitful. It is clear his descriptions favoured his own role, and surprisingly that of a few selected ministers, while at the same time being vindictive towards Hancock in particular. His contrition didn’t go so far as to own up to previous untruths, in particular the sight test story though it seems he got a little closer to admitting he went on a family joyride simply because he thought he was above the rules the rest of the country were abiding by at the time.
What he has done is put an inside account on the record, which will inevitably define much of the agenda of an eventual inquiry. It will make it far more difficult for Johnson to limit the scope of that. But only at that point will Cummings’s own role become clear, from his account he was merely an ineffectual bystander which somehow seems improbable — though to be fair it is politicians who ultimately have to take the responsibility for the decisions however made.
I agree with you that one lesson from the recent period is that it is time for Britain’s famously unwritten constitution to be codified. The main reason though is the way Johnson has consistently tried to undermine it (thinking prorogation, court cases, deliberately preventing parliamentary scrutiny — and it would be interesting to hear Cummings’s role in that). I am unclear though that the constitutional solutions you propose are the best, but certainly worth discussion.
The dreadful choice presented in 2019 of Johnson or Corbyn as Prime Minister certainly suggests problems with our party system where only two parties have any realistic chance of political power meaning that they are each contain a mix of incompatible factions vying for dominance. It might indeed have been better if Tory extremists had been a different party from sensible Conservatives rather than bullying them, and similar with those sections of the Labour Party hankering after an imagined socialist nirvana. Even so, countries with more proportional electoral systems don’t seem to do a lot better at choosing party leaders.
I don’t myself see that unelected ministers would solve much. Was Trump’s cabinet so much better? The problem is the person doing the choosing. Until Johnson threw them out there was a reasonable pool of potential ministers of experience and stature in the parliamentary Conservative Party. Would an unelected Cummings have been that much better than the elected Hancock?
Finally, it is important that an eventual inquiry does look at where bad Covid decisions were avoidable. My feeling is that it would be difficult to be sure about that for March 2020 when governments worldwide were struggling with a threat that was poorly understood and inadequately prepared for; certainly we can’t judge that using our hindsight with its much better understanding. There are though lessons for the future in it. But for the UK there were points in September/October and even more so in December when the consequence of decisions was sufficiently predictable that Johnson’s government need to be accountable for the illness and death that resulted directly from their choice of decision.
In the book ‘Failures of State’ Gove is portrayed as quite rational and capable but some what side-lined by Johnson’s irrationality and minute by minute indecision.
Sunak on the other hand comes out of it covered in merde – and rightly so. It is a puzzle to me why Sunak would get off so lightly. Maybe Cummings just does not take him seriously?
I mean c’mon – do any of us?
And BTW – Mr Warren is totally correct about austerity – note how not even any of the Tory MPs during Cummings testimony seemed to get this – and again the book ‘Failures of State’ goes into the affects of cost cutting from 2010. We were ready for a pandemic from 2003 and up to 2010. Beyond that, our preparedness (the 2nd best prepared in the world according to the book – bequeathed by New Labour to the nation) was undermined by the society destroying zealots in the Neo-liberal Tory party.
Cummings foollows the same logic as Groucho Marx, who famously said he would not want to be a member of a club that would accept people like himself as a member. Likewise, Cummings regrets working as adviser for a Prime Minister who appointed someone like himself as chief Prime Minister’s adviser.
Much of what Cummings said seems highly likely to be true, however it appears he was selective with the truth. Stephen Reicher, behavioural psychologist on Sage’s SPI-B, and of Independent Sage commented on Twitter
“More evidence that behavioural scientists did not delay lockdown by invoking ‘behavioural fatigue’:
SPI-B rejected the notion in its minutes of 12th March
SAGE rejected the notion in its minutes of 13th March
Cummings is WRONG”
Other scientists from SPI-B also rejected Cummings’ claim, in this article https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/26/scientists-reject-cummings-claim-that-their-advice-delayed-first-uk-lockdown
There is no doubt Cummings was selective
But then, every human is
I also accept he may have been deliberately so. I have not moved to a position of trusting him. That does not mean that where there is corroboration- and there is on much he said – that I dismiss him
A number of people have suggested that Cummings may be trying to rehabilitate his image so he can back a new leadership candidate – Gove, or Sunak?