a secret process has evolved inside government. Every single thing pretty much that I've just described in the last five minutes was either deliberately closed by Boris or the system just closed it down and Boris didn't even know or didn't care. >> Some people would say, "Well, you put Boris in, so you bear a fair share of the responsibility." >> Today, nobody on earth can say, "This is how many people came in last year. This is how many people left." All the numbers are complete fake numbers, right? The single most striking thing and I would challenge you as an MP to argue against me is >> Hello and welcome to quite right. I'm Michael Gove editor of the spectator >> and I'm Meline Grant, assistant editor and parliamentary sketch writer at the spectator. This week we are joined by a very special guest Dominic Cummings. >> Now Dominic was my colleague at the department for education. I suppose in Philip Pulmanesque terms, he was my demon during that time. But he went on to become the devil in the eyes of many as the campaign director of vote leave and as the principal adviser when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Dominic is nothing if not controversial. For some people, and here I'll lay my cards on the table. He's original, brilliant, insightful, and creative. For other people, like my old friend David Cameron, he's just a career psychopath. But you will have the opportunity to hear from Dominic direct as he talks to Maddie and I in this twopart conversation. And in the first part, Dominic will take us into Whiteall into what he calls the heart of darkness. And we'll discuss what went right and what went wrong under Boris Johnson's premiership. And in particular, we'll look at the vexed question of co where both Dominic and I are in the dock. I think it's fair to say that in numerous different ways, in numerous different departments, and in an increasingly palpable way to ordinary people, the country is in a mess. How did we get here? And is it fixable? >> Wow. Going in with the big one, right? To to kick off. I guess the big the the the I think the big picture of of it from my perspective is that you have um what we're watching now is the same process that you see repeatedly historically. You have a set of institutions and ideas that grow up in a certain period and what happens is that these institutions and ideas and the people who believe these ideas get pulled more and more out of reality as time passes. the difference between the ideas and the institutions on the one hand and reality on the other hand gets wider and wider and wider and then eventually the system falls down into the gap between the two. So you see this happen every few decades in Europe. You can see it say in the mid-9th century in 1848 you have the old order of 1815 the international order the domestic order. You can in the 1840s everyone can sort of feel that things are falling apart. They fall apart in 1848. Over the next decade a completely new world emerges and essentially the same thing I think is happening now. the ideas and institutions of the post 1945 world, whether it's the EU, the UN, all of these sorts of things, the institutions, NATO, the ideas, they're falling into the gap. And it's extremely hard for established elites to say to themselves as this process is happening, everything we believe is turned out to be wrong. uh institutions are useless and they need to change because you have a lot of power and a lot of money locked into keeping the old things on going right >> so that's why historically I think the process or it's never one of like it's very rarely one of gradual change the English process is is is unusual but even there it's very it's jagged it's much more normal historically to see sort of periods of relative stability and then crisis and collapse. We're going through that sort of thing now. The old parties are knackered. The old whiteall is knackered. The old media is knackered. The old universities are knackered. They're all knackered simultaneously. But of course, there's huge power of money involved and they can't turn around and or they haven't been able to turn around and say, "Okay, let's face up to these problems and adjust and change how we're going." as you've seen in crisis after crisis in the last decade, it's just double down again and again on doing things in the old way and if you don't like it then you're fascist, you're extremist, etc., etc., etc. So, they're driving themselves into a kind of deeper and deeper systems crisis um with each turn of this cog. >> And what do you think are the for for British citizens, what are the uh most vivid morbid symptoms of this failure? So, what's most going wrong in the country at the moment? Well, I think we're we're at the point now, right, where pretty much every every major institution is either failing or it's under attack pathologically from from Whiteall. So, um you know, we saw in COVID, right, the the the two big successes were um doing vaccine research faster and doing rapid testing. Both of those things were immediately closed down. You have a war with Ukraine, but instead of actually fixing military procurement, you make procurement worse and worse and worse, and you now have all these people coming back from Ukraine saying, uh, this is the truth about what's happening on the battlefield. And White and the MOD says, "Whatever you do, don't tell the senior officials and the senior MPs and senior ministers the truth because we've got to have more bigger tanks." And you have NHS obviously imploding. You have public order in crisis. You have no go areas all over the country expanding. You have collapse of confidence in the police. And then you also have sort of tragic comically you have um Whiteall, the Cabinet Office and the MOD spending huge amounts of money and legal effort to wage lawfare against British special forces at the same time. So exactly the sort of completely pathological behavior you would expect from a system that's on its last legs. And do you think that there are people in Whiteall and in the mainstream political parties who appreciate this even if they don't acknowledge it as fully as you'd like them to? >> I think there's very few inside the parties I don't know what your impression of this is but my my personal experience is that the conversations I have with people that are most realistic about this ironically in some ways are actually with kind of deep state officials. They're the most likely, first of all, they're the most exposed to the actual most pathological toxic behavior and its consequences. They understand it best, whereas MPs and journalists really don't understand obviously a huge amount about how the system really works behind the scenes. Right? So the most interesting conversations I have with people about this are either with total outsiders or with the most insidery of the insidery people in the cabinet office or whatnot who have lived it all and understand it with fingertip feeling. >> But the MPs seem to me almost like almost completely clueless. >> You mentioned the lawfare against British troops. In fact, your your wife Mary Wakefield wrote a fantastic interview with a former SAS regimenal commander I think for our magazine which for me was was kind of baffling and eye opening. Yeah. >> Where is this coming from and who's leading the charge on it? >> So it's a it's a as you say that interview is great and I would strongly recommend your listeners to to look it up. If you just Google Mary Wakefield and George Sim and the SAS you'll find it. But so that's an interesting case life because George and the people he worked with in the SCS then were taking down the IRA in the 80s and early 90s. They were given medals for the operations. Mrs. Thatcher went and visited Heraford and said, "Brilliant job in extremely difficult circumstances. Well done. You're all heroes." And the exact same people now in their 70s are being told you're going to have to lawyer up and find money from somewhere because um you may be facing murder charges. Where's the chain of command on that? Tom King is still sitting in some cottage in his 90s. No one's arresting Tom King, >> right? Is that the defense secretary? The >> defense secretary at the time. Right. So these these soldiers were the people who were ordered to go and do this by the prime minister then given medals for their efforts in extremely difficult circumstances and are now being told get ready for for for murder trials. >> The so there's a couple of different things. One is almost the heart of darkness in the entire system is the legal section of the cabinet office. One of the things that Jeremy Haywood did effectively from his point of view was to grab control of large parts of the legal system by bringing it into the cabinet office calling it the it's very complicated process but essentially he got the cabinet secretary's control of this legal entity inside the cabinet office which then spreads its tentacles throughout the whole system and to a large extent displaced the power the old power of the attorney general and the attorney general's office. The cabinet office legal team is massively remain remember they leaked against the their own government during the Brexit negotiations 2019 2020 which the cabinet secretary apologized for and said was unprecedented in British history to have our own government lawyers leaking against our own government negotiating too massively prom um and for them ECR is like a is a is is a religious principle it's a commandment that that that supersedes everything else so from their point of you defending that is critical. You then have the NIO which we also had to cut out large parts the Northern land office which we also had to cut large parts out of during the Brexit negotiations because they were on the side of the Irish government and Shinfay and IRA not the British government >> and also you have long-standing elements inside the mod which always hated special forces. Remember immediately after World War II um the SCS was closed down and other similar entities were closed down and then had to be revived later to deal with various disasters going on. So there's long-standing hatred and opposition to the very concept of British special forces in much of whitel. And if you have a completely pathological system and you have uh a system where the officials and the lawyers are actually in control and the ministers are largely NPC characters, not actually in in real power, >> then it just drives this kind of behavior. Ministers sort of look around somewhat baffled, somewhat so often not very happy about it. But of course they can't stop anything happening. They just told the government secretary says it's there's no alternative. >> No. Um is there an issue also in in the military? I mean you you might expect Sir Roelly Walker to kind of barge in and speak to the prime minister and say actually it's not right that people with no military experience are passing judgment on high stress situations when people have made a split-second choice with people who are trying to kill them. You know, I'm you can't do this. Leave my leave my men alone. Like it's causing a real recruitment crisis. something that's deeply troubling to many veterans. Members of my own family are up in arms about this. >> The system doesn't care. That's the whole point, right? I mean, you're in an unprecedented situation now where they're sending over in 2025 SAS people are sent off on classified missions in the Middle East to go and whack various terrorists or whatever, right? They're then being arrested as they get off the helicopter off in Syria or wherever by plaude and told we're arresting you under murder charges. God, right? It's completely insane. But the history of the last 10, 20 years is senior people in the British armed forces have had an extreme lack of moral courage in dealing with this problem. So in the last few weeks, you've started to have retired people speaking out. Okay, good. But where were the retired people? They the retired people know everything I'm saying is true. They were in charge of it. What did they do when they were actually in charge themselves? They said, "Oh, well, it's very political." and the cabinet secretary says there's nothing that could be done and the ECR is a political issue so we've just got to swallow it. So yeah, Rolley Walker should put his medals on and Roelly knows what absolute the whole thing is and he should go into number 10 and say to the PM, "We're not having this anymore and there's going to be mass resignations unless you actually commit to it." But of course, it's politically now incendury because the thing which is driving it legally is the human rights act. So the only way I went into all this in great detail in 2020, the only way you can stop a lot of these things similar to the boats >> is by facing legal reality and saying you either have to amend slashreal the human rights act >> or you have to put up with it. >> But you have to make a choice. Sulac wouldn't make a choice on the boat. The lawfare that's going on now is a similar problem. Is there a case for saying that sometimes some of the virtues that you might associate with the the British system are now being used um against British institutions? So naturally the army would say uh we're generals, we're not politicians, the politicians take the ultimate decisions. Similarly, there is an instinctive belief in Britain that we are a rulesbound country. We operate with a system of liberty under the law and therefore there's a natural deference towards those who are legal authorities and also we have confidence ultimately that if a scandal is big enough that it will be raised in parliament and ventilated by the press. And in a way the point you're making is that all of those things are arguably in a functioning society civilized restraints on raw power. But we do have a functioning society and those restraints are now out of place. >> Yeah. So I think I think your description of the British system worked like pre 1970s, right? But a couple of massive things happened. You have first of all membership of of the EEC and the growth of European well EEC law as it was and then EU law. You then have the Human Rights Act. You have the Equalities Act which is somewhat similar but let's leave that aside for the moment. And in but in parallel to the EU and the EC in the ECR/human rights act you also have this huge development of how judicial review works in the country and these processes are completely entangled. So you can't separate out the effects of the human rights act from judicial review. So then, as you know, Michael, >> when you're sitting inside government, not not 1%, not one in a thousand of the things that the Human Rights Act actually touches ever becomes public. But every day as a minister or every day in number 10, you're told constantly, oh, you can't do that because the Human Rights Act, you can't do that because legal advice says blah, you can't. These things are never made public. It's a completely internal process. So I think what we've got is we've got an old British white hall and MP system >> kind of this evolved over centuries, right? >> Yeah. >> Then you've got now sitting on top of that the EU system, the human rights act system and the judicial review system combined with this with the um lawyers inside Whiteall means that the old British system doesn't work anymore. >> No. and and one one of the striking things it's only a small footnote is that uh when I was in the leveling up in the housing department there were things that we wanted to do on building safety to help people post groundall to deal with the problems of leaseold and we were thwarted because of the human rights act. So there were people trapped in unsafe buildings and there were people who uh had bought leaseold flats who were being ripped off and government lawyers would say the A1 P1 article one part one rights of the of the rich trump the interests of these folk. Um, and it was the Human Rights Act that was and the ECR that was the effective blocker. And I don't think there'd be a single person outside who would think that it was justified in that way. But it's how the system thinks. >> Totally. You and I, you'll remember, right? One of the first things that happened when we went to Department of Education, we said we're going to change some of the legal guidance to strengthen the power of teachers and headteers to search pupils for weapons, porn, dangerous materials of various kinds. >> Basic discipline. Immediately the official said, "Oh, you can't do that. We legal advice says it's unlawful because of the European Convention, human rights, right to privacy of the child." We had to go and get a top-notch barrista, pay him with taxpayers money, and spend say 3, four months or something arguing about that. All of that's completely invisible. No one outside the system has any concept that these things happen, right? But you multiply that, like that's something that we chose to make a priority, right? You say, "We're not going to put up with it. We're going to hire the lawyer. We're going to have the battle." But as you know these things just fire in at you some many often many times per day >> and you can't do the same thing that we did taking four months on each of these things multiple >> perhaps we don't also understand what the counterfactual looks like you know the t the opportunity costs the the time that was spent >> rumaging around to just do basic stuff. >> Yeah. And and the the other thing is you get a reputation in the department in white hall more broadly if you are dealing with every single one of these things then you become a troublemaker. So the noise that's generated the potential controversy that that that follows. So and this sounds like an excuse for not doing everything that I should have done. But you have to pick your fights because if you're fighting on every front you eventually become a virus that the system develops antibodies to. um uh you become uh a a problem that it needs to expel. >> Sometimes viruses can win though. >> I'll leave that to >> other thing metastizes right in such ways that that it's extremely hard for outsiders to deal with. So when I said through four years ago now I think people don't realize but the madness of the human rights act now means that a secret process has evolved inside the government that looks at various terrorist threats and a very weird perverse outcome of this is that the lawyers have decided that it's okay to send some special forces guy over to the middle of nowhere, watch someone come out of a building and drone strike them and kill them. That's lawful. But it's unlawful to have the same team of people grab him, put him in a helicopter, bring him back to Britain for questioning. Right? All these human rights lawyers all over Twitter go Cummings is insane. Clearly, completely This this madness is is impossible. Then of course over the next couple of years, more and more people come out saying, "Yep, this is exactly this is exactly what happens." So all these people right KC's judges who are part of the system also have no real understanding of the insane ways in which the bureaucracies morph behind the scenes in secret to cope with this public thing of the human rights act. The system kind of reverberates internally because of legal advice and forces people internally to do all of these things which are then kept completely secret. Now the contrast of course is look at what's happened in Europe this year on um very interesting aspects of how the commission has suddenly behaved. The commission for the first time really has started to get panicky on the whole thing about the boats in the Mediterranean and the effects on public opinion in the south. So very quietly behind the scenes the commissioners just suddenly said to the Greek government and to and to the Spanish government >> if you need to do ABC just do it and forget the human rights act and forget the we'll turn a blind eye. we don't give a just solve the problem. Now, that also is a very important dynamic, right? Which shows the problem that Britain has in Europe. It's a completely normal thing just to go, "Oh, yeah, well, we signed up to all this shit." But actually, now it's causes this insane problem, so just deal with the insane problem and we don't care what the lawyers say. Everything is normal. >> But in Britain, that's impossible. The cabinet secretary marches in and says, "I'm sorry, Prime Minister, but there'll be a judicial review and you'll be told that you'll be in contempt of court and potentially thrown in jail. So therefore, you must do the following thing. And as you know, Michael, PM after PM has had exactly that conversation. >> Is there an element where like leaving the EU may have actually made things worse for us? Because I think some of the Europiles in Britain don't follow events actually follow what's going on in Europe closely. They still wedded to this kind of fantasy idea of what the EU was like maybe 10 years ago. So >> I mean, it's definitely the case that obviously a lot of the Romaniacs have been extremely radicalized by the process of leaving. And in lots of ways the EU was much less it was much less polarized before much less intensely opinions were much less intensely held and lots of the left actually had a lot of criticisms about the EU that's all gone now right because the EU is just is is a complete cult for a large section of the old system where you can't rationally discuss its problems there is no analysis of it. No one cares about any any of these things. So you're definitely right. A lot of the problems going on inside the EU now um I just I mean they're not reported in the British media. I think it's always been the case that in the UK reporting or analysis of what happens at an EU level and also a proper understanding of politics within those countries has been deficient because it was the case in the past and it is even more the case now that uh the effort to understand what drives the EU is one that again doesn't seem to sort of fit naturally into our political or media culture. the fact that you've got this political institution which is not like sort of NATO. It we might touch on defense in a moment which is there in order to serve a single purpose um you know it's it's there to transform how those countries are governed internally and transform the shape of Europe to move towards a a particular integrationist goal. But anyway, enough of me. Um, one thing, Dom, that uh I I want to touch on is the past before we go and have a look at the future because some people will say, "Okay, fair enough. Powerful analysis, worrying uh in its detail, but six years ago, you were the architect of an election victory. You had an 80 seat majority and five clear years ahead of you to fix this >> and it didn't happen. Why not? In 2020, we began uh to change almost all of the big things we started to change. So whether it was procurement, ironically, the meetings which I started immediately after the election on procurement in January 2020 that had to be cancelled in February 2020 to deal with total show over procurement with COVID. So procurement we started planning law we started huge change to how science and technology operate in white hall the whole R&D ecosystem the economic model tax the mod we began a whole process to uncover what are all the things that are rotten inside the mod why are they rotten we got the mod secretly to admit to dozens of things that were completely broken parenthetically one of them was Ajax, which is now in the news in the last week with the poor minister. Classic classic modern Westminster, right? The poor minister going, "Well, I was told just a few weeks ago that Ajax was fine and and and don't don't know what why it's in the newspapers that the soldiers are coming out rattled and and deaf and throwing up." We were told in the cabinet room in summer 2020, Ajax is a multi-billion pound total and utter show >> fiasco. Armored tanks. >> Yeah, armored tanks. Exactly. Sorry. Yeah. So we were told about this but okay that's a mult that's a I don't know what it is 5 10 billion quid total disaster it's been a disaster for many years we were told that it was that it was knackered there were dozens of things like that we were told in 2020 these things are all broken we do a deal with the mod you admit all these things are broken we shut down all the broken things we save tens and tens and tens of billions we shift the money to new things we for the first time in 20 years have agreed money agreed budgets that the cabinet office, treasury, mod all agree that bud the numbers are true, not fake. White hall reform, as you know, we had the cabinet secretary agree in summer 2020 to profound changes to how hiring would work. As you also know, Michael, in summer 2020, the system essentially surrendered. So the the normal story is vote leave was a total war with white all um uh over everything including over civil service reform. Not true. Many excellent officials agreed with the vote leave analysis on civil service reform. And after the whole system imploded in spring 2020, the senior civil service surrendered and said, "Okay, everyone here has watched the whole world system collapse. You Dominic have talked a whole load of stuff about this for 10 10 years plus. Obviously you've got an AC majority. The whole country needs rebuilding. It's now all going to happen. Surrender. Okay. And you were in some of the meetings where we discussed the surrender terms with case right and how we were going to move forward. >> So on all of these big things, economy, science, whiteall, mod, the deep state, all of these things we began a pro also sorry on borders said we have an Australian point system. we're going to cut immigration and we actually started building the infrastructure for the first time to start counting people in and out instead of having all of these fake numbers which Britain the whole British immigration debate right today nobody on earth can say this is how many people came in last year this is how many people left they can't do it all the numbers are complete fake numbers right we began in January 2020 a process to build the system needed so you could actually just know these people come in these people leave we keep tabs on them Not shouldn't be rocket science, but it was in Britain. >> There were a couple of very good civil servants, I won't name them, who were actually genuinely ruined their lives. >> Exactly. >> Every single thing pretty much that I've just described in the last five minutes was either deliberately closed by Boris or more often the system just closed it down and Boris didn't even know or didn't care. So all of these things that that literally take the counting in and counting out, right? If that system had been built, the whole discussion now about immigration would be completely transformed. But they literally closed it. So, and as you know, Michael, right, politically when Boris said in 2021, instead of carrying on and delivering 2019 manifesto and actually delivering the change that people voted for in 2016 and 2019, no, we're going to make friends with the old system again and really not very do very much. All of the big things that were started to change in 2020 will been at all. Most of the Conservative Party was very happy with that. >> Most of the Telegraph was very happy with that. Let Boris be Boris, >> right? Everyone went along with it. When Boris put up taxes in 2021, completely contrary to the guarantee made him and soon acted it. Tory party voted through. Very little debate even though it was strategic disaster, politically completely stupid. Of course, it was praised by all the sensible pundits as a political master stroke as usual, of course. So in 2020 we began to deliver what the country wanted, right? And if you went through all of these things I've just described and what we started doing in 2020, you now watch all over Westminster people going, "Oh, we need to do this on procurement. Oh, we need to do this with the mod. We started it all, but the Conservative Party in Whiteall closed it all down." >> Some people would say, um, well, you put Boris in. Um uh so you uh and those of us who voted for him uh bear a fair share of the responsibility. >> So a I did not put Boris in. I very deliberately had nothing to do with the Conservative Party leadership a contest or anything to do with the Conservative party at the beginning of 2019. But it is true that after he won, he then came to me and others in the vote leaf team and said, "No one could see a way through this. will you come to number 10 and try and find some path through this nightmare crisis? So yes, I thought we should try and do that. I thought that the prospect of watching Westminster cancel the referendum would have been catastrophic and the kind of combination of canceling the referendum with Corbyn waiting in the wings I think was a sort of double catastrophe. So yes, we did go in, we did bulldoze it through in 2019, but I think that was good in the circumstances, right? You can't in politics, you don't have very much freedom. You have limited freedom to decide are you going to try and do certain things in a context which you mostly have no control over. You were battered around by Tolto's great forces of war and peace, right? And your chances to make an impact are relatively minor. We chose in 2019 and said, "Okay, we're gonna try and get Brexit done, force through an election, get a democratic mandate for change, and then deliver it in government." Will Boris blow up and screw it all up? There's a very reasonable chance that he will. But what's the alternative? The alternative is we all just sit at home and watch the system completely melt down. >> But isn't there a risk overall uh that the expectations that you've set of politics and politicians are too high? So in the paper that you wrote after you left uh the department for education after we'd worked there um you outlined an ideal of a dissian education which is uh a view of all of the skills that politicians need which is demanding. you've written about the truly impressive politicians of history, whether that's Pit or Bismar, uh, and the the plans that you've outlined and in some cases sought to implement for change, I think many people would find persuasive and compelling, but in our political system, you're dealing with flawed human beings. And that's not just because of politics. That's just because of human nature. What would you say to uh a critic or even a friend who would say look a lot of your diagnosis of what's wrong is persuasive but uh given that you've got you know clowns to the left and clowns to the right as it were uh then it's always going to be difficult to achieve what you want. I think you have to separate out very carefully two two different things right perfection is obviously impossible completely impossible and history shows the recurring patterns you read them in fusidities and classical Athens you see them today there is no system which can eradicate some of these core problems and core problems of human nature unless human nature itself is re-engineered but lots of the things I'm talking about are things that we all we know that imperfect humans with imperfect institutions can do. We can all look back and see how Whiteall and Pit dealt with procurement and R&D and military procurement in the 1790s and 1800s. Whiteall in 1795 7 1800 was closer to SpaceX 2025 in culture than Whiteall 2025 is >> to SpaceX 2025. >> Pitch and Elon are exceptional individuals. >> We No, no, no, no, no. But true, Pit was an exceptional individual, but Pit was also a product of a system and there were many exceptional individuals around. And I think this is the other part of this, right? So we know that Whiteall could do a lot of these things much better because it did it. We know that the American system could do far better because you can just go back and read General Groves on on now it can be Told. You can read Freedom's Forge on industrial production in World War II. That's not a pipe dream. That's not oh this is impossible. human institutions before the internet, before computers could do all of this stuff, right? We know it's possible. But you are pointing to I think what is a profound change and this is critical. If you look what what's the big difference between the Westminster of Whiteall of 1800 and now, it's the talent. In 1800, a large element of the most elite talent in the country was in some combination of parliament, whiteall, armed forces, intelligence services, deep stately type stuff, right? What is the big cultural change that's happened in the last few decades? It's the flight of elite talent out of public service in Western countries. And the collapse of the institutions is partly because of institutional dynamics, bureaucratic dynamics that kind of operate regardless of the electron people inside, but also because all of these across the western world, we've had this cultural shift of elite talent out to do other things. So, General Groves now, where's General Groves now? He's working for Elon on rockets or he's working for Patrick Collison and Stripe or whatever it is, right? They're not sitting in the Pentagon program doing the F-35. And that is a that that is a huge that is a huge problem. And you are right to point to that. And it's also correct to say you can't expect institutions like Skunk Works or SpaceX if you don't have >> great people inside. It doesn't matter how you write down the organizational chart. It doesn't matter what legislation you draw or anything else. These things are always a mix of institutional structure and incentives on the one hand and then elite talent on the other hand. So we've driven out elite talent. We can't expect white tall and Westminster to change without that. But that's why going back to our conversations in summer 2020, we talked about >> here's how various institutional structures need to change in number 10, the cabinet office and whatnot, right? All these boring things that you were very unusual as an MP and actually being interested in most of them aren't interested in. But we also talked to the cabinet secretary about how do we change the rules so we can hire in these people instead of whiteall being closed by default and 99.99% jobs just being all internally promoted from the from the cast the approved cast that controls the system like a Hindu cast. Instead you have to open it up and make the system open by default so you can hire who you want and then make ministers actually responsible. This the last thing I'll say then I'll shut up. >> You go back to the world of pit. You go back to the world of Palmerston and then you look at today. The single most striking thing I would suggest and I would challenge you as an MP to argue against me is for them responsibility to Parliament was real. It was not fake. Pitt and Co had real investigations into procurement scandals. They destroyed careers. They threw people in jail. Palmerston didn't turn around when something went wrong and went, "Oh, well, I'll have to ask the perm second and and don't blame me." Right? Palmyon said in a great letter to Queen Victoria, England will never have the European system of a permanent bureaucracy. And if it does, it'll be a disaster. What's the big shift that's happened? This shift in Whiteall is inseparable from the shift from ministerial responsibility to Parliament being genuine to ministerial responsibility to Parliament becoming a complete fake and a fraud. And you know, nobody actually believes in it, right? You go into parliament and you stand up and you say, "Oh yes, this this disaster that's all over the today program and then use this morning. I take full responsibility and blah blah blah." But it's not in your heart. You know, you don't take full responsibility for it. You didn't even probably know about it until last night when someone says, "Oh my god, the front page of the Times tomorrow has this bloody nightmare story. Why is that?" And then you read the papers, you talk to the Oh my god, it's so insane. If I told the truth, no one would ever believe it. Right? But you have to stand up and say, "I take full responsibility." Blah blah blah. But it's all fake. Now, the odd thing is the country knows it's all fake. The voters know it's all fake. The only place where anyone still pretends that the fake is real is inside Westminster itself. >> As you've said in the past, pro- wrestling is more real than Westminster. >> Rick Rubin. Yeah. So, the great Rick Rubin, the head of Def Jam Records, has a has a has a great line, the news is fake, wrestling is real. And I think that is completely true. If you Google the Rick Rubin interview that he talks about it and then think about the news now, you'll you'll get the point. >> Does this ring true to you, Maddie? >> Well, yeah. I mean, in my sort of main job at the spectator, which is being the parliamentary sketch writer, we're there to satarize and observe. I'm often just amazed by the enormous great fisher in what's being talked about in parliament versus what people are talking about in day-to-day life. And also the big stories that don't really get coverage at all. Just in the last week, there have been various scandals involving young Afghan men either raping young girls in Britain. And these stories either not being reported in a major way in say the BBC or else the way they have been reported is in psy such a kind of psychopathic way. For example, two 17-year-old Afghans are described as boys, but the 15-year-old girl that they raped is described as a woman. It's this kind of thing where there are times where I feel a bit like I'm going mad. like if you try to just >> it's boys from Lamington or something, right? And then then it's only after the media actually sues and goes to court that their identity is revealed and the boys from Lamington are revealed to be two illegal af Afghan asylum seekers who just got off a boat. >> This feels quite unc out of character for place like Lamington. >> Yeah, we better get used to it in Lington because there's going to be a lot more of it. >> Oh, I know. And there's something very eerie about when it happens in places that were previously sleepy, leafy sorts of places. very interested in what you're you're saying about Pit and the way that he managed things being closer to Elon Musk. I sometimes feel like CS Lewis describes an idea called chronological snobbery where there's a a preference towards things that are newer just because they are newer and I wonder if that is quite a feature of progressive thinking particularly within the institutions like why would we bother looking at that it was so long ago let's not bother >> I think that I think there definitely is that feeling it's also so often humiliating to look back at the past so they don't want to it's very humiliating for them to look back and go oh yeah actually they did all this much with far fewer like 20 times faster without any of our modern technology is quite humiliating. So they have to write that off and say, "Oh, we couldn't couldn't possibly learn anything from that." It's exactly the same as as what Michael and I witnessed repeatedly in during COVID of officials saying, "Oh, there's nothing to learn from Asia." No, it's point pointless sending anyone over to Asia. when I arranged a task force to go over to Singapore and and whatnot to see how Singapore had organized a lot of this because of course Singapore had watched previous outbreaks of various diseases in China and actually got prepared for it. White Hall was enraged. We don't want to go and then ended up actually scuppering the whole thing and never sending sending anyone. So there is this incredible ironically given that they're so remain and they're constantly saying that the Brexit people are are parochial there's an incredible parochialism inside white hall where um they hate the idea of uh of learning from I mean remember when we talked about to officials in the DF about trying to learn from Germany and Switzerland and other places on things like apprenticeships and how they do vocational training and various manufacturing things and whatnot. Oh, the disgust faces were were very apparent. >> Westminster's favorite way of learning lessons seems to be a big inquiry. That >> pay a load of lawyers to lie. That's their favorite way. >> Give him a nighthood. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> One thing I don't want to sort of reiterate the whole of CO, but one thing that that Maddiey's taxed me with is lockdowns were and I don't want to put words in her mouth, but in broad terms, initially you could sort of understand it even though it was a bit of a mess. Uh but overall the the whole approach to lockdown was unnecessary and overdone and offensive to liberty. Um looking back just put the whole inquiry to one side because as we know it's a legal circus >> and without necessarily attributing blame to individuals but overall as you look back at that period and what was necessary to deal with the pandemic are there areas where you think critics of your approach have a point? Is there anything that the critics of your approach need to bear in mind? >> Super complicated, but to simplify it enormously, I would put it like this. You the first thing is you got to separate out the f the period February, March from what happened in the autumn, winter, and in 2021. >> Yeah. >> Right. In my opinion, it's unarguable that there never needed to be any lockdown or anything approaching a lockdown um in uh quarter 3, quarter 4 2020 or in 2021 after the initial disaster. If the system had got its act together properly in summer 2020, if for example the Department of Health hadn't completely buried and lied about rapid testing, you'd have had a huge rapid testing bill build up over the summer and you'd have had absolutely no need for any lockdowns in uh later in 2020. I think that's unarguable. Uh it's also noticeable by the way the inquiry has completely botched its reporting in the over the whole thing about it got complete either it's confused or it's completely lying. who knows which because it's so bad. So I think for sure all the later lockdowns were unnecessary and happened be only because the pathological system itself just kept collapsing. Yeah. And couldn't think couldn't find its way out of that. The first one I think though is very is is very different. I think the first one I think if you have the complete benefit of hindsight I think my conclusion would be if you'd actually had proper pandemic planning and preparation in the first place. If we'd had the world's best pandemic preparations quote unquote as you and me and the prime minister were all told we had in January by the cabinet office and by the current cabinet secretary Wormold. If that had been true, then there would definitely have been no need for a lockdown in in the first lockdown either because everything which they thought about pandemic planning turned out to be complete and utter and the system completely imploded. It's very hard for me to see how the first one could have been avoided. To think that that could have been avoided and I'll give you a I'll go forward in time in order to make my point. In autumn you could see how the system collapsed and when Boris was faced with the numbers on the NHS he called another lockdown right in autumn 2020 2020. The idea that in March 2020 there's a world in which he watched all the numbers going up on the NHS. The NHS which as it as it was in fact overwhelmed in various places that all continued the rest of Europe having said we're not going to do lockdown then all starting to do lockdowns like dominoes and then Boris alone standing firm and saying we're not doing that here. I think there's just no way that on there's no hypothetical world in which that would have happened and you know it wouldn't have happened because he didn't even do it in September October time. He imploded having watched the first one. >> So I also think that the first one was defensible in the sense of there was no system there was no testing. There was no nothing. As you know, all of us in the center of government suddenly had to confront the fact that all the officials who thought they had the world's best pandemic plan then suddenly kind of admitted to us it's all bollocks and there is no plan. We don't know what the hell we're going to do. There's there is nothing. We also didn't know how damaging it was for children then in January February 2020. So I think like some kind of emergency measure short emergency measure was reasonable in the circumstances of given complete state failure and complete state collapse >> February early March. I can't see what else reasonably like how else the system could have gone in a different way. Certainly not with that prime minister. You'll also have to hypothesize some completely different you know if you had Lee Quu in charge maybe something different could have happened or Elon in charge >> or maybe >> no no god no but >> be doomed >> I can't see but I think it is important to separate out that first initial crisis from what came later after the first crisis there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that what should have happened is a whole bunch of things were done >> April through to August September and if those things had been done properly then there was never any need for further lockdown downs um and all of the huge economic and other damage that that that that that did. >> How did we go from from that to what we saw later on in the pandemic where we had this extremely complicated, often self-contradictory and everchanging suite of rules that often made seemed manifestly insane to anyone who analyzes them. You know, the rules about when people could gather and how many. The rules about if you stand up in a pub, you're you're in violation of the rules. what is the proper diameter of a scotch egg and all that jazz like how did we how did we go to that >> because the system's original plan was there's nothing that can be done just so you just have to sit back and watch it and you can't do anything then the system panicked then there's the first lockdown then the system says oh actually the public are supportive of various tough measures but critically Britain unlike Britain is has become super super super centralized in almost every So if you compare what happened in Britain with some of the European countries and also with Asian countries, an extremely strong contrast is the extent to which everything was basically a bunch of people written around a cabinet table in London, >> which in my opinion is completely insane >> and is responsible for a lot of the insanity versus what happens in other countries which were much which have a much serial balance much more decentralized and therefore they could say to various to look like you decide that there you decide that there we're not writing down rules on how pubs work hundreds of miles away from us. Right? That that seems to many countries completely completely mad. >> This is interesting because another theme of your your writing is that it's simultaneously super centralized but also that ministers have no real power. There's a pmpkin element to governance. Correct. Like how do how do those two things function together? I mean they don't but you but you know do they contradict do those two premises kind of contradict? >> No they don't because the power because the power has vanished elsewhere. >> So it has super centralized but the power has also gone away from ministers. Where's the power gone? Well looks to the cabinet office the power of the cabinet has shrunk and the ministerial jobs have become largely pmpkin but the power of the cabinet secretary is now extreme. Cabinet secretary is much much much more powerful than any minister apart from apart from the the the PM. >> Yeah. Now if you go back and look at the beginning of the cabinet office right when the cabinet office was created in the crisis of the SO and the disaster of 1917 it was agreed by everybody okay we're going to create this new thing to try and coordinate the central government better but it must have absolutely no control over any personnel >> and it must have absolutely no control over any policy of any kind. It is purely a secretarial function to coordinate papers being moved around white. Right? Everyone agreed that and everyone agreed if it did either of those two things it would be an obvious constitutional abomination and a political disaster. What have we done? We now have a cabinet office which is completely in charge of all HR and personnel >> and has its own policy functions which are much more powerful and much more important than what the PM's office does. So that's the answer to your correct question. How come we've got a system which is super become super centralized but yet the minister seen pmpkin the answer is sir Humphrey has taken the power and that's where the power is but the power is no longer accountable in parliament. The power sits used secretly inside cabinet office.