Dominic Cummings’s plan to reshape the state

THE SUSPICION with which many Brexiteers have long regarded Brussels has come to be matched by an equal mistrust of Whitehall. After repeated delays to Britain’s exit from the European Union, many Leavers became convinced that bien-pensant officials were out to subvert the will of the people. Yet for Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser and brains behind the Leave campaign, the frustration with the civil service goes back much further. The subtitle of an entry on his personal blog, written in 2014, sums up his outlook: “The failures of Westminster & Whitehall: Wrong people, bad education and training, dysfunctional institutions with no architecture for fixing errors.” Some Eurosceptics want to put a bomb under Whitehall in order to get Brexit done. Mr Cummings wants to get Brexit done so that he can put a bomb under Whitehall.

Following Boris Johnson’s triumph in the December election, the government has an opportunity to reshape the country. Labour is in chaos, the Remainers are defeated and the British system gives huge power to governments with a large parliamentary majority. Mr Cummings’s thinking—set out over hundreds of thousands of words in a blog that ranges from Sun Tzu and Bismarck to education policy and space exploration—helps explain why many in Downing Street think that to get anything done in government they will first have to fix the civil service.