How Dominic Cummings wasted the greatest opportunity of his life

Boris Johnson’s chief adviser had a vision of government by data. But when the pandemic gave him a chance to remake the British state, he flunked it

By Hal Hodson and Kat Hall

When Dominic Cummings took the stage in London at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank, in November 2014, few outside the Westminster political bubble had heard of him. Dressed in a plain black suit with a skinny black tie, he looked like he’d walked off the set of “Reservoir Dogs”. He was introduced as a person with “interesting and controversial views”. Though he would later gain a reputation as a snarling hatchet-man, he laid out in measured tones his views about “fundamental aspects of the way the world works”. This involved a helter-skelter tour of disciplines such as astronomy, entomology and neurology (Stars! Ants! Neurons!). Quite what this amounted to was hard to say, but he spoke with the confidence of a man who thinks that everyone appreciates how right he is.

The nub of his lecture was a screed against the institutions that comprise the British state. Nothing about them, Cummings said, was good. There are no quantitative skills in Westminster, no management skills, no ambition. Incentives are misaligned, goals are unclear, failure is normal. Decision-making, he said, was “almost random” and “largely rubbish”.

Cummings never mentioned the demands of ordinary people, whom good government is supposed to serve. To him, the state was a machine, and its smooth running was inherently desirable. Until recently he had served as a special adviser in the Department for Education, yet he seemed uninterested in the subject except for how well universities might equip graduates with the skills necessary to run the country. The impression Cummings gave was that the British state was a disaster. His solution was to tear it down and start again.

The British public would soon get to know Cummings, first as the architect of Brexit through the Vote Leave campaign, then, after Boris Johnson entered Downing Street in July 2019, as the prime minister’s chief adviser, or “brain”. During the pandemic he became notorious as the man who broke lockdown rules to drive to Barnard Castle, apparently in order to test his eyesight. This escapade led one British tabloid to call him “a cheat” and another to label him “the weirdo blamed for destroying lockdown”.

Data would allow the prime minister to take back control

Liberal opinion towards Cummings has often veered between awe at his supposed power and contempt of his views. The media presents him as unstable and Machiavellian, a political wizard in a beanie, stumbling between genius and incoherence. Yet the stridency with which he seems happy to dismiss other people as “thick as mince” or “charlatans” sits at odds with the vagueness of his own thinking: it’s hard to work out exactly what Dominic Cummings believes. Though his writings are legion, he is incapable of expressing himself systematically or concisely. He tears others to shreds, but is less good at expressing a positive view about almost anything.

One thing that Cummings has consistently been in favour of is data – more specifically, the use of data science to improve the performance of government. He has written of the benefits of “seeing rooms”: control centres that analyse streams of data to support decision-makers. He has repeatedly pointed out that the machinery of the British state, which has changed surprisingly little since the Victorian era, is hopelessly inadequate for dealing with the complexities of the networked world. Pandemics are one of the challenges that states will continue to face in the 21st century, a danger that Cummings had pondered on his blog before the current coronavirus outbreak.

There was nothing inherently ideological about Cummings’s ambition to remake the state. A left-wing version might envisage a government that used data to deliver services to citizens at a lower cost than the private sector, in the mould of Project Kangaroo, the BBC’s abortive attempt to build a state-owned Netflix. A right-wing variant might use data to shrink the state to its barest extent, while simultaneously knowing more about its subjects’ lives than ever before. Through this step-change in knowledge, the state would be able to navigate its place in the world, and its relationship with its subjects, skilfully but subtly.

Cummings’s view seemed to have been vindicated by his successful campaign to take Britain out of the European Union. David Cameron’s recklessness in calling the referendum exemplified how even the most powerful man in the country failed to understand the minds of Britons. (The two were not friends: Cummings described Cameron as “spectacularly” incurious, among his more polite expressions; Cameron labelled Cummings a “career psychopath” who dripped poison.)

This transformation would not be easy. Cummings knew that in his way stood hundreds of thousands of civil servants, a group he famously described as “hollow men”. They operated the machinery of government and, in his eyes, had a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo. “Although [Whitehall] is systemically incompetent viz policy and implementation, its real focus is on its own power, jobs and money,” he wrote on his blog.

In his digital Utopia, these pettifogging mandarins would be swept aside, replaced by computer networks that spanned government departments and fed data into algorithms. Cummings included himself in the ranks of the dispensable. He repeatedly claimed that he had joined the government merely to set things in motion and that he would leave within a year. Like the apocryphal actuary who writes computer programs to automate his work, then leans back and collects his pay cheque, Cummings reckoned that historic changes to the machinery of the state could be achieved with the seeding of a few smart ideas. After that, the data man could ride off into the sunset, his work done.

Officials and technology contractors talked of not letting this opportunity for digital transformation go to waste

In an investigation in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 1843 spoke to 17 IT contractors, former government employees and members of Cummings’s team at the heart of power. According to them, Cummings planned to create a new unit in Number 10, the colloquial term for the prime minister’s office. This team would devise policies based on data and manage the information flow itself – the latter task would be accomplished by data scientists who would analyse data sets from across government. The idea was to create a virtuous circle by which real-time monitoring of departments would inform policy and enable the prime minister and his advisers to identify underperforming areas. Cummings wanted to entirely eliminate permanent secretaries – the apolitical heads of civil-service departments – and shrink the cabinet from 22 to a mere six or seven secretaries of state.

If successful, this would radically transform both the power of the executive and its internal dynamics. Though the prime minister is the nominal head of the British government, the Treasury has long been a significant influence on all areas of policy because it determines the extent and purpose of funds that each department receives. Data would allow the prime minister to take back control. But neither Cummings nor his team ever spelled out what kind of policies his data-led government might pursue.

The covid-19 pandemic has killed over 50,000 people in Britain, left untold numbers debilitated and disrupted everyone’s lives. But for Cummings it presented a golden opportunity to turn his vision of digital governance into a reality. In a public-health emergency you need to centralise control and annex large data sets – actions that would meet with significant resistance if it weren’t for the crisis. Among officials and technology contractors involved in the government’s covid response there was widespread talk of not letting this opportunity for digital transformation go to waste. This was Cummings’s chance to prove the effectiveness of a vision he had long extolled: to have “seeing rooms” at the heart of a digital panopticon, using technology to watch over and control the activities of the furthest reaches of government.

Cummings had focused on digital matters since becoming the prime minister’s adviser in July 2019. Early on he ordered analytics software to be installed across government websites to give the Government Digital Service, part of the Cabinet Office which works across departments, a unified view of Britons’ interactions with its online services. Even though many commercial websites gather users’ personal data in just such a way – and the civil servants themselves asked for the software – this largely innocuous move caused uproar among privacy campaigners, mainly because of Cummings’s involvement. “Dominic Cummings may claim to be a pioneering advocate of data science, but when it comes to its ethical use, he is woefully behind,” Pascal Crowe of the Open Rights Group, a campaign body, said at the time.

Cummings is the kind of contrarian who delights in criticism as confirmation of his own genius: “great ideas”, he wrote on his blog, will “almost inevitably seem bad to most” when they are first conceived. He began hiring people to work on digitisation.

The media presented him as a political wizard in a beanie, stumbling between genius and incoherence

One new recruit was Ben Warner, a data scientist who had worked with Cummings on the Leave campaign. Warner was made a special adviser in December 2019, charged with reorganising how Britain uses the statistics it collects. The British government prides itself on collecting an extraordinary range of data (guess the number of peg-makers around in 1841), but despite the formation of the Office for National Statistics in 1996, streams of information are siphoned off to different departments and never linked up.

Warner wanted to create an integrated data infrastructure that pulled together information on households covering everything from education, income and benefits to migration status, crime records and health. New Zealand had built just such a database, a feat that proved its worth during the pandemic when public-health officials were able to combine tax, transport and household data to predict the spread of covid-19. That came later. In the first instance, though, this scheme was to be an initial step in Cummings’s plan to increase central oversight of government departments. According to internal government documents, he thought improved data flows would also affect specific policies such as the “levelling-up agenda”, the government’s plan to provide investment to poor communities, largely in the north of England.

It may seem strange that Britain’s digital Machiavelli and his cabal of quants took such interest in the dull grind of statistics distribution. But as Cummings saw it, such digital plumbing was necessary to allow more exciting projects to flourish. Unless the signalling is correct, it’s impossible for a railway network to ferry goods and passengers around.

The revolution might have become institutionalised. Instead, as February turned to March, a new coronavirus started infiltrating populations across the world, to devastating effect. The pandemic became a test of state capacity. Citizens had to trust not just that governments had their best interests at heart but were capable of protecting them from a deadly virus.

The provision of health care was central to each government’s response: were there enough beds, medical staff, ventilators, pieces of protective equipment? But to vanquish a pandemic you have to treat it as an information problem too. You need to find the humans who are hosting the virus and prevent its transmission to others. Speed is essential, both to learn how the disease moves through a population and to communicate this information via a system designed to isolate positive cases. This was Cummings’s moment. And he fluffed it.

On March 11th the full horror of the covid-19 pandemic set in across the British government. The Bank of England cut interest rates to their lowest-ever levels. The following day Boris Johnson announced that Britain had failed to contain the virus and that the best it could do was delay its spread. Cases of covid-19 were growing exponentially.

Cummings held a meeting at Number 10 with representatives from 18 technology companies to discuss how they could support the government’s response to coronavirus. The world’s five most valuable firms – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon – were present. Their powers of data collection and processing were exactly what the country needed.

To fight the pandemic the government had to establish a system that would identify people who had tested positive for the virus, contact them and anyone whom they might have infected. At that time Britain’s network of government laboratories could handle only 1,500 tests a day, and it took the best part of a month for the government to come up with a plan to build a number of new laboratories. These were called Lighthouse Labs, after the fluorescent dye they used in their tests.

It may seem strange that Britain’s digital Machiavelli and his cabal of quants took such interest in the dull grind of statistics distribution

The construction of these new labs to process tests was only part of the solution. They had to inform infected individuals – as quickly as possible – to prevent further transmission. Armies of call-centre staff, summoned by outsourcing firms such as Serco and Sitel, proved inadequate at getting in touch with enough people who had tested positive (over the summer they failed to reach 20% of cases) or their recent contacts (40% of them were not contacted).

The Johnson government was not entirely responsible for the lack of testing capacity. Over the previous 20 years both Labour and Conservative administrations had shrunk the government lab network, taking the view that excess state-capacity was wasteful. Yet the likelihood of a respiratory pandemic was well known. A three-day government-run exercise in 2016, called Cygnus, had focused on the country’s preparedness for an influenza pandemic. The final report stated that a pandemic would require the government to “surge resources” into key areas – a capability, the report noted, which was “currently lacking”. During the exercise it also found that participants were confused about which sets of epidemiological data were the most significant.

Many of the failings exposed in the Cygnus exercise were not acted on. To some extent this was a vindication of Cummings’s view that the civil service was an institution within which reports get written but nothing gets done. So, when the pandemic hit, the government lacked both the necessary capacity to deal with it and, more profoundly, it lacked the know-how to build that capacity quickly. According to multiple sources involved in the government’s test-and-trace efforts, management consultants were hired not just to conduct outsourced work but to devise a plan of action.

They were only too eager to help. “Consultancies were running amok,” says an executive of one technology company, who attended Cummings’s meeting on March 12th. “A lot of them are washing up at the pandemic. Where else were they going to be working?” For all Cummings’s aspiration to run a government on the principles of data science, as the crisis hit he reverted to the playbook of the Blair and Cameron years: when in trouble, call in the consultants.

The ineptitude of this scrambled response became evident in October, when NHS Test and Trace, which ran the national scheme, temporarily lost more than 15,000 cases as a result of using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which are not designed to handle large and growing volumes of data. Number 10 was explicitly warned about its reliance on Excel months before the actual foul-up. Yet Cummings either considered it unimportant or was incapable of solving a relatively simple database issue. Whatever the reason, this failure was a poor advert for Cummings’s ambitions to re-engineer the state.

Cummings already recognised that the government lacked technical skills and had set out to fix things. But he was as much part of the problem as the solution: many people simply didn’t want to work for him. The only tangible result of his provocative job advert for “weirdos and misfits” to come and work at Number 10 was the hiring and then rapid firing of two men whose views were weird enough to put them beyond the pale of acceptability.

The post of chief digital officer of the government, which had first been advertised in September 2019, remained empty (it still is). Several tech leaders and entrepreneurs told 1843 that Johnson’s government had asked them to work on digital projects, including test-and-trace, but that they’d declined (a number of them had no interest in helping the government deliver Brexit). As a result Britain stumbled through the summer, struggling to keep up as infections rose in a second wave. In early September, Cummings established a new “control centre” in Whitehall to improve the government’s response to the pandemic, which he himself described as a “shitshow”. But he never made clear how it would help. It turned out that the state still needed talented people working for it – faith in data alone wouldn’t save it.

Cummings faced a bitter struggle to hack through the networks of patronage within the budget-oriented system

The National Health Service (NHS), not Cummings, was responsible for the government’s few successes. Treatment for covid-19 improved steadily. In late March 58% of people admitted to intensive care with the disease in England survived more than 30 days; by the end of June that had increased to 80%. A technology incubator called NHSX, founded in February 2019 before Cummings joined the government, had attracted a coterie of talented techies dedicated to improving the technological capability of the health service. They devised a system to distribute scarce ventilators to places in the greatest need. Bureaucratic politics meant that NHSX did not work on the test-and-trace system. And the second-most-powerful person in British politics couldn’t break down that barrier.

Cummings also encountered opposition from branches of government he had hoped to dominate. Johnson wanted a dashboard of NHS performance data piped directly into Downing Street. Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, whom one senior government official described as “the most astute politician of the lot”, is said to have resisted, asking what use Johnson would have for such detailed medical data. Number 10 ended up with a simplified version of the dashboard, though it’s unclear how they have used it (a government spokesperson did not comment on the dispute).

Britain’s shambolic response to the pandemic cannot be laid exclusively at Cummings’s door. The machinery of government is too complex for that. But it is undeniable that Cummings failed to impose his vision of the data-driven state when handed more power than most can dream of.

“I think Cummings is a bit of a fraud,” says a former government adviser. “I’m kind of annoyed because I drank the Kool Aid early. He’s a charlatan who talks a big game over dinner, but you’re left with the sense that he doesn’t actually have it.” The man who walked out of Downing Street with his cardboard box of belongings on November 13th was a techno-enthusiast whose grand plans had come to naught.

Perhaps Cummings never stood a chance of constructing a digital Leviathan. Half the country saw him as a villain who’d tricked Britain into voting for Brexit. Some were horrified by the thought that this ideologue would replace civil servants with data-crunching algorithms to consolidate power in the executive. “This government is churning out increasingly dystopian plans at a huge cost to the public purse and civil liberties,” says Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch, a civil-liberties campaign group. What some people would consider to be tedious proposals to digitise and network anachronistic systems, others saw as a stake to the heart of British democracy.

The British civil service occupies a special place in the public imagination. TV comedies skewer its unique combination of bumbling ineptitude and icy careerism. It may be parochial and cumbersome at times, but it also serves as a check against the worst impulses of government. That civil servants do not change when the government does is both the institution’s greatest strength and an enduring weakness. Cummings’s power grab put their careers at risk – a white-collar version of the automation that had already rendered many blue-collar jobs obsolete. It’s hard to imagine that they would not have put up a fight, as Stevens did over the NHS dashboard.

Cummings reverted to the playbook of the Blair and Cameron years: when in trouble, call in the consultants

The resistance would have grown stronger as it reached deeper into the power structures of Whitehall. Under the current system the Treasury holds the reins of state: it analyses the spending of each department and directs its activities by changing its budget. Flows of money serve as proxies for flows of information: government accounts provide a crude version of the data-gathering and decision-making algorithms that Cummings envisioned.

It is undoubtedly true that data has advantages over money. It can be analysed in real-time, not just after periodic reviews. It offers a more granular view of performance, which could theoretically help the state to serve its citizens more effectively. The British government used to have a public dashboard that tracked a wide range of government services, but this was shut down in 2017 as the most recent band of digitisers lost power to reactionary elements in the civil service. Had he survived, Cummings would have faced a bitter struggle to hack through the networks of patronage that coiled within the budget-oriented system.

Cummings left Downing Street a failure. The digital revolution, however, still looms. Like it or not, the British government is already in a digital competition, both with other states and with the large technology companies that increasingly resemble them. At some point it will have to confront this.

The tech companies have been accruing power for decades and already know more about a given country’s population than the country’s rulers. Unlike tech giants, democratic governments across the world are accountable to their citizens. If the gap between the capabilities of these entities continues to grow, and states become more detached from their citizens, we risk a crisis of democracy.

One policy director at a company that researches artificial intelligence points out that tech firms were able to use their superior data-gathering and processing capacities to see the dangers of the new coronavirus long before governments did. Apple and Google concluded as early as February that a pandemic was coming, based on trends in the aggregated data flowing out of their networks. Most Western governments were left in the dust. “Government doesn’t have the machinery to glom onto anything effectively,” says the policy director.

Given the asymmetry of power, it is little wonder that governments have proved to be ineffective at regulating tech companies – a feat that has nonetheless become more necessary as these giants have become ever more state-like. “Cloud platforms in the US and China are absorbing many of the formal and de facto functions of states: currency, cartography, identity,” says Benjamin Bratton, a social theorist at the University of California, San Diego. Governments will have to bulk up their digital capacities in order to monitor these companies effectively and keep up with the pace of change in the digital world.

There is, of course, the Chinese option: brute force and total control. The Chinese government subjects any firm, even ostensibly private technology giants, to the state. Only recently it prevented Ant Financial, a fintech company, from floating its shares on public stock exchanges. During the pandemic Alipay and WeChat Pay, China’s two largest payment apps, hosted the government’s public-health software. In Britain, by contrast, the government had to implore citizens to download its app.

The digitisation of the state cuts to the heart of statecraft. Bratton notes that sensing, modelling, forecasting, then taking action and repeating the cycle is an effective definition of governance. For centuries, this loop has run through the familiar structures of government. Now we live in a world where private companies have far surpassed the state in their ability to sense, model and forecast.

Western democracies face a choice. They can build up their own digital capacity, enabling them to regulate tech companies within a free market. Or, like China, they can force these companies to serve the public good. If they do neither they will continue to become less powerful and less relevant, both geopolitically and in the lives of their citizens.

It is unclear how much Dominic Cummings pondered the future of democracy (he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview). But he was one of the few people in Britain who had the necessary vision to reshape the state for the 21st century, as well as the proximity to power and unflinching confidence in his own abilities to do so.

Despite his intellect, Cummings was precisely the wrong person for the job. He was enamoured with data but scattergun and haphazard in his own management style. His abrasiveness deterred talented experts from joining the government. His contempt for the existing system raised the hackles of civil servants who might otherwise have been persuaded to change. More importantly, he never articulated a vision of how a data-driven government would change the lives of British citizens for the better. Cummings may be, once again, a prophet in the wilderness. The urgency of his fixations remains.

Hal Hodson is Asia technology correspondent at The Economist, currently seconded to Britain. Kat Hall is the algorithms reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

ILLUSTRATIONS: EWELINA KARPOWIAK

additional images: getty, pa

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