#819 - Dominic Cummings - The Secrets Behind A Crumbling British Government
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Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dominic Cummings. He's a political strategist who served as chief advisor to the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Dominic has masterminded some of the biggest events in recent history, from leading the Vote Leave campaign during Brexit to quarterbacking Boris Johnson's COVID response. He has seen the inside of UK and US government at their most chaotic and

And the things that he knows are absolutely wild. Expect to learn just how inefficient the inside of government is, how the conservatives lost so badly in the recent general election, why immigration has gotten worse even after Brexit, what Dominic thinks about America's potential future under Kamala Harris, how it felt to have Benedict Cumberbatch play him in a movie, and much more.

Dominic is the boogeyman behind the scenes to many people. And I imagine that there's lots of them who have massive problems with the things that he says. But my God, the opportunity to hear someone that has been this close to the absolute central seat of power inside of the British government and all meetings with the leaders of countries from the EU and from the US, it is incredible.

So interesting to see exactly how these institutions, these organizations, the people within them hold on to power, their fears, what it is that they're optimizing for. It's so interesting. If you have any desire to understand how countries are genuinely run, there is a lot of interesting insights to take away from this one.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dominic Cummings. Good morning, Britain. Ask the question, is multiculturalism working? 5% said yes, and 95% said no, it isn't. What do you make of that? Um...

I guess not surprising given months and months of crazy marches, terrorism over the years, harassment of MPs. I mean, lots of parts of the country go to, they seem kind of like clearly crazy. There's a lot of violence in various towns, which is not picked up by the Ministry of Media. But if you live there,

You live with it, you see it all the time. So I'm slightly surprised by the number, but the overall kind of picture is not surprising. Do you think there's an irony or a prescience of Brexit being driven by concerns about immigration to now 2024 with the UK facing massive immigration problems and it being such a huge talking point?

Yeah, it's a crazy situation, right? So in 2015, 2016, we have the referendum. And during the referendum campaign, I say, well, what's a core reason to – let's go through a few fundamentals of why we should leave, right?

Number one, free movement of people is out of control. It's the number one issue in Britain. Politicians' response to every problem is simply to say, well, it's an EU issue, so there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.

All across Europe, you see the problem of free movement driving the growth of extremism. You have votes in places like Austria, where you have like a third of the people voting for pretty much actual Nazi parties. I don't mean like fake Nazi parties, like accused by the Ministry of Media, but like actually, basically Nazis.

And our argument was, if you actually take back control of democratic policy over immigration in Britain, then you'll see the immigration collapses in the EU, Farage will be retired, UKIP will be gone, and extremists will be neutered here, and the whole country can move on and talk about other things. It would be better if Europe did it overall, but Europe's not going to do that, but we should do this ourselves.

The whole mainstream media attitude was, that's completely crazy. The FDA, the economists laughed at this. Their prediction was if Brexit wins, then immigration will become even more of an issue. Farage will be turbocharged. UKIP will be up at a third of the vote, blah, blah, blah. Right. So run the clock forward to 2020. All the predictions that we made were completely correct. Concern about immigration is a straight line down. Attitudes towards immigrants is much more positive.

Farage is retired, UKIP is gone, and basically the voting position is completely vindicated. And even the mad remainers who hate me and hate Brexit have to admit, actually, the immigration thing has turned out completely differently than what we expected, right?

Meanwhile, in Europe, of course, exactly as Votelief predicted, the problem has grown and grown. If I said in 2016, well, in like eight years' time, they'll be close to a Nazi party, neck and neck for leading the polls in Germany, everyone would have completely laughed at the FT and economists, but that's actually the situation, right? So I think things worked out the way that Votelief predicted on that stuff. But then, in an amazing plot twist,

I fall out with Boris, obviously, at the end of 2020, the voting leave team leaves number 10. And then in 2021, 2022, 2023, the Tories actually give up all immigration control of legal immigration, have unprecedentedly high legal immigration, then open, basically surrender to the fucking insane, stupid, retarded dinghies coming across the channel. So you suddenly have tens of thousands of these ludicrous boats coming over.

And Farage is back. A new party is created. Tories lose half their vote. I mean, it's like a sort of, you can't explain it by any kind of rationality, right? The Tories just sort of completely shoot themselves in the head. But the good thing about it is it's clear to everyone what's actually happened, right? Because of Brexit, there's democratic accountability. No one can blame the EU anymore. The British government sabotaged

border control and sabotaged having a sane immigration policy. Deliberately, that's what the Tories did, and everyone was clear about it. So it's sort of stupid and insane in one way, but at least now, because of Brexit, everyone knows exactly who to blame. And quite rightly, they gave the Tories the kicking they deserved.

Talk to me about how you say that the Tories sabotaged the immigration policy. I haven't lived in the UK for two and a half years. Looking at what people talk about, it's a huge issue for friends, a lot of whom live in London, a lot of whom would have been not talking about this sort of thing unless it was a big deal. And it's all over the news. So just dig into the dynamics and the mechanism of what's going on.

So, obviously, it's super complicated in one way, but I think you can simplify it to a large extent. Essentially, so we win the referendum in 2016. Tories then implode for three years, drive the country into constitutional crisis, complete chaos. Boris asks the Vote Leave team to come to number 10 and sort out the shit show. We go to number 10. We solve the constitutional crisis. We beat Corbyn in the election. We're then at number 10, right?

And we do it with an immigration policy, which is pretty clear and has very, very widespread support. Our leave immigration policy was we should be much more pro and open to high skilled immigration. If you're a scientist, if you're a doctor, if you're a physicist, if you're a startup person building a company, we should make it way easier for you to come, easier for you to bring your family and build things and create value. But we should massively cut unskilled immigration.

And we should have a period in time over like the next decade or so where we go, right, more high-skilled immigration, massively crush unskilled immigration, particularly from like war-torn countries with people fleeing with completely fucked up ideas about how to run the world. And...

We spend that time actually building the infrastructure, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries, all that kind of stuff that both parties basically neglected for 30 years. And then in 10 years' time, we can revisit it and see whatever wants to do. Essentially, what happened in 2021 is the Tories said, screw all that. We're just going to basically open the floodgates. And so suddenly, a system that had been thought to be, when net immigration was like,

to 300,000 was already unprecedented, suddenly it shot up to a million. Nothing like it has ever been seen. And then in parallel, they basically concede that, well, they start off... So at the same time as you have this huge unparalleled surge in legal immigration,

You then have a situation where organized crime gangs, transnational crime gangs, realize that essentially the British legal system is paralyzed in dealing with people coming across the channel in these boats. They claim asylum.

And there's basically no realistic chance of anyone being stopped or booted out. So the gangs start increasing the pressure on this for 2020. It's like, there's a little bit of it in 2020, but it's like tiny numbers. 2021, 2022, the numbers go up and up and up. And essentially what happens there is Boris, so the actual solution to this, I went through in 2020,

I went through it with the Navy in terms of operational methods of how you actually stop the boats physically. And I went through it legally to figure out the legal side of it. In a nutshell, you can't stop the legal side of it unless you actually at least amend the Human Rights Act. And you're prepared to tell the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that we're not going to enforce various of their judgments on this subject. And that's fundamentally the only way you can get legal control over the illegal immigration and the asylum system.

What Boris does is he doesn't want to do this. So he creates this completely ludicrous policy of, we're going to fire all these people to Rwanda. Tory MPs, being what they are, go, oh, that sounds like a good idea. And everyone starts yabbering away about Rwanda. But the important thing to realize about the Rwanda policy is it was always intended by Boris as a fake. It was intended as a fake thing instead of actually solving the problem. So the real solution is,

repeal parts of the human rights legislation, and then deploy the Navy and just stop any boats arriving. That's the actual solution if you actually are optimizing for stop the boats. What Boris started was this whole fake discussion about Rwanda policy. But of course, then what happens is the courts just say, "Well, sending all these people to Rwanda is a breach of their human rights anyway."

To cut a long story short, Boris Johnson and then Rishi Sunak waste four years arguing about this completely retarded Rwanda plan, which wouldn't solve the problem anyway, instead of actually solving the problem. So you have, on the one hand, unparalleled parabolic illegal immigration, and then you have parabolic numbers on boats coming across the channel. And the country looking at this and just saying, all right, this is what an absolute farce.

And of course, it's made even worse for the Tories because Sunak takes office and he says, read my lips, judge me on whether or not I stopped the boats. Then, of course, the boats are completely out of control. What's your postmortem on the recent general election? 80 seat majority to the biggest loss ever. How did this happen?

The fundamental core of it is the Tory party has been rotting for decades. And between the MPs, it's not because they were too left wing or too right wing or because of Brexit or Remain. The core of it is, and having been in Number 10 and watched these people, the core of it is that the Tory MPs completely gave up thinking about actual government and real power and how power is exercised.

and voters. So the core of democratic theory is that parties want to win elections to be in power, therefore they look at voters, and therefore when they're in government, they're actually incentivized to take government seriously. This theory completely breaks down when you look at the Tories over the last decade. Essentially what they optimize for is the 24-7 breaking news cycle,

and their careers over a very short time span inside Westminster. And they completely stopped caring about or thinking about or prioritizing actual government. So if you look at every kind of significant aspect, we're talking about immigration, but if you look at NHS waiting lists, if you look at violent crime, if you look at productivity and average wages, if you look at the Ministry of Defense,

You've had...

The biggest pandemic, worst pandemic in a century, and the Tories basically just gave up on the health service and let the whole thing fall apart. They've had the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler in 1945, and the Tories completely gave up on the MOD and let the armed forces just kind of rot and hollow out. So you look at every single major aspect of the state and state capabilities, the Tories either let the rot happen or they actually did things to accelerate the rot.

So they pissed away something like 35, 40 billion just in this parliament on the most ludicrous high-speed rail scheme in world history.

completely corrupt, completely useless, total and utter farce of a project, 40 billion down the toilet. Meanwhile, they go around machine gunning critical areas of state capabilities, starving special forces of crucial cash, like trivial cash, pandemic response, all sorts of things. So it's just a sort of... And the public can see it, right? The public aren't stupid. The voters can see

We're paying more and more taxes, the country's going into more and more debt, yet every major thing that we look at, the quality of services are disintegrating. We're paying more and more and more money for less and less and less services. So, you know, you keep doing that, the Tories deservedly have had the worst election result in their history. How relatively do you see it as a Labour victory versus a Conservative loss?

Was it just handed over? Would it have been, it could have been anybody. It could have been count bin face on the other side. No, I think you've got to give credit to Starmer and his main kind of guy. Um, uh, I forgot his name now. Um, but the guy you run is the guy who ran his campaign. I'll think of it in a second. I'm really bad with names. Um, I think that's, you know, there's, there's brilliant campaigners like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan, uh,

And Starmer knew that he wasn't a character like that. And to give him credit, like a lot of politicians are sort of delusional on things like that and think that they're Obama when they're not. Starmer, Morgan Sweeney is his name. Starmer and Morgan Sweeney, I think, sort of realized that they've got a guy who's not very good at politics, not very good at communication. So they played a kind of cautious defensive game. They didn't try and overreach. They didn't try and pretend he was something that he wasn't. And they put them...

Their political effort over three years was very far from a sort of fascinating, interesting story, but it was careful, defensive, and they put themselves in positions so that if the Tories blew themselves up, then they could profit from it.

Whereas Corbyn and other people on the left of the Labour Party over decades repeatedly just don't get to first base like that. Starmer and Sweeney got to first base and they put themselves in a position where they could profit from the Tories blowing themselves up. And you've got to give them some credit for that. On the other hand, though, if you look at the numbers, right, Starmer only got basically the same number of votes as Corbyn did in 2019 when we crushed him.

And there's like massive tactical voting. The massive tactical voting is driven by the fact that everybody perfectly reasonably despises the Tories and was determined to try and shove them out wherever. So if voting Lib Dem was the right way, they voted Lib Dem. If voting Reform for Farage was the right way, they voted for Farage. So essentially...

It was like overwhelmingly, and you can see it in how people answer polling, it's just overwhelmingly people trying to figure out how do I vote most effectively to remove the despised Tories? Because the country's got to move on. What's your thoughts on Reform UK and Farage's re-entry into politics? Yeah.

It's sort of depressing, basically, I think, because Farage is basically like Tori Mp's at heart. His goal is just to be on the Stupid Today program on the BBC. He's not actually there to get anything done. So he's there to kind of profit from people being upset with the system, but he doesn't have real answers for what to do.

And he always surrounds himself with useless characters who can't build anything. So the party itself isn't really going anywhere. It tops out at roughly 15%. There's 15% of the country pretty much like Farage and hate everybody else. And he can get that 15% this year. He got 15% in 2015. But it's never going to solve the actual problem.

Well, there's a lot of people that see reform as the only potential supplanter to the Conservative Party, that Tories are dead in the water, they're not going to go anywhere, there's no way that they can come back from this, their reputation is completely destroyed. And here comes the prodigal son, someone who is a good communicator, who does articulate and orate very well.

Is that a non-starter in your opinion? Do you need to, like Lazarus, bring the Conservative Party back from the dead? How can you make any sort of an opposition to Labour? So I think there's a vicious circle in British politics, which I think you see a similar sort of issue in America, right? What's happened over decades is that elite talent...

A lot of elite talent used to go into politics and public service in one form or another. If you go back 100 years, you can go back 50 or 70 years, you see a lot of incredibly able people in Washington, D.C., in Whitehall, building things and doing things.

What's happened is that that elite talent has massively shifted out of politics and public service. And they're in some combination of maths, money, venture capital, tech startups, scientific research, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They don't want to be part of the party clown show and the political clown show. And this becomes very self-reinforcing.

So, you know, like if you're looking at the overall economy, the economy is an open system. All kinds of people can come in and out of it. Startups happen. All companies die. There's this constant creative destruction, right?

But in politics and government, the system doesn't work like that. So you have increasingly these like old parties, which are all created 50, 100, 200 years ago. Tories, 200 years ago. Labour, 100 and odd years ago. Democrats, Republicans, you know, 150 years ago, whatever.

These things are all kind of rotting internally. And most of the smart people have moved out elsewhere. And it becomes, therefore, extremely hard to rejuvenate these things. And a very similar thing to what's happened in the States, where you can see both Democrats and Republicans suffering from this problem.

My own view about the Tories is that it's just very hard. I've watched them for 25 years. It's just a one-way process of talent collapse and rot. It's very hard to see how it can be self-generating. And also, you have to consider this way. They don't want to change, right? The voters look at them and they say, we hate you because you're so shit.

But the Tories don't think of themselves like that, right? They just want to keep going in the same way that they always do. Same as Whitehall, right? You have Whitehall collides with once a century event in COVID, once a 50-year event in Ukraine. Does it say, oh my God, we've totally failed. We've got to change tack. No, it's like, we've got to go back to normal. Give us more power, give us more money and let's carry on. And you should just, the answer is you've all got to trust the old institutions, right? That's the solution. That's their solution to it.

Give us more money, give us more power, and trust us. Does that not lay the groundwork for someone like a Farage to come in and say, this is new. Some of the people that were around him did seem to be a little bit younger, maybe a little bit more disruptive in some way. It's less ossified. It can do these things. Is that not a potential solution to this? Yeah, so I think in principle it is. And in some respects, that's what Trump is. Trump partly is a phenomenon generated by

by tens and tens of millions of people just being completely disgusted and fed up of the old system. And a lot of people might think Trump's a bit of an asshole. They might not agree with him about everything, but they know one thing for sure about Trump, right? The old system really, really hates him.

And because of that, well, he can't be all bad and therefore maybe he's our guy. Well, I mean, we saw that with J.D. Vance. There's this famous Tucker quote where he said something like, I know of nobody in the halls of power that supports J.D. Vance and that makes me trust him immensely. Exactly. And this is this like self-feeding dynamic, right? So the old establishment is saying more and more the real danger is populists and fascists and the people who don't trust the old institutions anymore.

but the more they, and their argument about what's happening is, well, it's the idiot voters who are fooled by disinformation. Yeah. Like Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation. Right. And, and, and Biden is senile disinformation run by, run by Putin. Biden is super sharp in private. Right. That's what all the, that's what all the main, that's what the New York times and CNN and MSNBC told, told everyone for the last two years. Right.

So they keep doubling down on, it's the voters who are stupid to be, not to trust us. And the answer is for them to trust us more. But that is pushing more and more and more people into opposing them. And as the Democrat Party has gone more and more mad, it's pushed up. Elon voted twice for Obama. A whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley who voted for Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Obama twice, have now just come out and said,

sonnet like we're gonna vote for trump what david sacks doing a fundraiser chamath coming on his side sf now starting to get moving exactly chamath who was like super pro hillary and biden right it's now like all he's all in all in for um for trump the kind of this kind of like self-generating madness of the democrats and the old media is part of what's

driving that right these guys didn't want to find themselves involved in politics these are startup people who wanted to keep doing what everyone's done in silicon valley for 50 years which is like

we try and isolate ourselves from the madness in the East Coast. We don't want to touch it. We want to build our own stuff out here. Leave us be. And finally, the madness of the New York Times, the Democrats, has become so intense. A lot of them have said, I think Mark Andreessen said last week, something like, paraphrasing Trotsky, you may not be interested in war, but war's interested in you. And, you know, I think that's the attitude which a lot of people in the Valley have adopted, right? We didn't want to be interested in all of this stuff. We wanted to keep clear of it, but

you kind of put a gun to our head and forced us to. It's a call to arms for the tech bros and their mechanical keyboards to get moving and start doing something. All right, so just to round out the discussion about the UK, what do you see, what can people expect the next few years in the UK? What should people, what's your prediction? What do people expect?

So I think that generally speaking, I go,

There are powerful long-term trends, and unless some force intervenes with them, you should just expect these things to continue, roughly speaking. So the Tories are a farce. The Tories will remain a farce. I think it's very unlikely that you see some kind of rejuvenation. After 1997 to 2001, they just ran around in circles for four years, completely delusional, a complete waste of time, didn't get anywhere. Since then, the quality of the people has massively deteriorated, so why the hell would the story be different?

I think, ironically, that Labour will do a bit more of what me and the Vote Leave team wanted to do on some things. So I think they'll be a bit better on things like planning law, for example. It'll become a bit easier to build stuff. They'll be a bit less sort of like casually, ignorantly vandalistic towards science and technology than the Tories were.

But at the heart of it, Keir Starmer, like Rishi Sunak, like Boris, is like an institutional man, right? They believe in Whitehall. They believe in the institutions. And these institutions are pathological. The institutions destroy the good things. So what happened in 2020? We built the Vaccine Task Force, world-leading.

Whitehall saw this as terribly embarrassing, so closed it down. We built sewage monitoring for pathogens, crucial not just for COVID, but for all future pandemics and for bioterrorism and everything else, right? World leading thing, everyone says, well, God, what Britain did is brilliant. What happened? They've shut it down.

You go through valuable thing after valuable thing now, the institutions actually attack it because it's embarrassing to old Whitehall. So I think Tories keep failing, Labour keep failing, Whitehall keep failing. There'll be some improvements of Labour over the Tories here and there, but I think the picture generally will be pretty grim.

Not as grim as inside the EU, but I think it'll be depressing if the system is left to itself. So then the question is, the big question is, is it, will Britain obviously is in many, many ways constantly downstream of what happens in the States? We have like the kind of communist trans madness going

sparks off and grows in San Francisco and then heads west, heads east and then hops over the Atlantic and gets to here. And then similarly you have like the backlash starts in California, heads east. And then the question is like, will that hop across the Atlantic? So will there be something sort of equivalent to what you've seen with Elon and the other people and other parts of America saying, okay, Washington is so dysfunctional, we've got to get involved.

If Britain's going to change course, it needs a subset of elite talent to stop what they're doing now and to say, okay, we're actually going to get involved with politics and government and force the broken old system of change. How would you make politics or government more attractive to young talent, to the people that you want to bring into it? Um...

Well, so at the moment you have these old civil service hierarchies, right? Which are, they're run by the absolute worst elements of the HR department. And they recruit almost entirely internally. And one of the way, what this does is it creates a kind of like anti-talent ratchet.

So if you deal with the British civil service, what you see is you see a whole bunch of people between like 25 and 35 who are really, really able, a lot of energy, a lot of brains, a lot of kind of can-do spirit. What happens is these people almost all leave between like 35 and 45. And the reason is they spend the first 10 years looking at it. They do a bunch of stuff and then they look at their bosses and they look at the HR system and how everyone gets promoted.

And they basically recoil with horror and they leave. So almost every single one of the most able young people in civil service that I've worked with over the last 20 years, almost everyone has gone. It feels like the reverse of the Peter principle in a way. You know how people get promoted...

in positions where they're good at their job until they suck at their job which is why the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs this is almost like an early warning system against the peter principle you know you're seeing all of these people this slow march toward potential promotion toward potentially a position of power or respect or or remuneration or whatever and these people are just you know ripping the ejector cord to get out before that happens

Yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. And that's why you have this kind of like collapse over COVID, right? You suddenly, you look around the room and a whole bunch of the senior people actually responsible for crisis management in a pandemic are just dying.

A lot of them are complete clowns and the whole system falls apart. What's the reason for this ossified, old guard, worst parts of HR department being in charge? Is it just that there's no market forces acting? So the sort of typical competitive dynamics that would happen in a world of business, entrepreneurialism, capitalism and stuff, they're just not acting. It's that kind of the primary force?

Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of people on the right make a mistake and they think the big difference is private v. public, but I don't think that's really the key thing exactly. Because you see, the first thing is,

All really big organizations, after a bit of time, end up having very similar dynamics. You look at Google now and you listen to people talking to value about Google, what do they say? They're basically like, "Well, it's like a sort of dead government bureaucracy. It's incredibly hard for anything to get done. The founders are no longer involved. The high page is often is yacht, whatever."

So this happens in the private sector too. But of course, the huge difference is that, okay, Google ossifies, but then Sam Altman is over at OpenAI reading the papers produced by Google and says, holy shit, if you see this paper on transformers from the Google team, we can go do the following things, right? So he's got this very dynamic startup, very dynamic character, Sam,

and they go and build something in a short period of time. That's like the big difference, right? You haven't got that kind of startup ecosystem in government where people can go, right, okay, the Department of Health is a joke or the Ministry of Defense is a joke. We can build something different. In government, that's not how it works. And therefore, the only real creative force or disruptive force that can happen is political forces.

The only people with the power to change it, the civil servants can't change themselves. And the civil service system, because of its HR system, only promotes internally

So it just gets worse and worse over time. The only force that can change that is a political force that says, we demand and we are going to insist and use our political authority to change how these things work. And historically, the only way you can really do that is you have to just keep closing a lot of stuff down and you have to create new things that can bring in new talent from outside the system. I imagine that's very threatening to the people that are in there.

Exactly. A, it's very threatening to the people who are in there. So they fight like hell to basically blackmail the politicians into, well, if you try and do this, there'll be war. But you also have the other cultural problem which we discussed earlier on, which is the MPs have just lost interest in it. The MPs have lost interest in the business of actual government and they're actually happy not really running things, right? So British government now is basically a Potemkin show.

The ministers walk up Downing Street. They smile at the cameras. The media pretends that the cabinet discussions are actually where power is and actually where the big – and it's like big rowing cabinet about policy X. But the reality is cabinet is a completely Potemkin exercise. X is not decided in cabinet. X is decided somewhere else. But the MPs are okay with that.

right everyone's kind of in on the game the mps are okay with that the media is okay with that and the officials are okay with that because the officials have the real power they're the ones actually in charge of it so they're perfectly happy for the clown show to focus on the ministers what what do you mean when you say the officials and elsewhere who are the officials where is elsewhere who does run the british government so a huge amount of uh um

So if you want to ask that, where's real power now? With the cabinet secretary, right, an official, originally the job was literally the secretary to the cabinet would sit there and write notes on what the cabinet ministers are saying, right? When the job was created in 1917. Now that cabinet secretary is much, much more powerful than any government minister apart from the prime minister.

So the cabinet and his deputies in all sorts of ways are like 10x more powerful than cabinet ministers are. So cabinet is nominally the place where power is and nominally the place where critical decisions are taken. But in fact, now vast amounts of the most important things are actually done in the cabinet office and power is actually wielded by the cabinet secretary. If a bomb goes off in London tonight,

The cabinet secretary will be called before the home secretary is called.

A whole set of wiring of power links to the cabinet secretary, not to the foreign secretary or to the home secretary. And the cabinet secretary decides what information is allowed to be seen. If someone's got to... If MI5 have got to tap the phone of the secretary of state for defense because people are worried that that person might be shagging some Russian agent or something, then it's not the home secretary that gets to see all of these...

intricate operational details with the intelligence services. This is like compartmentalized and it's done in the cabinet office. And there'll be a few words with the PM, but the PM will be the only political person essentially who has any involvement with it. So power is like unseen. Power is shifted inside the system very largely to officials. I'm not saying it's all Potemkin. It's not purely Potemkin. In the British system, the prime minister does actually have a lot of power constitutionally if they choose to exercise it.

But since Mr. Thatcher, PMs have basically given up on using vast amounts of their power, don't actually exercise it. What is Potemkin? You've mentioned it a couple of times.

So it's a famous Russian guy, like centuries ago. Essentially, it means... So in this process, what would happen is like the Tsar would leave St. Petersburg and go and visit somewhere to see what was going on. But instead of actually sorting out the village, they kind of paint a facade down each side of the village. So the Tsar would go through the middle and he'd look left and right and the Tsar would go, oh, right, yeah, everything in the village seems to be fine. In fact, it's just like

They paint the front. They paint the front. The picture is completely fake, right? Behind the picture, the village is actually a complete telescope. It's like when you hear about these tours of North Korea where the journalists have been taken around. Right, okay. Exactly. If you imagine a North Korea photo shoot is what I mean by Potemkin politics. Cool. Where the picture that you're shown on TV, on the BBC –

is essentially completely or largely fake. What was being in British government like for you? You step into those doors as someone that wants to make things happen, that has desires and ambitions capitalistically for success in terms of technology. What was it actually like being in the midst of that machine? It was...

It was basically very depressing because you have on the one hand, you have this incredibly centralized system that in all sorts of ways has too much power, but in all sorts of other ways, it's very hard as a special advisor, which is what I was, to actually get things done because you don't have actual executive authority yourself. So

Although if you look at the media, the media reports about me are like all powerful, dominant, coming second most powerful person in the country, blah, blah, blah. A lot of you'll see endless things in the newspapers to that effect. But that's just not, it's not true. It's not how the thing works. It's not a single, the most junior official in the country I could not give a direct order to and say, you should go and do the following thing. Yeah.

So your kind of influence is all very, very indirect and it only exists to the extent that people think you're actually speaking for the PM. It was fundamentally depressing because on the one hand, you have a depressing mix of things. On the one hand, you have ministers in a cabinet that's just not interested in the most important questions. They're completely obsessed with all the bullshit in the media every day. That is their only life and only interest.

And you have, as I said, you have a lot of very able young officials, but then all of their bosses or most of their bosses are a nightmare. And you have just these broken bureaucracies that can't actually get anything done and which spend almost all of their time just trying to defend their own power and budgets, not actually doing what they're there to do, you know, to serve the public. And that's...

It's very depressing when you see that up close every day. Well, I suppose from the outside, everybody hopes, even if the government appears up front, you know, Biden decrepit and unable to speak correctly, or Boris is this kind of blabbering, big buffoon-y guy that sort of

rolling through press conferences, you hope that behind the scenes there's some competence somewhere. And I suppose the magician showing you how the sausage is made and you getting in there and going, oh, it's just...

just as incompetent behind the scenes. I imagine that that must be quite disenchanting and dispiriting. So you know what happens in J.S. Bond films, right? There's often a scene in a J.S. Bond film where Bond is walking along and then suddenly someone opens the door and then suddenly there's like 100 ninjas doing their martial arts exercises. And we're like, oh, right, that's where the ninjas are. But when you go to government, you realize there isn't a door open.

And there ain't any ninjas either. You're sort of sitting there and it's actually literally just like Westminster, right? You've watched the old TV show from the 70s, Westminster. That's basically like a documentary of actually how government works. So of course...

I'm not being completely, you always have to remember that what I'm talking about is like 98% of the picture, right? There's like obviously always a few brilliant people. One of the privileges of doing my job was I spent a lot of time dealing with some of the people in the armed forces. I went and had meetings with British special forces. There's extraordinary people there doing extraordinary things. So obviously I'm not saying that like every part of the British system is rubbish, right? There are obviously pockets of

extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. But that kind of heightens the tragedy because you look at these people and they're kind of like, the system is the enemy of them, right? Wherever you go, the MOD is the enemy of special forces. The Department of Health is the enemy of these brilliant doctors and nurses. It's like competence is kryptonite. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the most surprising things that I learned from you is just how much of Britain is run via WhatsApp.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's partly, of course, that itself displays like a really weird thing, right? So when I arrived in Downing Street in summer 2019, like no, basically no one ever believes me when I say this. I put it in my COVID evidence under oath, but no one believed it. When I arrived in Downing Street in July 2019, there wasn't even a file sharing system.

So if you go back and look at all of Boris's statements on COVID, like announcing lockdown, hugely dramatic things that no one had seen in 70 years. They were done literally on my private Gmail account because the only way you could get the prime minister, crucial advisors, the crucial scientific advisors, and the press office all able to edit the same document at the same time was to use someone's private Gmail account. Right?

So a one-man startup, in lots of ways, Chris, your startup doing your podcast has better tech and tools than are available to the British Prime Minister spending like a trillion quid a year in British taxes, right? That's the insanity of the system.

What is the state of information flow efficiency in the British government? I have friends that are doctors. They tell me that the NHS still largely runs on Windows XP and that you've got to fax things around. And you think, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's only people's health and them staying alive. What about government? Surely government can't be so inefficient.

No, no, it's very much the same. It's like the computers there look like they're out, you know, they're sort of like 2005 Windows, you know, Windows Office is what it all looks like. It's like...

or anything like that is basically pretty shambolic. Now, there have been one of the few good things about COVID. So obviously, I wrote about a lot of this before going into number 10 in 2019. Everyone pooh-poohed it. We don't care about data. We don't care about technology, blah, blah. One of the good things about COVID is that some of these issues did go more mainstream. In spring 2020, you know, so when the first wave of COVID hit, right,

and you're approaching the first nightmare peak, thousands of people starting to die a day.

The actual information system for the British Prime Minister was I would go into a little office. I would wheel this whiteboard along the corridor at number 10. I'd put it in the cabinet room and the British Prime Minister would sit down and the head of the NHS would read out from scraps of paper on a bit of paper that he'd written down from fax machines. The last fax is operating. You're kidding me. I am not kidding you. I said this under oath. So, you know, like perjury, if it's not true.

Simon Stevens at the NHS is reading things out from scraps of paper that he's got from faxes. And I'm scribbling on a whiteboard these numbers that he's reading out and then getting my iPhone out of my pocket and going times two, times two, times two, and then scribbling out the numbers beneath and then saying, Prime Minister, that means that the number of people in hospital in three weeks is going to be... And everyone looking around going, what the fuck is he... That can't be true. What's he on about? Just double it for four times and that's where we're going to be in two or three weeks.

that was the information system now we brought in a bunch of people who to work on this um and within like eight weeks so normally if you say like how do you fix a system like that for nhs right it would take five ten years cost 15 billion quid and then be a total shit show uh that would be the normal story we actually built this new system completely for the nhs in about six ish weeks and actually had like a state-of-the-art system so we went from

faxes, scraps of paper, me scribbling stupidly on a whiteboard like an idiot to state-of-the-art cloud AWS dashboard with live information on all the beds, all the ventilators, how many beds were free, da-da-da. And we managed to do that in like six, eight weeks. So one of the few good things about COVID was that some of these things went more mainstream and officials actually saw for themselves the power of technology, the power of actually having modern tools, how

how it helps decision makers, how it helps better management. Also the danger of inefficiency, I suppose, because the consequences are actually dire for once. Exactly. They're confronted with the consequences of shit IT. We're basically blind. We're thousands of people dying and we don't understand where, when, how or what to do about it.

The UK COVID-19 inquiry released its module one report only a few days ago. Did you get a chance to read that? What do you think? No, I haven't read it, I'm afraid. The inquiry has been incredibly depressing and in lots of ways it's just like adding misinformation and like another layer of fake to the whole thing.

I mean, you have the extraordinary sight of scientists have trooped in one after the other saying under oath, well, on Friday the 13th of March, I believe the following thing. And I didn't understand why number 10 was blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Saying it's under oath. But sitting on YouTube is a video of them on BBC News on Friday the 13th of March, that exact day, saying literally like 180 degrees the exact opposite.

Not once ever in the entire inquiry did the lawyers and the judge ever say, your statements to us today under oath, Professor so-and-so, are 180 degrees opposite of what you actually said that day. So we're not saying you're lying. We're not saying you've got to go to prison for perjury.

But we have to get to the bottom of this has to be explained, right? Instead, everyone's just gone, oh, right, okay, I just accepted it all. And there's example after example after example, unfortunately, where the inquiry basically wants to say the whole thing is the product of Moron Boris and Moron Matt Hancock, and they want to blame those two for everything. Now, of course, those two did make a lot of mistakes, but no one's been more critical of those two than me.

But if you actually want to do government better in future, and if you actually want to get to the truth, you can't just have this process where you say, where you try and dump all the blame on them and then pretend that the rest of the system actually worked fine. Is that the inquiry being incompetent or are they willfully allowing a narrative to permeate that is appropriate for the outcome that they want?

It's very hard to know these things, right? Unless you're in the room talking to them, it's very hard to know. You've been in the room. It seemed like they pushed and poked and were able to sort of throw some sharp things at you. Yeah, they did with me, but they haven't with the officials and they haven't with the scientists, right? They've let a whole bunch of people give evidence without poking holes in it. And also, they just haven't called a whole load of people.

So there's a whole bunch of people who were in critical roles who have just never been asked even to give a statement, never mind to turn up and be interrogated. So it's very hard to reconcile that with a set of people who are actually trying to get to the truth. The head of the civil contingencies unit

the actual cabinet office entity in charge of crisis management for a pandemic, right? Obviously, you have to have that official aid and you have to question very carefully what they say. Never even appear. Never mind question badly, just hasn't appeared to answer the questions in the module that I was in.

I found it so funny watching the highlights from your, maybe one of your multiple

multiple run-ins with the COVID inquiry where your WhatsApp messages or your text messages get brought up. And there's some spicy language in there. It's the kind of language that you send to people when you just need to get things done or when you're in a WhatsApp chat or whatever it might be. It did read quite a lot like a thick of it sketch. It read like Armando Iannucci had actually put it together. But on the flip side, I

Obviously, I don't know the ins and outs, but I can imagine if you're a northern guy working with a bunch of fucking incompetent people who seem to be incapable of actually getting anything done, that you're going to begin to dial up that rhetoric and just speak

unencumbered, sort of straight from brain to fingertips into WhatsApp chat to try and say like, this is what I'm feeling right now. I'm in wartime. Don't get in the fucking way. It's not time for airs or graces. And yeah, I just, it really resonated with me

I think with a lot of the, I used to run nightclubs in the Northeast of the UK. And if we're doing Halloween and there's 5,000 people trying to get into two nightclubs on the big market in Newcastle, you know, that is the sort of, those are precisely the messages that I'm sending to the boys. Like where the fuck are the barriers? Who do I need to kick in the nuts to be able to get this to be sorted? It's just, it's that kind of style. Now in the cold, harsh light of day, five years later or four years later,

It doesn't sound great when it's read out with some guy in suit and tie on pointing at you who's sat looking sheepish in front of a microphone. But yeah, I just, I thought it was very reminiscent for me.

So I think as well, right, so if you take a few of those messages that got the most attention, I'd say two things about those messages, right? The media presented a lot of them as if I was swearing at officials, but in fact they were one-to-one messages between me and the Prime Minister. They weren't me shouting at some official, you fucking idiot, do blah, blah, blah, right? It was me screaming at the PM saying, this is what... So that's the first thing. The second thing is,

The whole kind of media focus on that itself was very revealing, right? Because it's like, oh, Cummings' language is appalling to the prime minister. But no one paid attention to the actual content of what I was talking about. If you take the one that people were most appalled by, by me criticizing a particular official, right? The actual issue in play there was,

that the cabinet office was taking officials working on vaccines and testing as we went into the second wave, off vaccines and testing, to deal with a cabinet office HR fuck-up from a year earlier, right? So you're facing thousands of people more dying in wave two in September. You're desperately trying to get vaccines going and testing going to try and stop this happening. And the people actually in charge of doing this

are coming along and taking the staff away and saying, oh no, we've got this HR fuck-up with a bunch of lawyers and we've got to work on that instead. That's the actual scandal. Not me using swear words to describe someone to the Prime Minister. The actual scandal is the actual scandal, right? But again, neither the inquiry and the media want to focus on my bad language rather than how the system works. I don't know. It's so...

this sort of weird performative empathy, upstanding prim and proper approach to decorum. And I don't know, it just seems so detached in many ways. Yeah. I mean, can you deliver these messages without the requisite swearing that goes along with them? Yeah, you can. But you're right. It just seems to me to be another example of

people focusing on all of the wrong things now that's not to say that they've not focused on some of the right things it's at other points but fuck me like is that really the most important thing think about the language that was used here god there was people dying does that really matter does the language matter exactly and of course like as i said you know like

When I'm actually in meetings, having meetings with people, of course, I'm not like shouting and swearing at these people. They're put with meetings and it's like, right, you do this, you do that, you do the other.

But the way in which the inquiry and the media tried to present it is as if like, oh, that's how meetings are conducted at Number 10. And again, it's all part of a fake story. So they want the story to be, oh, well, because Number 10 has these crazy meetings with coming shouting, it's very people, that's why things went wrong. No, the messages were one-to-one messages to the PM. They're not meetings. And you're not focusing on the actual issue. So it's like a double fake. Again, it's like,

They want to create a fake story. They want people to focus on the fake story. They don't want to get to the heart of why on earth is the entity responsible for crisis management and saving thousands of people's lives actually ditching that to work on HR cock-ups that are completely irrelevant. Yeah. Speaking of fake, you've got this new Breaking Kayfabe series thing where you say that the news is faker than WWE. What do you mean by that?

So it's like, you'll know who I mean, but I'll just explain for some of your audience. So there's a legendary music producer in LA. There's a guy called Rick Rubin, who obviously you'll know. And it was Rick Rubin who actually said this. Rick Rubin was asked about how he relaxes and about politics in the news and whatnot. And Rick Rubin said, well, I'm a big WWE fan.

But the older I get and the more political news I watch, the more my attitude is that wrestling is real and it's the news that's fake. And what we should do is you should start watching political news on CNN or read the New York Times as if it's a WWE script. And then you'll actually understand what's going on much better.

And I thought like, that's, that's actually, it takes an artist to kind of get to the heart of the political issue. And it sounds kind of crazy when you first say it, but then look at just what happened with Biden, right? For two years, if you talk to a swing voter farmer on 30 grand living in Missouri, he

In a focus group, he would say, well, the president clearly is like senile. He's shuffling around, walking into walls. He's shaking hands with the air. I don't understand what these clowns in Washington are doing. Like, it's just ludicrous having a president like that. It's like my grandfather, when he got senile, he can't do the job, right? That was what the uninformed people who watched No News thought.

The story in the New York Times, believed by the best informed people in Washington, was the president's super sharp in private, like he smashes out. Sharp as a tack. Sharp as a tack. Yeah.

First debate happens and all of the New York Times and Washington Post are full of people going, oh my God, this is unbelievable. Like I'm shocked, shocked from staffers briefing from inside the White House, right? So you've actually got a situation in which staffers briefing from inside the White House are giving statements about the president's mental health, showing that they're actually less informed than someone who watches no news and just watches TikTok for like five minutes a day, driving a tractor in Michigan.

yeah that's how it shows that like rick rubin is right rick rubin is right he should have been the the guy that was advising everyone yeah it's um i i realized during that period that to me making jokes about biden's senility on a an episode felt so obvious that it was hacky it was so old news and so yeah exactly that i wouldn't i i avoided doing it because it felt like

a cheap shot, not a cheap fake, a cheap shot. And then, and then to realize that the fucking veils fall from people's eyes when he has that debate with Trump. And then to hear this totally dickless set of assertions by people in the media who now can, who,

Do this sort of like faux criticism thing where they can seem like they're stepping up and pushing back against the Democrats and the party and the president that they've been running cover for for the last two or three years, saying that it's cheap fake, saying that it's whatever. Well, I...

it's obvious there's no cost to you holding this opinion now. There's no cost at all because everyone's seen that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ben, Ben Usher, Ben, somebody wrote this great article about common knowledge and the common knowledge is not just, it's not good enough simply for people to know a thing. They also have to believe that everybody else also knows that thing. And when you have this huge,

big fireworks display showing the problems that the president is facing at the moment,

Anybody that then comes out and says, oh, it's unbelievable. We can't support Biden with the way that he's got. Everybody knows this now. It's the same thing with free speech. Free speech is only important for people that disagree with your view, because of course you're going to want all of the people who agree with your view to have fucking free speech. Yeah, it was so God, it really made me realize just how much there are kind of two worlds of people. There was one world of people who thought it was so obvious it was hacky to talk about and another world of people for whom this was a revelation.

Yeah, exactly. And even more weird in a way, but it's like the world which is most deluded about actual core reality is the set of people who spend all of their time supposedly at the absolute center of power talking to the power people, right?

So the closer you were to being editor of the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN Bureau in DC, the more likely you were to say completely insane things about Biden's mental health. I wonder whether that was running cover rather than being ignorant. Obviously, it's going to be difficult to know, but I get the sense that anybody that had been around him knew as opposed to them being ignorant and telling what they thought was the truth in the press.

So I think at the very, very core, that's true, right? I mean, I remember having breakfast with one of the top five, probably most powerful officials in the country, in Britain, in January 2023. And he'd just come back from one of these NATO meetings. And he said to me, they're all sitting around with like, he was with...

He was with the British Prime Minister, Macron, Schultz, Biden, blah, blah. And he said, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, who literally had a huge pad and would write every time Sunak or someone would speak, it would be like massive letters. Sunak, Macron, Jake Sullivan writing on this huge pad, right? And putting in front of Biden. And everyone could see this.

So that was said to me in January. Oh, so he knew who he was responding to. Yeah, because he had to be reminded that the guy there is Macklemore. That's how bad it was. And I was told that by this guy who watched it happen in, I think, end of January 2023.

And that's a guy in Britain, right? That's not someone who's, you know, sitting working in the White House and involved all the time. So clearly a lot of people around the core of the deep state who are in these meetings with Biden knew the truth about it for a long time and kept it quiet.

But the whole kind of elite media, whose job is supposedly to tell people the truth and to get to the bottom of it, right? The Washington Post is the people who broke Watergate. They're supposed to be the people to figure these things out. And it's not like this was hard to figure out, right? As you say, you could see it. It was so obvious you didn't even want to talk about it. What do you make of the state of America right now, for all that the UK's maybe gone through some turmoil, pales into insignificance with the absolute furnace that is America? Um...

America is always just like so much more extreme than Europe, right, in various ways. So it's got, on the one hand, you've got hugely, hugely interesting progress in things like AI and biotech, incredible economic dynamism in all sorts of ways. But then as soon as you turn to the political scene, then it's a sort of like just amazing car crash.

I do think it's very positive, though, that a bunch of the Valley people are getting involved. And I don't really mind if it's like if they're going to get involved in the Democrat or Republican side. To me, it's less important than

At an overall level, are we going to start seeing a shift in what we talked about before, where all the able people basically sod off and leave politics and government to become a clown show? Or are you going to start seeing a historic reversal of that and see more and more of the talented people say, okay, we are actually going to have to step up to the plate here and try and change it and get involved with it? So I think that's a...

That's a hopeful sign for America. Washington and government can only improve if the most able people at building things get more involved in public service, for sure. And I hope that that's a sign of, you know, I hope that this is going to be one of those things where Britain is downstream of what happens in America and that there's a similar kind of process here. What do you make of the J.D. Vance VP pick?

Don't know very much about Vance. Never met him. But I think one of the most interesting reactions I've seen is the kind of smart Obama people who actually ran Obama's winning campaigns. Their reaction to it was not the best pick for Trump from the point of view of winning the election, but it's a sign that Trump might be actually serious about driving things through in government because Vance is friends with a lot of entrepreneurs.

He actually believes a lot of this kind of economic populist stuff. The Obama people were all very worried about whether or not in Trump's first term he would actually govern the way that he said. And they were very relieved when he arrived and made a terrible blunder and basically followed Paul Ryan and tried to whack Obamacare and stuff like that, which was a political disaster for Trump.

The amount of people now are very worried that the Vance appointment is a sign that he's learned his lesson. And when he arrives this time, he's actually going to govern in a different way and actually focus on what a lot of working class voters want.

So from America's point of view, I think that would be good if Trump does do that, right? The system does need rebalancing. And across the Western world, we can't just carry on with this economic model where it's stagnant wages for people on median earnings, but like huge asset price bubbles that help the billionaires. This whole thing can't carry on the way it is.

And give me your thoughts on Kamala going into November. So I think what's happening on her is like, it's the same. So the way I describe it, the way that the media works now is the phrase narrative whiplash, right? So you have this narrative which goes along and then like suddenly they just change on a dime. So like in COVID you saw Trump is racist to talk about closing the borders. It's racist to close the borders. Suddenly narrative whiplash.

we must shut the borders immediately. And then the war in Ukraine, it's completely nothing to do with NATO, nothing to do with NATO, it's only to do with Ukraine joining NATO. Now, if we're plush, Ukraine must join NATO. So we see this process over again. We've just seen it with Biden, super sharp in private. Biden is senile. It's like literally Russian disinformation. Flip, Biden's senile, Biden's gone. The next is

Kamala's great, super energy. We're all really excited. She's going to be a brilliant candidate. And I guarantee you that before very long, people are going to start writing, oh shit, like all the reports and focus groups are that she is not a good candidate. Remember, Kamala's 2019 campaign was a total shit show. She blew herself up very quickly. She couldn't build a staff and keep it. She's very, very hard to work with. People don't like working with her.

Winning politics at an elite level is a lot about can you mobilize talent and get people with different views working together in a kind of harmonious way. And if you can't build a team, then you can't get much done. And I think she's really going to struggle as a candidate. Of course, Trump's not popular by historical standards.

So it's likely to stay close, whatever happens. It'll probably be decided by not that many votes in maybe three, four states, same as last time, same as in 2016. The narrative whiplash thing is so interesting and interesting.

I've certainly seen it too. It's odd that in a world where everything that everybody says is essentially blockchain for the rest of time, that no one actually decides to bring up the shit that you previously said. It feels like it's this odd blend of, you know, sort of puritanical, uh,

language policing if it comes to your whatsapp messages directly with the pm or andrew huberman sex life but then if it's articles and headlines that have been written that are then immediately reversed or positions that people have taken publicly which they then publicly perhaps under oath decide to do a u-turn on that that bit gets to be allowed i i really haven't worked out what this is i don't know whether there's a particularly sort of

protected class. I don't know whether it's certain people are allowed to do this and certain aren't, whether it's if you align with particular points of views that you're more allowed to have this odd, non-retroactive skepticism and scrutiny of the shit that you used to say compared with the shit that you say now. But it is true. I thought about mass lighting as opposed to gas lighting across the entire board. It's like, no, no, no, no one ever saw this.

Nobody ever saw this. You did a little in that article I was talking about before that kayfabe thing. You said, "Herd immunity without vaccines is the science and the policy. Herd immunity without vaccines was never the policy. The central question in the referendum is about whether we're in the single market and customs union. The referendum was never about whether we're in the single market and customs union. The war is weakening Russia, so we must continue. The war is strengthening Russia, so we must continue."

Exactly. You just see this process over and over again. But as you say, it's kind of an invisible process to everybody involved with it. And they don't point out to each other. It's like, we'll be just like terribly bad form. So the flip happens, but then everyone just talks like that's what we've always said. And no one goes, hang on a second, but the war was supposed to be weakening Russia. How the fuck are we now? What do you mean we've got to carry on because it's strengthening Russia?

That means like a whole plan has gone totally wrong, right? It's the easiest solution. It's a much easier version than 1984, where they have to retroactively go back and actually change what happened. Yeah, now they don't bother. Yeah, for some reason. They just leave it there in the public domain and no one even picks it up and puts it out. So I really wonder whether this is contributed to by the pace of just news, the sheer velocity that we're being...

you know, pepper sprayed in the face with everything that's going on, this pressure washer of information that's coming out. Like Trump getting shot feels like it's over. The president got shot in the head. The presidential candidate got shot in the head. And now we're talking about, uh, it's Biden. Oh my God. Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris is doing it there. And everybody who's talking about the Trump thing now, it's wild. It's wild. Yeah.

Meanwhile, all these details come out about the Trump thing, right? Like, turns out the Secret Service agents were actually watching the guy for like 15, 20 minutes through the scopes before he fired when he had a gun and left Trump on stage. Like, un-fucking-believable crazy shit. But as you say, it's just like, oh, that's now page 18. Oh, dude. Did you run in your mind the model of what would have happened if Trump's head had been an inch to the right?

I mean, there's got to be some, like, if you look at the whole thing now, right, like, the event is just about explainable by, like, total systemic incompetence. If you just look at it and go, okay, well, like, we know from COVID, we can see in Ukraine that Western institutions, like, one after the other are just shot, and they just, like, do pathological crazy shit.

Well, okay, you can sort of imagine how the Secret Service would have decayed to this point where they could allow this sort of thing. You don't have to posit a conspiracy. But if you imagine that Trump's head had exploded live on TV, and then you ask people to believe the current official story, millions of people are not buying any of that shit. Why do you think that's the case?

I think, well, if you look on the flip side now, I was looking at a poll the other day, and it said something like a third of Democrat voters believe that the thing was basically staged to help Trump. Now, you imagine if Trump's head had exploded, I think at least a third of Republicans, maybe more than a third of Republicans, and more than a third of the country would have said,

what like we're supposed to believe that this is just all some like like just incompetent idiocy that the secret service looked at this for 20 minutes didn't didn't shoot at him and then just let him shoot the president in the head like no i'm not fucking buying it so i think it would have been i think it would have been um uh people would not have bought the idea that this is just systemic

incompetence. I think they would have a very, very large fraction of the country, quite possibly over half the country, would have said, clearly this is some kind of conspiracy. And they've tried to lock him up with the lawfare. They've lost these cases. The Supreme Court's thrown everything out. Okay, well, now they've shot him so that they've got rid of him that way. So I think it would have been really, really bad

uh and and quite possibly sparked a lot of violence right you know you could think back to 1968 when you have the assassination of Martin Luther King the the terrible assassination of Bobby Kennedy well like eight weeks later or whatever it was um

That was a serious, profound shock for America, sparked a lot of riots, a lot of violence. I think you'd have to, in a parallel world, I think you'd be pretty lucky to escape that happening. Isn't it fascinating that the consequence of the action is indicative of how the action came about?

that Trump getting clipped in the ear changes the story that lots of people believe about how it had actually happened because there's no chance that the Dems would say, oh, this is, or whatever, it's the third of Democrat voters that would say, oh, this was to improve his chances to become president. Obviously not. Yeah. Exactly. But it's just an odd thing

an odd quirk about sort of human psychology, I suppose, that we look at what the outcome was and then retroactively make an explanation from there as opposed to trying to sort of walk through it step by step by step. And obviously the Secret Service lady is now gone. I mean, did you watch any of that hearing? I didn't, unfortunately, no. I meant to, but it sounds like another shit show. Oh, she got... It was... It was like...

really, really, really aggressive, just the most vehement. You can't think of this woman, incompetent as she may be and driven by DEI and blah, blah, blah. She doesn't care about Trump and all the rest of it. You can throw every accusation that you want at her, but this woman was eviscerated on TV forever. And they basically lined up

every different person that was going to have it. And every single one of them had a tightly defined five minute segment where they just punched her in the face over and over and over and over again. I saw even the only thing I saw was on Twitter, I think, where I saw AOC asked a pretty, like, very, very, very good question that I just obviously doesn't have any kind of respectable answer, right? Yeah, it was rough. But yeah, I mean, just thinking about what would have happened if,

Trump's head had exploded. I still, it blows my mind that we're over this already. The fact that it was so close to happening, as close as it's possible to be without it happening, literally.

And it's just a story now. It's a meme. There's t-shirts about it. He kicked the hop tour girl off the top of the meme-averse for a couple of weeks. And now we're talking about Kamala Harris and, oh, is this, this is the real insurrection because they've subverted the...

democratic process of getting a candidate in and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, hey, what about the guy who got shot in the head only in a little while? Yeah. It is. Wait till I say the next thing that's going to happen is, you know, you can see in Ukraine now what's happening with the incredible growth and sophistication of these drone attacks, right? Like that's coming to domestic terrorism across the Western world, right? You don't develop all this technology and then it just stays in fucking Ukraine forever.

So at some point we're going to see that crazy shit happening over here. Then you're going to start asking questions like the whole format of how Trump had that event, right? It's just not doable. Assume that the secret service actually had a sniper perimeter, which they should have done, and they handled the whole thing competently, right? You do all that the way that you actually should do it and did do it competently in 1991.

It doesn't matter anymore because someone's going to fly a fucking FPV drone in and it's happening with that, right? So the whole way in which we think about these events and how politicians interact with the public, I think it's going to change sharpish. I mean, hopefully...

Like the tragedy is normally historically, these things only happen after a complete disaster. And sadly, close enough to the disaster that you get all of the consequences without any of the disaster. So ideally, what happens is like this prompts a kind of like complete root and branch rethink of what the hell, how the hell do we do VIP security in this age, and then the drone stuff comes into that and they get ahead of it.

That happens, that's best case scenario, right? But if not, at some point, this is going to happen.

Yeah, I had Eric Prince on, the guy that founded Blackwater, a private military contractor guy, and he was telling me about how, I think previously to take down one of the Russian tanks, you need, I think it's a Javelin missile, and they're about 300 grand for the missile. And then you also need all of the apparatus to be able to launch it, plus the team to be able to do it too. And once you've launched two of them,

the heat signature is so identifiable that your position is then given up. So you have this sort of whole already, you know, javelin missile. Like when I hear that, I think Black Hawk down, you know, hardcore advanced military technology. And he's,

kind of making it sound like I'm referring to a fucking trebuchet or something. We're going to pour pitch off the top of the ramparts onto them or something. It just sounds ancient. And then he's saying, you know, you can do the same job as, I don't know, let's say it's a couple of mil plus the team, plus the exposure of all of this stuff with an FPV drone, which I think all in, including the beer can sized amount of C4 or whatever, pick your explosive of choice, strapped to the front of it.

is maybe 1500 bucks or 2000. And you've got a guy with a set of goggles on. And if you've got a repeater, a signal repeater, you can do it, I think up to four miles away and you can destroy a tank that's worth millions and millions of dollars. And then the tanks, they're now developing these nets sort of around them. They've got these special nets there.

finding the weaknesses that the FPV drones are exploiting and they're patching them. So then the drones are getting bigger or stronger. So there it's, you know, literal arms race that you're observing happening in real time here. And yeah. When did that video about the, the kill bots thing? Do you remember that where they do? Yeah. 10 years ago. Yeah. I would guess like roughly, yeah. Like roughly six,

seven, eight, ten years ago. Yeah, exactly. For the people that hadn't seen it, it was basically talking about sort of micro drones that would have some kind of biometric signature. Maybe it was DNA or walking gait or facial recognition or something and they would just be poured out of the back of some

airplane and they would fly down with tiny little C4 charges land on someone's head and kill them and it would allow you to do that and then there was you know this sort of nightmare scenario maybe it was a Black Mirror episode where you would have a dark web sort of ransom attack thing where this drone would be released if this money wasn't given and then it doubles and it doubles and it doubles and

You know, you're right. I mean, I hadn't thought about it before, but yeah, the drone warfare is not just going to be kept and taking down tanks during an active military campaign. It's going to be for everything. It's going to be a risk for everybody in the same way as the original iPhone, I think, cost...

sort of adjusted for inflation, something like $5,000 or $10,000. And then all of the rich people that wanted cool technology brought it down so that the normies could buy it too. We're already at that stage with these FPV drones. So they're only going to get cheaper. And to roll on top of

I hate to bring up China because it feels like an obvious thing to say. The US government shutting down all domestic drone production from all of the different producers and companies that were wanting to do it because they were worried that it was going to create a flight risk, which completely opened up the market for DJI to come in, a Chinese-owned company. And now DJI is some obscene amount of the market share when it comes to personal drone use. So, okay, maybe the most important warfare...

technology of the next 10 years is owned, majority owned by one particular country that lots of us probably have some concerns about. 100%. And I remember I wrote a blog in 2014. I'd been over to California, actually, for one of these kind of like weekend conference things. I was talking to a bunch of people on the drone stuff then. I came back and I wrote a blog and I said then, like, the future is...

A competent person with less than a million dollars is going to be able to fly a bunch of drones over and blow up the House of Parliament, and no one will know what the fuck has just hit them. And when I wrote that, as usual, the normal media was like, this is stupid, what the fuck is he on about?

Five years later, when I went into number 10, I sat down with one of the senior officials at number 10 and said, what is the actual plan for defending against drones in Downing Street? If we have a G7 event and the PM is standing there with the US president and the Chinese president and Putin and whatever, how the fuck do you stop...

like three small 15 year olds, right? Sitting in St. James's Park and sending over a drone and just whacking the entire G7 list. And of course the answer is, well, we haven't got anything done. Like basically if someone wants to do that, then they're going to do it. I asked someone from the cabinet office about three weeks ago, has any of this changed? Like have they woken up on the drone stuff? They're like, no, of course not. It's just the same shit show. They haven't got any. So again, you know, you see,

This pattern you see historically where regimes just get caught short by certain technological changes. It seems weirder now because we can actually see it on TV or on YouTube in the Ukraine. The natural assumption is, well, we spend all of this massive amounts of money on Ministry of Defense and all of this stuff. Obviously, these guys must be on this shit, right?

But then you go and talk to them and the people actually responsible for it, of course, have their head in their hands saying, we can't get funding from the MOD. No one wants to fund it. It's so difficult. People think it'll be embarrassing. If we start, if we make this public, then it will be just actually an admission that we can't do anything about it. So everyone wants to keep it quiet. But yeah, but then all you're doing is keeping quiet until some set of smart, fanatical people take advantage of us doing nothing. And then we're going to be in big trouble, right? Until you can no longer avoid it.

It's very, exactly. It's very, all of that stuff is deeply worrying. Hopefully, the best case scenario is that the Trump thing is like a kick up the ass for everybody. But my fear is these institutions are so pathological, they'll basically just go back to sleep.

It certainly seems that way, even if you take the sort of public response to it and you think, well, I mean, they've moved on. So internally, there'll be some investigation, which is going to take away, by the way, from the precise resources that are needed in the buildup to the November election, because it's going to be secret service agents. It's going to be internal meetings. It's going to be, you know, the oxygen in the room is going to be sucked out by an inquiry, which takes it away from the very thing that they're trying to inquire about.

I think the main thing, mate, learning from your conversation with Dworkesh, mutual friend, and reading your stuff is just how fucking incompetent the inside of government really is. And you just hope...

That there's someone in there. And yeah, like you say, there are probably a few competent people scattered around and maybe they're holding it together. But the rest of it's sellotape and cable ties and fairy dust, just hoping for the best. And you, in that article I referenced earlier on, the five rules of how government really works.

I want to quickly go through those. So first, not even nuclear weapons are taken seriously, so never assume the problem leading the news is taken seriously.

Yeah. So I spent a lot of time in 2019, 2020, like really, really, really digging into the situation with nuclear enterprise in Britain. Obviously, most of the things are illegal for me to talk about, but at the core of it, it is legal to talk about. And it's

Over a 20, 30-year period, the country has basically neglected a whole bunch of the core infrastructure at every point pretty much of the whole kind of chain for how these weapons are deployed, the whole infrastructure. And they've neglected building what needs to be built, and then they've classified all the COC-UPS so highly that it's like I can't – not allowed to explain in detail to you what they all are, right?

And this, again, is this pathological cycle where there's a failure and then you rather fix the failure, it's all covered up, but then the budgets just get bigger and bigger. And it means actually that it has a ripple effect, which is they basically have to keep stealing money from the conventional budgets inside the MOD to patch up this unseen, unacknowledged huge disaster of tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars in the nuclear enterprise. And my point there is like,

Everyone sort of thinks, oh, well, yeah, they might get that wrong and they might cock that up. But like the most important things, obviously, the system must be really, really focusing on. And my point is, that's the wrong way to think about it, unfortunately. Like things have got so bad that it's sort of the other way around. The ministers went around spending stupid amounts of time on trivia that's on the front page of The Sun, whilst actually just systematically neglecting the actual core things like how to do making sure that nuclear weapons are sorted out.

And even since I said that, they've had a couple of public disasters, right? They had that test in the Atlantic, which went to its sub and the missile just popped out and sank. They had a nuclear sub that nearly sank off the coast of Scotland. So, you know, some of the rot that I talked about a few years ago is now starting to come out into the open.

JD Vance made a pretty interesting comment. He was asked about what does he think, where does he think will be the first Muslim country to get a nuke? And he said Britain. Yeah, I didn't see exactly what you said. I saw like third time reports of it. Is that he was making a crack there about like the growth of Islam and Sadiq or whatever? He was indeed.

Very interesting. Second one from your five rules of government. Roughly all the most talented people at building things are excluded from our civil service. The politicians you vote for have roughly zero power to hire, fire or incentivize officials. So they have no real power.

Yes. So if you think, you know, anybody who's trying to build anything, everyone knows like the single most important thing is for the CEO of Microsoft or the CEO of a private hospital or whatever is can you actually build a team, right? Can you hire them? Can you fire them? Can you incentivize them? Can you trade them? And a British government minister has no power to do any of those things with a single civil servant.

So you have the ministers are officially responsible to parliament for what the system does, but they have zero power over the management of the system. So nothing in the world that works, works like that, right? It's like nothing. So we shouldn't be surprised that these things are dysfunctional.

Third, if you think of the most fundamental principles that lie behind the most successful organizations in history, principles like extreme speed and clear responsibility, then our government works almost totally on exactly opposite principles. Yeah. So, you know, look at Elon, look at how Elon does SpaceX, incredible intensity, incredible speed, incredible attempts to like simplify, to cut things out that aren't needed. And

And if you try and apply those kind of principles inside government, then the whole system reacts like you're a virus and it's an immune system and it's got to try and close you down. It fights to stay the way it is. One obvious way which you see that happening now is with the AI companies. On the one hand, the deep state is trying to talk to the AI companies and interact with them.

but the cycles at which the British state or Washington work, it's just like 10 X or a hundred X slower than the speed at which some old works. Right. So some old one is like working on this speed and then he's trying to interact with Washington. It's just two completely different, two different clock speeds. Um,

I guess that's why you see this sort of lumbering behemoth in terms of legislation that falls behind. You only need to look at the workarounds that people have come up with for states that don't legalize weed.

to go, "Oh, well, Delta-8 is now available. Well, Delta-9 is now available." If we just adjust one molecule here, we know that we can get huge runway out of a drug that essentially does the same thing that is the one that's prohibited, and we know it's going to take... They're basically factoring in the satellite delay for legislation. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You see that everywhere.

Fourth, the MPs are usually not focused on the election, which is usually far away. They're focused on what they think they need to tell the media today to improve their chances of promotion. Yeah, so as we discussed earlier on, the theory of democracy is that one of the reasons why democracy sort of trends towards improving problems is that the MPs want to win the election.

But we're now in a situation where that sort of incentive is basically broken and they actually spend all their time just on this daily news cycle. And once that happens, two fundamental things happen. One, they stop paying attention to actually good government.

And two, they stop thinking about the voters and they think about what the editor of the New York Times thinks or, you know, the Laura Koonsberg of the BBC, et cetera, et cetera. And that fundamental dynamic is behind why, you know, why it's so hard to fix all of these things. Yeah, I think Tony Blair recently described the government as a conspiracy of distraction from what actually matters. Yeah, yeah.

I thought that was so funny. Fifth, the civil service and politicians' top priority is not doing a good job for voters. It's preserving existing power and budgets. If you don't share this priority, you don't get promoted.

Yes, so if you look after COVID, what's happened, basically the officials, the people who approved right and who saved thousands of people's lives have almost entirely 100% gone through public service, often hounded out. The excellent woman who ran the vaccine task force, for example, was trashed all over the media. Whereas

Officials who got completely screwed up, did a shocking job, cost many lives, cost huge economic damage, have largely been promoted and often given gongs. The nightmare woman who gave us duff advice after duff advice in February through March, like don't close the borders, masks are counterproductive and don't work, all this kind of crazy shit, is

She was promoted and put in charge of the new biosecurity agency that was created to replace

the complete shit show biosecurity agency that fell apart in in covid right so it's like oh the entity's supposed to do the job completely collapsed we've got to set up a new entity who should put in charge oh the woman who got everything wrong the person who broke the last one and that's that is the system working as intended right that's that's absolutely that absolutely like sums up i wanted to ask you about sort of personally what the

last few years has been like? It seems to me that you've been the sort of evil, nefarious guy behind the scenes or in front of the scenes for a bunch of different things, whether it was masterminding Brexit, whether it's utilizing new kinds of digital advertising, whether it's driving to Barnard Castle, whether it's, you know, coming up with COVID, whether it's the language that you're using. What has that been like, being a human with all of the normal

flaws and emotions that humans have to have sort of gone through this wartime public decry? So I think I'm lucky psychologically in that I've never been bothered. I've always just been interested in trying to do the thing. I've never been interested in, I've never been bothered about the media. And there's a sort of trade-off in public life, right? I think, which is that

If you focus on the media, it's almost impossible to get anything worthwhile done. Your social life in lots of ways is better. You potter around. You're not a hate figure. But if you're optimizing for that, basically everyone who optimizes for that achieves nothing. And their entire existence in politics is basically completely pointless. If you do what

approach it the way I have, then you're a hate figure, the media hate you. But what does that mean at the end of it? It doesn't really mean anything, or to me, it doesn't anyway. What is it actually? If you think about a lot of the problems that other people in life have to face, are you getting shot at? No. Is it real consequences? No. It's just people writing nasty things about you. So I've never really cared about that. The only exception to that obviously is

You know, 2019, 2020, a few times I had to move my family out of the house because of death threats from psychos and stuff like that. That's obviously bad when you've got a small child. But that's the only thing actually that was genuinely difficult, I would say. Like, that's obviously tricky and you don't want to have to, no one wants to have to deal with that in their life.

But that's the only thing I would say is bad. The rest of it never bothered me at all. You didn't mind being a hate figure for some people? No, I didn't. I think, you know, you have to, if you're going to try and do things on the historic scale of Brexit, you have to accept that a lot of people are going to be pissed off. You're a public figure. People have got a right to, you know, have views about you and be angry about it. I think...

What's the point of being upset about it? That's just life. It's never going to be any different. So why let it get you down? It's a very admirable approach, I think, for anybody that's in public life. But yeah, it's just very interesting. I think talking about kayfabe and WWE and stuff, you may have had the...

of kind of fitting into a slightly established role of the guy behind the scenes that doesn't maybe seem to be too touchy-feely, that kind of doesn't really fucking care. And then, you know, Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play you in a movie about Brexit. Maybe the American viewers won't know, but there's an entire movie made about sort of the Brexit process with Benedict fucking Cumberbatch. Like, Doctor Strange played

played you in a movie. I mean, there's not many people that can say that. How did that feel? So I've never actually watched, like I should watch the movie. Yeah, you should watch the movie, Dom. I kind of, I didn't at the time. I kind of said like, I'm not watching the movie until Brexit happens. And then I kind of, after that, I never, I kind of never got around to it. I've seen a few clips on YouTube and stuff, so I should watch it. It was a weird thing. Like he came, I think the whole thing was slightly odd to be honest, because I think

There's a very nice guy who wrote the script for it, a guy called James Graham. And I think originally what happened is he kind of sort of bought the whole bullshit conspiracy story from Carol Cairo and everyone that this was some kind of like weird, like the Brexit, Trump, it was all connected with Putin. The whole digital advertising was kind of secretly coordinated with Facebook behind the scenes. You know how the whole kind of Russiagate hoax took off in Britain and America, right? So the original premise of it was like that was sort of true.

But then James Graham spent time with us, talking to us, and then realized that the actual story of the media was fake. And to give him credit, he was honest enough to sort of change it. But therefore, the movie has a slightly odd feel, right? Because it starts off, he started off writing it on the premise that the story was sort of true, but then realized the story actually wasn't what would be in the media.

Yeah, but it was weird having a kind of method actor come around to my house. He sort of sat there. My wife sat on the window seat, sketching him. And Benedict Cumberbatch sat opposite me, having dinner till like two in the morning. And as he was sitting opposite me, he kind of like started to become me. So he started mimicking my gestures and stuff. And it turns out that like, I've got this habit, it seems, of like, I started like to sort of sit like that. And I kind of like,

just sort of put my head over my arm over my own head and then suddenly I'm watching it like Benedict Cumberbatch is doing all the mirroring back my gestures at me and started to talk like me so it was a very odd it was it was a it was a

very odd experience yeah i wonder how much you learned about yourself watching benedict cumberbatch be you well you learned that you put your hand but i will every so i'll let i'll drop you an email but when i when i watch the film yes yeah yeah you've prompted me to actually i should sit down and watch the whole thing from start to end except for watching a few clips on youtube yeah i think he was like he got the accent not bad yeah i seem to get the accent not bad um the thing was at the time i was just the whole thing like when they were doing the film

The whole situation in Parliament was so depressing. The Tories had driven the country into this cul-de-sac, the biggest constitutional crisis of the century. It just felt like no one could move. And the whole thing, actually doing the referendum was a truly nightmarish experience. I've never recovered from it physically. It fucked up my health.

I used to be a brilliant sleeper. No, not again. I got basically so exhausted that something basically broke over that. Is that just intense stress, sleep deprivation, too many stimulants? I think it was sleep deprivation, yeah. Then I had a baby about 12, 14 weeks or something before the vote.

No, that was bad timing.

So yeah, that was, so when the movie happened, I was like, I don't want to go back and start. I don't want any reminders of my life. Oh, right. It's like PTSD. Exactly. I don't want any PTSD. So I kind of just ignored it. Jesus. Well, talking about sort of retrospectively learning about yourself, since moving to the

a lot about the UK in comparison. I'd say I probably learned more about the UK since being in America than I did whilst being in the UK. And I think the main one that I've noticed from a group perspective is the massive lack of patriotism that we have in the UK. You know, every Brit knows the 4th of July and what it stands for. And almost no Brits know when St. George's Day is.

Yeah, it's wild to me. I it's kind of dispiriting, you know, the fourth July has just been in gone. So maybe I'm still in the honeymoon afterglow of seeing all of these people be proud and happy about their country, even for all that. It's a horrible, xenophobic, racist, transphobic, bigoted, you know, hellscape. There is a thorough.

so many people on every single street that are just proud to talk about their country and what it means and the values that it stands for. And then I think about the UK, British culture, our history, our heritage, and it's

There's just none of that at all. And it's sad. It's sad to think that a guy that flies an America flag outside of his house is called a patriot in America, and a guy that flies an England flag outside of his house is called a racist in the UK. Yeah, I completely agree. It is dismal. There's a famous essay that Orwell wrote in, I can't remember exactly, but like 1940 to 1942 sort of period,

And he wrote in there about how this weird phenomena whereby the British intellectual class had essentially become so anti-British. Instead of people who had all been brought up to be patriotic 50 years before, suddenly with the exact opposite. In fact, they all now were brought up and encouraged to sneer at the country and think that that was the sophisticated take. And

And that was true about that transition. Russian Revolution 1917, you have this wave of surge of support for the Communist Party after 1917 that really changed Western intelligentsia and intellectual elites a lot.

And to a large extent, right, we're still living out the consequences of that process. And a big part of the reason, like you, you come from a very similar part of the world to me. You know that if you go back to where me and you were brought up,

There's lots and lots of working class people who are patriotic, who do think that Britain's a great country. But the culture is like a thousand miles away from a lot of the dinner parties that you'd have in central London, right? Where if you talked in those dinner parties in central London, the way that you talk where me and you go home to see our families, it's an extremely different, it's chalk and cheese culture, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of...

below the surface criticism I think now of what's happening with the UK there's a great YouTube channel called Bold and Bankrupt and this guy has done dark tourism around the world he got trafficked across the border from Mexico into the US he was held in a Russian jail for a while because they were

worried about what he was, whether he was some sort of spy there. And then he decided to take on his final boss of very scary potential areas to travel through, which was British seaside towns. And he...

He's going through all of these, you know, just the classic dead high street, boarded up windows and graffiti everywhere and trash. And there's no one. And, and the few people that are there don't speak the language and there's just no remnant of British culture. And I saw this phenomenal tweet basically referring to the same thing, which is, I think Britain's got the whatever sixth highest economy in the world, something like that. Uh,

And he said, no, it doesn't. Like the UK or England doesn't have the sixth largest economy in the world. London does.

and the UK is a very poor country attached to a very wealthy city. And that's the way to see it. And again, so many people, everybody's focused on London, maybe a tiny bit on Manchester. And apart from that, the rest of the country is just elsewhere. So in terms of news, in terms of media, in terms of cultural significance, no one gives a fuck about Liverpool.

Or Wakefield, or Birmingham, or Solihull, or anywhere like that. No one cares. So you don't have the...

sort of cultural focus. You don't have the financial support at all. Everywhere in the country is pretty much fucked except for London. And yet you can kind of hide behind this macro trend. All of the micro trends are hidden within the big macro one. And yeah, it's sad, man. It's sad. And like I say, in retrospect, just something that I've learned since not being there, you get to see

It's the sort of fish going through water asking the other fish, how's the water today? And you think, why is it that way? Why is it that we don't have the kind of support and cosmopolitanism? And this other insight that I learned about how I think both the UK and America have two spots of

two or three spots in the top 10 universities in the world. So we share the same number and yet the US produces a huge times more entrepreneurs.

than the UK does. Well, why? It's because America still encourages people to believe that you can go and do stuff. And the UK has just got this zero sum waterlocked mentality where our aspirations are as sort of exciting as the weather. And I just wish I could change it. I really wish that I could re-inject some of the enthusiasm that I've learned since being over here back to the UK. I think it would make daily life and the outcomes that we have, you know, politically, commercially, socially, I think it would make a really good difference.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, what you say is completely correct. One of the weird and terrible things about Westminster is just like, the only part of Britain that they care about is London.

They care more about what's happening in America than they do about what's happening in Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool or Newcastle. None of those places have any... No one cares at all what's going on there. And these things become a vicious circle, right? Because it means that the money is sucked down to London, the infrastructure all points down at London. When I was in government in 2020, we went through this huge spending review on infrastructure and we were trying to say...

look for like decades the infrastructure has been built around like serving London we've got to start thinking about what infrastructure to build to help other cities what does Manchester need what does Newcastle need um

And all these officials, they don't give a fuck about any of that. It's like, well, London's where the money is, so that's where we should focus infrastructure. But yet, that's like a self-referential, self-building thing. We're not saying that to be anti-London. London's making money, good for London. But you can't just have a country decade after decade where all the talent comes to London, you don't build anything everywhere else, and all these other places just end up getting boarded up and written off. And

It's connected to the fact that Britain... So if you look back at when Britain was the number one country in the world, right? Go back to, say, 1850 or 1880. If Birmingham wanted to build something, Birmingham built it.

The idea that whether or not Birmingham builds a train station or builds a school or builds a hospital would be decided by some fuckwit economics graduate in the treasury who says, oh no, I don't think that Birmingham should do that. If you said to people in 1870 Birmingham,

that in like 150 years time, some 27-year-old PPE student is going to decide whether or not Birmingham can build a hospital. They'd have said, well, if that's the future, I guarantee you that Britain is no longer going to have more power, right? Because that's clearly insane. And that's what's happened. When Britain had a powerful navy, when Britain was the center for science, for technology, for industrialization, etc.,

We were much, much more decentralized. And there were different power centers all around the country specializing in different things and doing world-class things in different places. And since then, we've gone in this completely different direction where the money has all been stuck to London. We are more centralized than any other European state. Nobody else has a situation where so much money is raised at the center and then spent at the center. Everyone else...

has much more taxes raised locally and much more money spent locally. And that, you know, these things are all

all come together. I wonder what, I mean, it's an argument for becoming federal, right? You know, to sort of have these things chunked up and to allow local principalities to govern themselves, at least in some form or another, because at least then people can campaign for the things that you're doing. Because even the, whether you're the dude looking after Clacton or the guy looking after Blaydon or whatever your particular council area of choice is, where do you work?

Who are your colleagues? Who are you hanging around with? What do they care about? What's in vogue for you to talk about when you do get down to Whitehall, when you do spend your time in Westminster? What are they all talking about? They're not fucking talking about what's going on around St. James's Park in the northeast of the UK. They don't give a fuck about that. So, yeah, I see that. One of the things I try to do, so in 2020, one of the things I said to Boris was,

The Tory party is rotten. We haven't won in the 2019 election because the Tory party is some healthy thing or it's a love thing, right? We've won because it's a massive constitutional crisis because...

The MPs in Westminster have tried to overturn the biggest Democratic vote in our history because Corbyn is rubbish and because me and the Vote Leave team have come into number 10 and grabbed the broken thing and sorted it out. And we're much better at politics and campaigning than the rest of the clowns in Westminster are. But that's not a long-term solution to stuff.

We essentially have to close the old Tory party down and turn it into something new. One of the things we should do, for example, to do that is we should close the whole rancid structure of the HQ in London. And we should reopen the headquarters for the party up in Manchester or Birmingham or somewhere and say, that's the new headquarters. And the people who are hired from the Conservative Party are actually living up there, like 200 miles away from London. Mm-hmm.

And that's the sort of thing, if you're actually going to rejuvenate the country, if you're actually going to rejuvenate politics, it has to become much more connected to the actual voters. It has to stop being a self-referential game where everyone's looking in within, you know, like 500 square meters of Westminster. And we have to go back out and look at, we have to be engaged with what the important things are in the world. And we have to focus on the voters, not ourselves.

But the more dysfunctional politics gets, the harder it is. So when I say that, normal people outside London think, well, yeah, that's just obvious. But that sounds more and more insane to people inside the system. And that's where a big part of the problem comes. It's why London was so shocked by the referendum, right? Because they're all sitting here talking to each other in central London, and they never realized what was happening outside the M25. What do you...

doing now? What are you working on? What are your plans for yourself for future?

So I spend most of my time, I spend part of my time just basically reading history books and studying and writing on blogs. I've got a sub stack, some of your subscribers might be interested in. And on projects that come up, people come to me with problems and say, will you have a look at this and help me out? And if it's interesting, I might spend two or three months looking at something for them.

But I've never been driven by money. And I never do any political thing for money. I only do it because I actually agree with it. So that's quite limiting from a commercial point of view. I don't fly around the world running elections here, there, and everywhere. I could make a lot of money doing that, but I just don't like that. I don't like the idea of it. What I'm thinking about now is the British situation is depressing, as we've been discussing.

What I'm thinking about is setting up something new, setting up a new political campaigning thing to try and grip it and try and force change and to try and bring in people from outside politics and try and do the whole thing differently.

So I'm talking to people now quietly about it. I'm talking to some donors about funding it. I'm trying to figure out how to structure it. I'm talking to some potential staff and things like that. And what would that be? Is that going to be a party, a think tank? Like, what is this? It's definitely not a think tank. And to begin with, it definitely won't be a party. I think it's not the right time to launch an actual party now. But I think what you could do is build a very unusual political organization that

that does a bunch of valuable things and builds support. I think pretty quickly you can get something that has more supporters than Tories and Labour put together, that tries to represent what the actual voters think, who basically hate all the parties and think they're all rubbish. And then who knows down the line, right? If you can build this thing in the right way and you can get, on the one hand, support from voters and on the other hand, get a lot of elite talent involved with it,

Then who knows down the line what might be possible. But Westminster left to itself can't rejuvenate itself. And history says that usually what happens is these kind of broken systems just keep going until they hit a massive crisis of some kind. And then they break and then there's a disaster. So the question is, can we build something that can force change short of some terrible disaster? But if you're going to do that, it needs to be something...

the rejuvenating force has to come from outside the system it can't come from inside westminster it has to be great people in the country sick of the old system saying right we're sick of it and we're going to build something new fuck me that's disruptive well it's hard right like if we can do it if we could do it it'll be cool but like you know it's hard to do it's hard to do these things i go back and forth on it um

It's clearly very hard, but on the other hand, doing Brexit seemed really hard in summer 2015. No one really thought it was possible, but it ends up happening.

The core thing is, if you just look back over that period, why did we win in 2016? Because people are really sick of the current system and they want the massive change. Why did the Vote Leave team win the 2019 election? Because people were really sick of the old system and they really want massive change. Why did the Tories just suffer the biggest ever defeat ever in 200 years? Because people are really sick of the old system and really want massive change. If Boris had stuck with our deal in 2019...

that we did in 2019 and spent four years doing what we said we would do in 2019 and 2020, the situation would be completely different. Instead, him and Kerry decide, get rid of vote leave, just fuck around and do nothing for four years. They get kicked out. The public now voted them out and voted Star Marine and they're desperate for change, but they're not going to get massive change again, right? So we keep having this system where the voters keep saying, we want massive change. We are completely sick of the old thing. And the old thing says, yeah, we're not giving it to you.

How much do you lay the failure of the last four years at the feet of Boris personally?

I mean, you've got to blame him a lot, right? You know, we had the whole thing. Summer 2020, there's a historic moment. We had an 80-seat majority. We had a once-a-century crisis with COVID. We had the collapse of all the core institutions of power in number 10 in the Cabinet Office. And you had the civil service, senior civil service, knew that the system had collapsed and essentially surrendered to us and said, well, okay, the economy needs rebuilding. The health system needs rebuilding. The civil service needs rebuilding.

you guys got an easy majority clearly now like you're going to do it so let's work out we'll work out the terms for that and for about eight weeks or so Boris like went along with that and was okay we're actually going to do it we're going to smash it and we're going to build up a whole bunch of things and then tragically he turned us back on that historic opportunity essentially it was because

weirdly because he saw Starmer so he started doing PMQs with Starmer and dealing with Starmer in parliament and he decided Starmer was so rubbish at politics that I actually don't need to change a lot of things we'll beat him easily I'll beat him easily in 2024 and secondly of course his girlfriend said

well, Boris isn't going to be really in charge of all the details. So why should it be Dom in charge of it? Like I want me and my friends to be in charge of it. So you had this combination of Boris thinking, I don't really have to change much. So Boris actually was, if things are really difficult and I've got to build a whole bunch of things, then I need to vote Leave People Here because they're the only people that can do it. And I can't do this with the usual Tory cloud show.

But once he realized or decided, I don't actually have to build very much, I could just coast because Storm is so bad at politics. Then he was like, I don't really need to have the vote and leave people around because I don't really need to do anything. And everyone hates them anyway, so why don't I get rid of them? And then his girlfriend is saying, everyone hates them, get rid of them and put my friends in charge. So you have this huge historic moment, opportunity to change the trajectory of the country. An ADC majority and people desperate for it to happen.

And then, you know, he walks up to the penalty spot and hoops out of the stadium. Wow.

Dominic Cummings, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate your insights. There's very few people that are able to be as sort of candid and explain what's actually happening inside of government, even if it would be significantly more comforting to feel like the people in charge knew what they were doing. I really, genuinely, really appreciate the insights. Where should people go for your sub stack and other stuff?

Just dominiccummings.substack.com. If you click on that, you'll see. Thanks very much for having me on, Chris. Really enjoyed our chat. Hopefully come back on and chat maybe about the US election or something in the future. Oh, I'd love that. I'd love that. I appreciate you, man. Cool. Take care. Thanks very much.