The British, as office going folk in Calcutta will acknowledge, gifted “babudom” to India, but now Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief of staff at 10, Downing Street and described as “the most powerful non-elected official in the country”, wants to sweep the whole system away.
The front page headline in Friday’s Daily Telegraph sums up the Cummings mission perfectly: “ ‘Weirdos and misfits’ wanted for Whitehall. PM’s chief adviser calls for new blood in Civil Service shake-up to be ‘true wild cards’.”
What Cummings probably wants is to achieve better implementation of the government’s decision making in post-Brexit Britain by hiring bright people who may not be public school, Oxbridge educated. But he has put his requirements into characteristically combative language in a 2,900-word personal blog.
Incidentally, Cummings himself went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1994 with a First in Ancient and Modern History. He makes a point of not wearing a suit.
Promising “seismic” changes and emboldened by the Tories’s 80-seat majority, Cummings said: “We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB.
“If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about (French psychoanalyst Jacques) Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news.”
He suggested “unusual” new blood could solve what he regards as “profound problems” with the civil service, which he regards as staid and inefficient, and says the civil service must work out how to employ “super-talented weirdos” without expecting them to comply with “the horrors of human resources — which obviously need a bonfire”.
One of his new hires will be “a sort of personal assistant to me for a year” but he warned applicants: “You will not have weekday date nights, you will sacrifice many weekends — frankly it will be hard having a boy/girlfriend at all.”
“I don’t want confident public school bluffers. I want people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment.
If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned.”
Setting out the categories of people he wants to hire, he said Downing Street needs “unusual mathematicians”, physicists, computer scientists, data scientists, but also “assorted weirdos and misfits with odd skills”.
Not surprisingly, civil service unions have reacted badly to the Cummings job adverts.
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: “Comments by Dominic Cummings that imply he wants to hire-and-fire at will reveal an anti-trade union mentality and will be strenuously resisted by PCS.”
Dave Penman , the general secretary of the First Division Association trade union, commented: “The civil service is recruited on merit, it’s a really fundamental principle. You are employed in the civil service because of what you can do, not what you believe.”
