Thread by @brokenbottleboy

There’s a lot going on in this post by Dominic Cummings about the kinds of people he’s looking to hire into No.10 dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two…

These posts and the pseudo-openness practiced by Cummings are going to be very useful to future historians.

Right now, I’m terrified forever whoever ends up as his personal assistant.

...and mildly amused/ concerned that his framework for defining ‘misfits’ is @GreatDismal novels.

Cummings’ repeatedly expressed distaste for Oxbridge graduates with humanities degrees is interesting from a graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, with a History degree.

Also the “unusual” economists and policy experts Cummings is after all need to like precisely the list of thinkers he does.

There’s also that Cummings seems to assume that all graduates with interesting minds will be 21 and completely devoid of any kind of caring responsibilities. This clarion call for cognitive diversity is a lot narrower in reality than he lets on.

It’s also abundantly clear that Cummings doesn’t see Hubertus Bigend as an antihero.

I can’t stand the very same political journalists that Cummings thinks are a pack of dribbling mooks then mooning over his blog posts as if he’s some incredible supervillain.

The line that people should focus on in that Cummings post is: “"With no election for years ... there is a chance and a need to do things very differently."

It’s about reshaping things in his image now and locking in the changes.

Oh and as it goes, using a Gmail address to do government business should throw up lots of red flags.

Cummings has form for using ‘private’ email addresses in an attempt to circumvent scrutiny. He did it as a spad at the DES.

“Extreme environment” = you will be treated like shit and used like a old tissue.

“If you play office politics...” = if you even remotely disagree with me ever.

The outgoing editor of the FT suggests Cummings’ blog is “cunning”. A political correspondent for the Independent says you “have to admire his honesty.”

All hail, Dominic Cummings, king of the wallet inspectors.

And the Sunday Times political editor is mooning over how “readable” Cummings’ blog post is as if it’s a summer beach read and not a long and self-aggrandising technocratic splurge.

Of course, The Spectator, in a move somewhere between Pravda and a teenage pop fan putting posters on their wall, has republished the Dominic Cummings blog post in full.

No analysis. Just a lazy pop culture reference and thinly concealed admiration. People like Peston make it easy for Cummings to cast himself as a big brain at the heart of a complex web.

And John Rentoul thinks that while most of what Cummings will try work work “it might be quite exciting.”

There’s the fundamental problem with most political journalism — everything’s a fucking parlour game to them.

*won’t

“...the lessons of Manhattan (1940s) ICBMs (1950s) and Apollo (1960s) remain absolutely cutting edge...it‘s so hard to apply them and almost nobody has managed to do it”

It’s as if creating nuclear bombs, long-range missiles and space flight aren’t much like day to day governing