Some quotes from self-declared superforecaster Dominic Cummings that are interesting in light of the PM's refusal to hire anyone that challenges him and this government's shambolic incompetence on everything from protecting people in pandemic to the exam fiasco
1) 'Everyone is discouraged from telling the truth to important people. It isn’t a culture in which you admit mistakes. There’s no grip, no focus.' He was attacking Cameron's coalition but sounds familiar, doesn't it?
2) 'The people at the apex of political power (elected and unelected) are far from the best people in the world in terms of goals, intelligence, ethics, or competence.' Yes, his government proves this point daily...
3) He complained about 'largely incompetent political decision-makers making the same sort of mistake repeatedly and wasting vast resources'. True, true...
4) 'We prefer to enhance prestige rather than face reality and admit ignorance or error.' Yes, this is the same man who pretended he drove to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight and works as chief strategist for a government that still has Gavin Williamson overseeing schools
5) 'It is depressingly possible that those who climb to the top of the hierarchy are more likely to focus only on their own interests.' Point proven.
6) 'MPs and officials have to make constant forecasts but have little idea about how to make them, how the statistics and computer models underlying these forecasts work, or how to judge the reliability of their own views.' Err...like with exam result algorithms?
7) 'Political institutions tend to become dominated by narcissists. Elected representatives are often chosen from a subset of people who have very high opinions of themselves.' Dom knows Boris all too well...
8) 'Whitehall suffers from a lack of internal mechanisms to enforce honesty about errors.' Whitehall? Or Downing Street...
9) 'Many accident reports, from air crashes to Fukushima, show that reflexive obedience to the chief lies behind fatal errors.' Yes, this was from the guy behind a government that places total obedience before competence and has driven out critics.
10) 'Cameron regards his job as like a steward in charge of the ‘ship of state’ – his job is not to crash it into the rocks.' If only Boris Johnson would see his job as avoiding crashing into rocks....
11) 'No 10 and the Cabinet Office are themselves a major source of chaos so it no surprise that the rest of government is in permanent omnishambles.' He was talking about the Coalition but certainly true today...
12) 'The occupants of No 10, like Tolstoy’s characters in War and Peace, are blown around by forces they do not comprehend.' (See 11 above )
13) 'Our leaders are like 19th Century Germans who had lost religion of whom Nietzsche said ‘they merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement’. They carry on in a state of ‘dumb amazement’ without realising how absurd their situation' (See 11 again)
14) 'I don't want confident public school bluffers.' Most definitely agreed after seeing Boris in Downing Street.
15) 'We want to improve performance and make me much less important — and within a year largely redundant.' Four months to go since this was written in January (although performance seems to be deteriorating)
