“Putin is a tiny problem relative to our own Ministry of Defence and the lawyers in the Cabinet Office,” said Dominic Cummings to the House of Lords Constitution Committee on Wednesday. It’s a typical asseveration by the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson in Downing Street: offensive nonsense dressed up as profundity.
Sadly, the very fact that Cummings was giving evidence to a parliamentary committee will persuade some that his critique of our system of governance merits sober consideration. It really doesn’t; and shows an astonishing lack of self-awareness. British democracy requires scrutiny of executive decisions. That is a strength, not a weakness. And Cummings himself exemplifies the dangers of allowing visionaries to override customary constitutional checks and balances.
Not even Cummings, I assume, would regard civil servants and government lawyers as the moral equivalent of an autocrat in the Kremlin who assassinates critics, illegally invades and annexes the territory of a member-state of the United Nations, and deploys nerve agent in an English city. Cumming’s case – to put it generously – is rather that an expansion of powers of scrutiny over government decisions makes Britain less effective on the international stage and less fleet in domestic policy.
In his evidence to the Lords, Cummings referred – and this is a reasonable observation – to a lack of popular trust in government institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. He parodied the official response as: “You should trust us more: you should give us more money and power.” But he went on, from this unexceptionable observation about government overreach, to the preposterous notion that the civil service is somehow working to undermine this country’s interest.
“It’s not Putin,” said Cummings, “who’s launching lawfare against the SAS.”
This statement, actually an accusation, requires explaining. What Cummings is referring to is a propaganda campaign conducted by right-wing newspapers along the lines that a witch-hunt is being conducted by government and the civil service against military veterans. The supposed vehicle of this persecution is official investigations into allegations of abuse in parts of the world under British administration, and the role of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in mandating such inquiries.
Some of the allegations date back a long way, to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Some are more recent, relating to military operations in Afghanistan. The only reputable way to proceed is to investigate, without prejudice. Hence the current investigation by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave into allegations of more than 50 summary killings by UK special forces soldiers in Afghanistan.
Cummings’s message was wider, however, than this deliberately provocative analogy with Putin. It was, in essence, that the institutions of government bureaucracy stifle creativity. In his words: “Inside the Whitehall system, there’s a constant demand of, ‘well, why can’t we get these great people into the system?’ Well, because great people have options, and they’re not going to go and sit in stupid meetings with PowerPoint after PowerPoint with no one actually taking responsibility for anything.”
It’s a seductive notion that administration would be improved by recruiting the right talent and giving them the tools to do the job. But there is scant evidence for it. Cummings’s own time in Downing Street was marked not by reforms to improve people’s lives but by conflicts of baffling parochialism and an inability to cooperate. Sajid Javid, among the most talented of ministers in the previous government, resigned as chancellor rather than acquiesce in Cummings’s attempted takeover of Treasury functions.
Cummings has plainly neither forgotten nor forgiven. His demeanour in front of the Lords, with trademark scruffiness, was a means of settling old scores. And it’s far from irrelevant, or even tangential, to note that Cummings’s abrasiveness in his criticism is consistent with his own record of public service. The official inquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic found that Cummings had “poisoned the atmosphere’ in Boris Johnson’s administration and that he had “strayed far from the proper role of a special adviser”.
And this official criticism seems to be a factor in Cummings’s rebarbative interventions in public debate. The truth is actually simpler than that he is a genius who’s been thwarted. He in fact should have had no place in Downing Street to start with. His philosophy of the high-achieving reformer who breaks through the stultifying limits of government is alien to the practice of sound administration. Whether or not a democracy possesses a written constitution (as the United States does, and the United Kingdom does not), it is a pluralist venture. A ruling president or party can’t legitimately claim that it has a mandate to stifle opposition and stymie scrutiny.
His views have no warrant in constitutional theory. They are, rather, a manifesto for arbitrary power wielded by unaccountable elites. And they have already done this country quite enough harm.