Part two | Dominic Cummings: what I told Farage & why the system will ‘do anything’ to stop him

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to Quite Right with me, Michael Gove. And me, Madeleine Grant. This is the second part of our discussion with Dominic Cummings. If you haven't listened to the first part where Dominic talks to Maddy and I about Whitehall, Boris and Covid, this is your opportunity to seek it out. And in the second part, we're looking towards the future. And we're asking Dominic what he thinks about the mood of politics at the moment. And he believes we're in a pre-revolutionary.

What does that mean? And does it actually mean the advent of Prime Minister Farage? Dometic explains his interactions with Nigel Farage, his views on reform and the Conservatives. And by the way, he also answers a very uncomfortable question, very honestly, and he explains why he thinks I would not have made a good prime minister. Dom, you've described...

a dysfunctional system, an accumulating set of crises, some of the challenges that you faced trying to change those things. As a New Year dawns, what do you think? is going to happen in British politics? What do you think is going to happen in the US? And particularly when it comes to British politics, if people want regime change, what should they do? Short term, I'm very pessimistic.

I think, so it's very embarrassing now to admit, but before the referendum, I thought, seems just completely crazy now, but I thought before the referendum, we're going to win the referendum. And that is going to force Westminster to change in all sorts of ways. It'll have to update. It'll have to accept that a lot of things it thought about politics were wrong. They've been so super committed to a whole set of ideas.

and how the public works and how campaigns work and everything, that the shock of losing will make everyone change their mind in various ways. Of course, now my prediction looks completely laughable. everything doubled down, but it's kept doubling down, right? It doubled down through the constitutional crisis, it doubled down through COVID, and it's doubled down through Ukraine. You have the...

What historians will really, really struggle to record, simultaneously on the one hand, Putin must fail, we will do everything, Slavia, Ukraine, sanctions will work, China will stand with democracy. Right, this whole story of 2022. Okay, well, if that's your official story, obviously you can't carry on with the shit show of the MOD, right? You're going to, because otherwise that would be literally insane to have that as the official story, then allow the MOD to continue as it were.

No, we're going to do both. We're going to have that as the official story, and we're going to double down on the MOD becoming more and more of a global laughing stock, even to the extent of...

organizing nuclear tests to prove that the nuclear system works and then the fucking missile's done and sink the bottom of the sea. But we'll carry on anyway, right? So the lesson of the last 10 years is the system will keep doubling down. So the system will... definitely keep doubling down again in 2026. They'll rally around. We will all, the system will rally behind. Continue infinite immigration. There's no way out.

After all, the Treasury says economically there's no alternative, and it's racist to have an alternative. So... Carry on on infinite. So you don't think there are signs that that is changing in number 10 now with Labour's and Shabana Mahmood and all of that? Oh, it's all complete nonsense. They won't do anything on the boats because they can't do anything on the boats. The boat is hardwired because of the Human Rights Act and Judicial Review and how Whitehall operates.

It doesn't matter. Siobhan says whatever. Rishi said all of this stuff in 2023. I predicted in January 23, when he made all these statements, I said repeatedly, it's all total bullshit. He will not stop the boats. The boats will carry on. The legislation they're passing will have zero effect. And I very confidently predict the same thing now. What about illegal migration? They cannot control illegal migration. That will carry on. They can't control why at all.

so all of Whitehall's pathologies will continue. They can't get a different economic model, so they'll just have to keep putting up taxes, and stagnation will continue. They can't control the police and law and order. so crime will continue to get worse. They can't control the NHS, so the NHS will get worse. And obviously the MOD fiasco can only get worse and worse. They'll lie more and more, cheat all the budgets, blah, blah, blah.

All the major things which is currently disintegrating will continue to get worse. The benefits thing as well. Now, the old system basically worked for 20-odd years from the 90s on the basis of, OK. All kinds of stuff in Whitehall is a complete farce. But as long as the economy is growing by 2% or 3% a year, we can keep the show on the road, sort of, right? Once you have stagnant growth and a cost-of-living crisis...

Ironically, across the living crisis, which you are massively adding to because of your insane Ukraine policy as well, and all of your sanctions things. We're showing Putin who's boss, right, by sanctioning oil. Meanwhile, we buy Putin's oil from India at inflated prices.

But, you know, that's Westminster. So you're making the cost of living crisis work through Ukraine. So you've got a public which hates the old system now more than ever. I just did a whole bunch of focus groups in October for the first time since 2019. unprecedented hate, contempt, despair, anger for the old system. And the cost of living crisis is completely fundamental to that. You mentioned before, Maddy, about the kind of dislocation between Westminster debates and that.

It's just amazing. I spent October listening to all voters all over the country talk. Cost of living crisis, cost of living crisis, cost of living crisis. They put an asylum hotel next to me. Cost of living crisis, asylum hotel, cost of living crisis, right? And then you watch what Westminster's about being about and it's like all this.

Zelensky bullshit and all the other bullshit which they absorbed their time on, that, again, can only continue, right? So 2026, the company's going to get even more enraged. The cost of living crisis is going to get worse because the economy's knackered and they can't do anything to change.

change course on it. Support for reform is logical for these people because they're desperate. Tory screwed us, can't vote for them. Labour screwed us, can't vote for them. So it's logical for people to go, well, let's look at reform and let's look at the Greens because we're out of options other than, and this is the next dynamic that pops up in the focus groups is, is maybe we should all leave.

or at least get our kids out. So you see over and over in focus groups now, the conversation goes like this. I hate the Tories, they screwed us. I hate Labour, they screwed us. I actually voted for Labour because it was time to just, we had to get the Tories out. But now Storm has completely screwed as well. I hate them both. What should we do? Well, I guess we should vote Farage. Yeah, what will happen then? Well, he hasn't got a team, he hasn't got a plan. It'll probably be a failure.

Yeah, it'll probably be a failure, but what else can we do? We've got to vote for them because we can't vote for Tories or Labour, right? Yeah, I agree. We seem to be snookered. Maybe we should leave. Yeah, I've been thinking about leaving. I want to get my kids out. Yeah, I've been looking at it too.

So that is the kind of dynamic you see repeatedly in focus group conversations now. Is that across the board with people who voted for other parties as well as Labour at the last general election? Yeah, all sorts of parties. Tory voters, reform voters, Labour. Different classes to socioeconomic groups. Yeah, the same conversation.

Cost of living is a disaster. Westminster and the old system is killing us. It's destroyed our lives for years now. Since the financial, remember, a lot of these people have not had a pay rise since the financial crisis, right? It's been financial crisis shitshow. Brexit shit show, COVID shit show, Ukraine shit show. It's just been one disaster after another. So a lot of people have had 15 years of their lives going nowhere. So they're desperate. You have that whole problem in their lives.

Then they look at politics. We hate them all. We hate the old thing. It's completely failed us. Look at Farage. One in seven people say, I think you'll sort it out. The other six in seven go, Well, he is against immigration, and he's been steady on that for 20 years, so maybe he will do something about immigration. But there's no team and there's no plan. He'll probably just blow up the way that they all blow up if he gets in. And then that's when they talk about, maybe we should just get out.

And that cycle of conversation just happens repeatedly. Do you think Farage recognises the weaknesses that the electorate have identified? And has he talked to you or people you trust about it? I think intellectually Farage knows what I'm saying is true.

I've said this to him, and he didn't argue. And I think he can't argue, right? Like, you know, unless you want to be complete. Farage is not, I mean, a lot of people in Westminster are delusional. But Farage is much less delusional than most of them. And it's just an empirical fact that when you talk to people, voters on big things, voters tend to get to the heart of these big questions, right? They sniffed out, when all of the pundits were saying,

Oh, Starmer and Sue Gray, serious grown-ups are in charge. The voters knew this guy's a dud and he's going to be crap, right? Most voters are way ahead of Westminster on all the big questions. And the voters say... over and over again, and Farage has been told this by lots of people, they want to see a team and they want to see a plan. Because voters are also a smart right. They look at it and they go, okay, well, maybe we should vote for Farage, but...

One guy can't change the system. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Even if you put someone a hundred times as able as Farage in, right? Even if you put Elon in or Jeff Bezos or whoever, any of these characters, it doesn't matter how able you are. One person cannot change all of this. You can only do it by building a team.

And the voters know that, and they're watching to see, and they know that Forrest has not put the team. How do you rate reform's chances of attracting those high-caliber people that you've described who increasingly work in computing and tech and finance?

If Forage really wanted to do something about it, he would set out this public story about how he's going to go around the country and recruit people. Here's how I'm going to recruit people to become MPs and candidates. Here's how I'm going to recruit people to be...

like the top 10 most important ministers. Here's how I'm going to recruit people to take over from the duds running civil service and replace them when I take over. I'm going to go around the country. I'm going to set it out, email this if you're interested.

Here's the first people I've hired to oversee the... There's an obvious story. If I was running a political party, there's an obvious story that you would tell, right? Or if you're setting up a new party now, there's an obvious way in which you would build this...

in public, this huge recruitment process, and say, and what would your story be? The old thing's completely failed. We all know it. The only people who don't understand it are the people still in Westminster. Now, they can't fix themselves. We, the country, are going to have to fix them.

So here's how I'm going to do it. You, the wonderful people of Britain, who've been off doing your other things in life, some of you are going to have to, I'm afraid, take one for the team. You're going to have to put your normal life aside for the next five, ten years. You're going to have to come in and help.

change the Westminster system. If you are brilliant at running a hospital, if you were brilliant working in the armed forces, if you've built a wonderful business, if you've got something to offer this country, we need you. to come in and replace the duds who've driven us into the sand. And here's how we're going to do it. And that's what you would do, right? As you can see, reform is not doing this.

So that, to me, is one of the critical questions in 2026. If Faraj tells that story, if he decides mentally, internally, I actually do want to be PM. And I don't want to get spat out by the deep state in eight weeks the way that they did with Liz Truss. Okay, I'm going to have to build a team. And he actually embarks on that. That will be transformational. But does he actually really want to be PM? And can he make that leap to?

I want to be surrounded by people much smarter and much more able than me. The strongest evidence that he might want to do is recruiting Danny Kruger. Do you think Danny's making this argument? Do you think Danny will prevail? And you've made the point in the past that there are some people around Farage who are basically party boys and girls who are not really serious about power and what's required. Do you think Danny can prevail against the Christmas party crew there?

I mean, Danny's an old friend and... I like him. He understands a lot of these problems. He worked in Number 10 and he saw up close in a way that nobody else in reform has done, right? He's actually worked in Number 10 with the horror of the Cabinet Office and really, truly understands how the thing works.

So I've deliberately not, him and I have not really talked about any of this since he's defected. I think he doesn't want to talk to me about it for very understandable reasons, given all the sort of past. sensitivities with reform and me and Farage and whatnot. So I can't say anything really about what he's thinking. But for sure, Danny obviously understands the problems, and he also obviously understands that.

It's inconceivable that any single person on earth could go in and change this. You could only do it. Anybody knows what I'm saying. I mean, I spoke to Nigel about it himself over dinner a year ago, roughly. Nigel said, yeah, like, obviously.

If you're going to change the government, I'm going to have to build a team and do it. So I don't think intellectually there's any issue about it. He knows intellectually that it's got to be done. But of course, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. There's a huge difference between Boris knew all sorts of things intellectually, didn't mean that his character meant that he could actually execute.

I do want to be a prisoner of Westminster assumptions, but I have to ask, A, is it possible that the Tories, between now and the election, could so internalise some of the lessons that... you've put forward, that they could become the vehicle for change? And is it also possible that if Labour had someone else as leader, that they could do a half-decent job of governing? Human agency is real.

And of course, it's theoretically possible that Labour could replace Starmer with someone who decides to go a different direction. But I think the chances of happening are close to zero. Is there anyone in the Labour Party who you think, even if it's unlikely that they could be elected, would actually do not just a better job, but a half-decent job?

So I know close to zero Labour MPs. There's one Labour MP who I worked with in government because of his role then, and that's the current Armed Forces Minister Al Khans. So I had some dealings... Professional deal, not political, obviously, because he was working in the armed forces at the time when I was in government. I had dealings with him. He obviously comes from a certain background.

understands about building a team and could do certain things that most MPs couldn't do. However, I think there's no chance that he's going to get put in. Labour were going to put in Miliband or Rayner or someone on the left because they just want a left... person to do left things. And they will drive all the pathologies worse and worse, and then they'll blame racism and capitalism and everything for that, and they'll just keep doubling down. The Tories are think of dead.

Completely dead. I think they're completely dead. One of the striking things in the focus groups is people have moved on from hatred. They've just moved, they just say things like, I just don't think about the Tories anymore because they're just not relevant to our lives anymore, are they? They're just finished.

So people don't even want to discuss how much they hate the Tories anymore. They just go, yeah, this new woman, she's obviously rubbish. Don't know anything about her. People can't think of one single thing that she's ever done or said. And they just look at each other and go...

But I mean, I just don't pay any attention. Do you pay any attention to them? They're just not relevant to us, are they? And then everyone goes, no, they're just relevant. I mean, I have no idea what the toy's doing about anything I really get. So the toys have just moved on to a place even worse than... universal loathing and hatred to a kind of, they're kind of parked in there, you're just waiting to die.

space as far as... So the public does think of them as sort of wheelwrights or Thatchers or stained glass window makers. It's a quaint organisation irrelevant to modern life. No, I wouldn't say quaint. I'd say it's like some kind of like, I guess I'll put it more like... If you're going to have a metaphor like that, I would say it's more like the local vagrant who used to smash everything up, but he's now cabbaged and sitting in a wheelchair and isn't relevant anymore.

That's the metaphor that I would use. They're just not relevant. People don't discuss their ideas. or any of the people. So I was also very surprised how almost nobody knows who the hell Jenrick even is. So everyone in Westminster goes, what about Jenrick? Jenrick's video is this, Jenrick's video. No one has seen anything. No one cares about any of that stuff. And presumably you think the fact that I'm a big fan of chemis is a sign of mild mental derangement on my part.

I mean, probably on camera is not the place to discuss exactly what you think of Kemi and why. And why you fooled yourself into telling people that she could function. I mean, she's obviously... The idea that a country that had prime ministers like Pitt and Palmerston end up with Truss and Kemi tells the story, right? I think there's a difference between the two, but we shan't labour the point.

Basically, Michael, very unsound to say that there's no place in the modern world for stained glass makers. Yes, I thought the editor of this potato should not say things like that. I know. Sorry. God, we'll pretend we didn't hear that. Stained glass window makers are wonderful and should be...

preserved and are a valuable part of our civilization, not like the Tory party. Yeah, what would Roger Scruton have said? I think I'm probably somewhere between you and Michael when it comes to Cammie Badnock. I think she can be... She can do a great job, but other times she can be extremely patchy. And the point about people generally listening, is there anyone in the Tory party that you think could do a better job? But I make the same point to you, Maddy.

Politics is a team sport. To win anything important and to control large, complicated things, you can't do it as one person. You have to build a team. And I think part of the problem with Westminster is it looks at these things through the prism of, can they do an interview? Can they give a speech? Oh, she did well in PMQs, right? That's not the way to think about. whether or not someone is an actual leader. If you go back and read the Lee Kuan Yew's amazing memoirs, right?

One of the most amazingly striking things that you'll see in there is the amount of time he spent on people, on finding people, recruiting people, motivating people, compensating people, training people, removing duffers. Very, very much like Elon or Steve Jobs or anybody like that who's like a global elite at building something. But no one ever talks about political characters through that prism.

But that's what you actually, that's what the country actually needs. So you say, oh, well, Kelly sometimes can do rubal and PMQs. But... Okay, I lived through 1997 to 2001, right? I watched the Tory party. I watched the Tory party for four years. And what did they say for four years?

All the serious people, they said, William was just wonderful in PMQs last week. I don't believe these polls. These polls, Dominic, they're like witchcraft. They're nonsense. And what happened? They told themselves that for four years. And then four years later, Blair smashed them with the identical majority. I suppose another question then is, even if there was a hypothetically...

Tory leader who was fantastic at those kind of things and had, you know, the balls of really curing you and the ability to deal with people. They would never, they always would destroy them if such a person ever arose amid their ranks. Yeah, but even if, let's say. Considering the party has become a pathological institution, it destroys anything.

value. People outside with talent looking at it now, no one in their right mind would join it. And of course, this is a feedback loop, right? Part of the reason why Kemi's doomed is people look at her and they go, yeah, she's rubbish, but she can't recruit a team. So she's got the D team around her doing everything, and the D team can never get out of vicious feedback loops by definition. So...

It's pointless talking about can Kemi do this, can Kemi do that. Kemi is... No, but is the Tory brand so scorched that it wouldn't matter what the leadership was doing? I think it is now so terrible. So I did think that after the last election, they had one last shot at it.

but I think they've blown their last shot. I think now that it's... Kemi will go in the summer, they'll put Jenrick in, Jenrick will sink like a stone, and then the party will say, well, then they'll think it will fragment. A bunch of them...

The kind of Dominic, Greve, Gork tendency, Gavin, Barwell, all those type people will go off and join the Lib Dems or Labour or whatever as the system polarises and fragments. And then another bunch will go off to reform and another bunch will just leave and start planning.

a different life. But that's why the question about Forage and whether Forage actually sets out this recruitment track, I think becomes a central question for 2026 because if Forage does do that, then all kinds of other dynamics will shift. But if he doesn't do that, then people are going to say, OK, Labour completely screwed. Tory's completely screwed. Farage has historic opportunity but is determined not to grab it. OK.

Well, given that the country is in a pre-revolutionary state and is desperate for something new, who is going to provide the new thing? What happens if reform crashes and burns at that point? Do you think... You mean after winning? Yeah, like if they make a hash of things, and we've already seen how, I mean, I hold no candle for Keir Starmer and his government, but it's no doubt that with the news cycle, the information economy and social media and just general feelings of disenfranchisement.

the window that you now have in the modern world to improve people's lives materially before they will reject you too is very small and seems to be getting smaller. What happens if that, do you think people would then, will they then look for another startup political party, basically?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the system will just get, if at that point, then the system will, well, so two things will happen. One, the old system will try and reinforce itself and say, see, this is what happens when you put outsiders in, everything just implodes. And people who don't trust the old system will say, we need to have something new. But I think this is likely to happen earlier in that if Farage can't build a talent and can't build the machine that he needs...

then it's reasonably likely, I think, that he just gets smashed up before the election ever happens. And that if you think about... what the old system will do to stop him getting in, it's not going to be politics as usual. And Starmer's already signaled this, right, in the last couple of weeks, when he says, I can live with the Tories winning, but I can't live with Farage winning.

The people around Starmer and all through the upper echelons of the Whitehall system are looking at Trump, they're looking across Europe, and they're saying to themselves, the lesson is to strike early and strike hard and not let these people in. We should never have let Vote Leave win the referendum on Brexit. That was the beginning of the disaster for us. We can't make this mistake again. Let's smash the absolute living shit out Farage.

and make sure that he doesn't win by fair means and foul. They'll leak medical records, they'll leak tax records, they'll bug his phone and leak that. They'll do anything that they need to. And by the way...

That's going to be happening all across Europe in parallel, and they'll all be telling themselves we're fighting fascism together. Against the AFD and the Ressemblée Nationale and all the rest of it. The European Commission has said publicly and on the record, we will use the tactics that we use for colour revolutions in Eastern Europe.

to stop Western European countries being taken over by parties that we don't agree with. That is the official doctrine of the European Commission, and they will definitely try and do it. Isn't that a bit conspiratorial? My point is they're saying it on the record, Michael. It's the opposite of conspiratorial. They have conferences by Lake Como to discuss how to do it. I've been invited to them. I haven't gone yet.

I wish I was invited. It sounds fun. Well, next time. Start writing about disinformation and you'll get an invite to Lake Como. Amazing, yeah. I just have to get hired by the Tony Blair Institute. They'd love to have me. We can fix that. Trump. Elon and Doge didn't work out. What's your assessment of what will happen with Trump's presidency in the years ahead? I think the Doge thing did work out in various ways. In particular...

What it did was it dug down to the absolute root of where is the money and how is the money controlled? And how is the money programmed by various computer systems and power structures inside the kind of overall Washington system? And for the first time ever now, they've actually made public. Here is how this whole system has evolved over 50 years.

right down to here's how money moves between the CIA and the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID and all of this sort of thing. So I think the exposure of how that... how the true deep state system operates and where the money is and how the computer systems operate that kind of wire it all together, exposing that and getting external understanding of that, I think, is important now.

It partly failed for a few different reasons. Number one, most of the Republicans in Washington don't actually want to dig into it, because the same reason for the Tories in Westminster. Secondly... Elon Doge and whatnot, came to the whole thing very late. So they didn't have time to hire all the people that they needed to and to prepare it and whatnot. And third, I think, Trump himself, for complicated reasons, is...

decided slash accepted that the Republicans are just not going to try to control money. And there's only so many battles the White House can fight, and the money is not one of them. So I think, therefore, you didn't have the kind of, you haven't had the White House driving doge and bureaucratic reform in the same way that they have, for example, on immigration with Stephen Miller.

where they've said it's actually a strategic priority and we're going to go to war with the deep state and with the courts in order to try and make progress on this question. So I think the big picture on that is, I think it's the same across the Western world.

The big picture there is the old system completely refuses to take a step back. The lesson that they learned from the last 10 years is we should have jailed Trump. We should never have let Elon buy X. It's not that Biden sabotaging the southern border and having millions and millions and millions of completely out of control immigration was stupid. No, it's that we should have jailed Trump and we should have actually done proper censorship.

You watch Hillary, John Kerry and whatnot now. They're extremely explicit in saying, quote, the First Amendment was a historic mistake and it must be undone, unquote, right? That is extremely important. Because you have actual Democrat presidential candidates formally and officially stating repeatedly the old system in their eyes is dead. And they're equating the Republicans with fascism.

And the thing to be controlled by the new legal system, which supersedes the old attitudes about free speech. So I think there's now a big tendency to think Trump kind of won that battle in 2024. Everyone's kind of got to suck it up.

X exists now under Elon, they can't control speech anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe that's how things evolve, but it's certainly not how a lot of the inner work, don't how people like Jake Sullivan and the people around Hillary and the people like Obama think about it.

They think we've had a temporary setback. Trump is disorganized. He's not actually going to smash the deep state in the way that Stephen Miller and Elon would like to do. If you talk to a lot of the Silicon Valley MAGA people... Their theory is not, is Trump going too far? Their great theory is Trump is not going nearly far enough and is not going to smash up the bits of the Washington system that need smashing up. And their theory is that then...

They get booted out in 2028, and the Democrats roll back triumphantly. And then, of course, in league with the EU, say, well, let's have some kind of new North Atlantic zone for how digital communication works, for internet regulation. to stop fascism and child abuse and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that this fundamental war between the insiders and the outsiders can only intensify.

Elite polarization and fragmentation can only continue. You'll see more and more people abandoning the old system and joining outsider forces. You can see that in Britain as well, right? There's more and more entrepreneurs in Britain saying, Yeah, actually, Tories dead, Labour dead. We obviously need to do something new. So I think these processes that we can see, elite fragmentation, polarisation, the increasingly bitter lawfare.

and kind of winner-takes-all and just jail your enemies, I think will intensify here and Europe and America. Need to restock inventory, cover seasonal dips, or manage payroll? OnDeck's small business line of credit provides immediate access to funds up to $200,000 exactly when your business needs it. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and full control over repayment, you can tackle unexpected expenses without...

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Final thoughts. Apart from reading your blog and The Spectator, what should listeners do to prepare themselves for 2026? What should people be reading, thinking? listening to as a preparation for the year ahead? So I think if you look back over the last 10 years and just think who's been ahead of the game and who's been delusional?

I think the voices that see what's coming are, by definition, at the edge. So I think if you're reading op-eds in The Times, then you're almost sure to be programmed to believe. wrong things and to be confused about what's going on. And if you just read the op-eds of the main newspapers for the last 10 years, the world would be just super confusing, right? You'd be asking yourself now, but sanctions were going to destroy the Putin war machine, right?

Think of all the amazing things you would believe if that was your information source. So I think you have to look for eclectic sources outside of the mainstream, and that's going to become truer and truer. And it's going to become even more true as the whole AI thing kicks off, because you're not going to be able to understand what's happening on the technology front if you're reading about it from Sky News and whatnot.

Can I ask a slightly rogue question? You use the term NPC a lot in your... blog which is non-playing character which makes me laugh a lot because I just always imagine that scene in GoldenEye 007 when you have to get Natalia to the computer in the control room and I keep imagining like our most garlanded journalist being stuck in a doorway I do think it's

Interesting that that kind of language is figuring in your blogs and people in Westminster are now, I guess, maybe a bit more familiar with it. I think it's a general phenomenon, right? I mean, one of the weird things that's happened is... this kind of pipeline from the darker corners of the internet like 4chan, through kind of edgy blogs and whatnot, through then into mainstream culture.

And then often the mainstream NPCs themselves don't even really understand where the phraseology and the arguments and the memes that they're using even come from. I mean, it's one of the features of the last kind of 10, 15 years. I mean, it is an odd confusing... How do you know if you're an NPC? What are the telltale signs? The telltale signs are you still subscribe to the FT and you read it and you share its columns and you say, very good column from so-and-so on Ukraine.

then you know you're fully locked into MPC status. There have been all sorts of conspiracy theories in the past about, you know, Tory leadership elections and all the rest of that rubbish. Put that to one side, just one question. I've never asked you this before, but...

I always found the view that whatever you thought of the things that I did right or wrong in politics, that actually you thought, Michael, however good you are, you don't have what it takes to be prime minister. I think you think that. Do you? And if so, in a sentence, why is that? Do I think you have what it takes to be prime minister? I think that you think, Michael, no, you don't. Never had. Which is not an insult. You know, that's true 99% of the human race.

So I think you could be prime minister in the sense that, so this will sound insulting and rude, and I don't want it to be like that. Please, be rude. So in a world in which Boris and Keir Starmer and David Cameron could be prime minister... then in that world, in one sense, why couldn't you be prime minister? However, I don't think you could be a prime minister like Pitt or Palmerston or someone like that. But I think to some extent, it's because...

So the first bit sounded like I'm trying to be rude. I'm not trying to be rude. I'm just trying to be honest about it. I think that if you, as you have, right, if you read these things historically... An element of being really good at these jobs is a kind of hardness and coldness. And the jobs are, there's so much pressure. And the stakes are so extremely high that only certain kind of characters can really cope with those things and still make good judgments under that relentless...

extreme pressure and constant, as Bismarck put it, constant gambling for high stakes with other people's money. It's very, very hard and only these odd people could do it. If you look at Lee Kuan Yew, if you look at Bismarck, look at Pei, look at these characters. I would say the temperament that actually is very well suited to it is the old English aristocracy.

So if you look at old Robert Salisbury, if you look at his relative, Earl Cromer, you read their letters, you read their memoirs. They had the mental... They could deal with the mafia types like Putin. They had the coldness. They understood them. They had the ruthlessness to out-mafia them and to compete in mafia terms when necessary. And they didn't fall apart under pressure. How did they get to be like that?

The toughness of life, learning to hunt. The aristocratic system bred them and then selected for them ruthlessly and then in an international system where if you don't prevail you have your arms hacked off.

then there's a lot of selection pressure to put those people up. So, you know, you look at the Napoleonic Wars, we end up producing two amazing geniuses like Wellington and Nelson. I mean, neither of those two people would be allowed anywhere near anything now. They're both committed to mental asylums. Wellington was a top.

Nelson was not, but still. Ruthless selection. Ruthless selection, right. And the ruthless selection of the aristocratic system either found people like themselves for certain jobs, but also an extremist said, OK, he's not one of us socially, but he's... fucking got everything we need, get this guy in there now. And also give him freedom and the responsibility and the power to actually crack on with it. That whole culture...

The end of that culture, I would say, really is... The end of it that you see is kind of Earl Cromer and before 1914. It's interesting, but... If you read a council right of 1914 parliament, it's already an extremely different thing because of the 1880s reforms to the parliament of 1850 or even 1870, 1880. So even by the time you get to 1914, it's a different parliament.

And I think that has its expression in Asquith, right? You have the outbreak of World War I, it's a total shambles. And unlike in the crisis with Napoleon, where you have Pitt and the Aristos go, right, it's all out war, let's organise ourselves. You have the complete shambles around Asquith instead, can't organise anything, stupid bureaucracies, can't fire people.

The cabinet is paralyzed looking at the Western Front saying, well, we can't fire so-and-so. Whereas Pitt was straight in, fired, fired, fired. Promoted, promoted, promoted. So already by 1914, you see that... death grip of the Northcote Trevelyan change. And that is the central thing, right? The old British system died with Northcote Trevelyan. Northcote Trevelyan created the permanent bureaucracy, gave the civil service control of personnel.

And the British Empire was destroyed in almost no time and blundered into two world wars. And until that system has destroyed us, and until we destroy the Northcote-Trevelyan system, we'll see everything carrying on melting down. I wonder if another reason for the success that we enjoy up to that point is because we're a society that focuses heavily on primogeniture.

If you're not a first son, you basically get nothing. Your older brother has secured the bag. Therefore, it's up to you to make your own way in the world, whether that's army, church. And if you're a younger son, like Wellington was. You've just got to go for it. You can be from a very, very wealthy family on paper, but actually not have much to recommend yourself. And that's kind of like a dog-eat-dog world, basically. I think, so to some extent, I agree with that. But I also think...

It's just also matters enormously where the center of the competition is aimed. So those people you're talking about, lots of those people went into the army, right? Or they went to work in the intelligence services. Or like the East India Company or something. Now, the focus of where that competition has gone.

has shifted for elite talent. So now you have elite talent going off to all kinds of esoteric pursuits that Westminster doesn't really understand or have any connection to, hence why you can't deal with technology properly, for example, at the centre of government. Whereas the Westminster Whitehall system now has this horrific HR culture promoting NPCs and the second team at best. And almost all of the great...

So Michael and I worked with a lot of great young officials. I would say roughly 99% of the great young people that we knew in their 20s and 30s have gone by the time of 50, right? Almost literally universally. Do they get frustrated and say, I can't make a difference here, I'm going to go and do something meaningful? Exactly. Yeah. People who are very talented and have a kind of entrepreneurial can-do drive, and they look at the management above them and they say,

I do not want to become Chris Wermold. I do not want to become so-and-so. That is death. That is awful. It's not what I came into public service for. It's not how I want to spend my life. So those people self-select out. And then the wormholes rise relentlessly to the top of the system. And then promote other little wormholes. Because that's what people like that do. People hire in their own image.

So I'm going to ask you another whopper of a question, which I know is bad because we're kind of tying up. But if we were to replace Northcote Trevelyan, is there a template that you would follow, like, for example, Singaporean system? We go back to the old system, which is ministers are actually really responsible to parliament instead of fake responsibility, and the ministers hire who they want to come into departments to do things and then take responsibility for them.

But the political responsibility in Parliament is then real. I hired so-and-so. I put them in charge of fixing this in the DWP. It worked. We've given them a million quid bonus. Great job. It was a fiasco. I'm out of here. Disgraces and no gongs for me. You have to have responsibility to parliament restored at a ministerial level, and then you have to have the political people actually responsible for hiring.

great talent from outside. And if you can't, which is, of course, exactly what Lee Kuan Yew did, if you can't do that, then you can't expect different results. The institutions and the people are just completely interlinked. So you can't fix the institutions unless you bring in great people, but you can't bring in great people unless it's clear that you're going to change the institutions because great people won't come in and work in the farcical institutions that you've got. Thank you.

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