Unelected bureaucrat Dominic Cummings is now inviting applications from experts in maths, economics, data science, machine learning and software development, interested in “authoring tools designed for arguing from evidence”, to join his team and work very long hours under constant threat of dismissal (Johnson and Cummings plan radical carve-up of Whitehall, 16 December).
During my brief career in the UK civil service, I was lucky enough to work with a team of just such exceptional and highly qualified individuals who would certainly have exactly the skills he says he wants. However, many of them were also EU27 citizens so, assuming they have not already joined the Brexodus of skilled Europeans, I imagine they might lack motivation to work with the man who helped manipulate the UK into Brexit. Most of us were also sufficiently versed in “arguing from evidence” to understand that much of the leave campaign was based on lies and fantasies.
One might conclude that Cummings lacks a certain credibility or moral standing in the data science community and, shorn of his breathless fanboy’s techno-babble and “brogrammer” posturing, his offer is perhaps of limited appeal to its expert audience. It could well be that most of the people with the skills, experience, intellectual curiosity and public service ethic that he needs are also those least likely to want to tarnish their own professional reputations or future careers through association with Cummings or his glorified sweatshop.
Chris Webster
Gümligen, Switzerland
• I can see why Johnson and Cummings may want to radically change the civil service. Clearly the traditional civil service attributes of honesty, integrity and impartiality do not fit well with their way of doing business.
Cummings’s reported concern about the Kafkaesque influence of senior mandarins perhaps reflects the apparent refusal of the Johnson government to publicly accept that there may be some barriers to achieving their objectives. Civil servants have the job of turning ideological aspirations into a real-world deliverables. This often involves dealing with politically inconvenient practicalities – for example, HMRC advising that it may take up to five years, rather than one year, to develop the complex IT to support new Brexit customs arrangements.
Advice to ministers highlighting such problems may influence them to amend policy but it is most likely based on impartial, objective analysis and usually supported by detailed briefing papers and even more detailed reports, so nothing Kafkaesque about it. It only becomes Kafkaesque when the government and its advisers suppress, redact and dress up the information in political spin.
Gerald Leach
(Retired civil servant), Pocklington, East Yorkshire
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