There are very few names that raise the ire of Irish commentators and journalists than that of Dominic Cummings, the one-time Svengali to the British Brexit campaign, and later advisor to Boris Johnson, before falling out with Johnson and playing a large role in his downfall.
To the average sensible Irish centrist, Cummings is precisely the kind of personality that should be let nowhere near politics: He is volatile, he is outspoken, he is not a team player, he has radical ideas about big changes, and he is, of course, a right winger. He is prone to esoteric heresies against popular consensus, as his steadfast contrarianism on Ukraine and Russia would tend to prove.
That said, he does identify some big and important problems, as reported yesterday by Ed West:
In the talk, Cummings addressed one of the most important issues facing us – why don’t we have effective people running the country?
One major problem he identified is the decline of talent in the civil service; civil servants are too badly paid, and there are too many of them. He described how, when he first began working for Boris Johnson’s government, he replaced the permanent secretary, as well as 15 of the top of the 20 people. He described how these ‘purges’ were initially unpopular but massively improved morale among more junior talented people working in the service.
He compared the quality of people we have running government to those behind the Manhattan Project or Apollo mission, which in his view reflected a collapse in public sector competence. Going back, he also cited the quality of people who ran the Royal Navy at the time of the Revolutionary Wars; they were well-paid and doing prestigious jobs, and so these roles attracted the top talent.
Ed’s piece, linked above, is as ever far more eloquent than anything I could write, but there are some points in it that I think are worthy of more consideration. He points out that in Britain, as in many western democracies, the most talented people are often drawn to the most productive sectors of the economy – in the UK that is London’s world-leading financial services sector, in Ireland it would probably be the higher tier management jobs in US multinationals. Moreover, Ed approvingly cites this view on Elon Musk, which he shares with Cummings:
At Royal Holloway, Cummings also observed that Elon Musk has more in common with Nelson and the people who ran the Royal Navy than current civil servants do, many of whom lack drive, imagination and willpower.
What I personally like about Musk is that he has that spirit of adventure and inquisitiveness which once defined the Anglo-American elite, characterised not just by a desire to rule the world but to learn everything about it, and to invent. It’s that Anglo spirit that drives both Musk’s quest to build new technology and his desire to send people to Mars, something I strongly approve of. His critics, in contrast, are mainly focused on the approval of their social circle, which invites huge caution and an air of defeatist irony. Musk’s volatility, especially visible with his social media posting, is part of that package.
There’s both a truth and a danger there, I think: On the one hand, Musk’s volatility and “spirit of adventure” is probably precisely the characteristic you’d ideally like to avoid in a national leader, because ironically the best national leaders should have relatively modest ambitions: Would we really want a Taoiseach who wanted to put Irish people on Mars (to use an extreme example) or would we prefer one who just delivered a peaceful, prosperous, and secure society with a high degree of social mobility? Great crusades are properly the realm of privateers, not statesmen.
On the other hand, the problem he identifies with the ruling class – that they are smug, complacent, and entirely uninterested in solving big problems – is evidently true. Indeed I have written about it extensively on these pages recently: Government in Ireland would rather invent a problem – “we need fewer single sex schools” – out of whole cloth and pretend to solve it than it would try to fix the big issues plaguing healthcare, housing, or justice.
Readers of my weekly roundup last week will have read a tale I recounted of a long-time activist with one of the Government parties who is looking at the selected candidates that his party has chosen for the next election with something approaching despair – “we’ve never”, he says, “had a poorer crop of midwits than this”. The problem is observably getting worse, with new candidates progressively getting younger and less qualified, and with the country having appointed a Taoiseach who is a fine communicator, but who has never demonstrated any management skills whatsoever.
Indeed it’s this latter point, I think, that’s the problem: In the age of multimedia, politics has become a sport of professional communicators, rather than thinkers or managers. The skills required to attain power are now entirely divorced from the skills required to effectively wield power. It’s also true that those communications skills are the ones being prioritised in universities, which churn out political science and economics and sociology graduates for whom politics is a career option rather than anything else, and for whom a few years working in advocacy for an NGO is an apprenticeship for running for the County Council at 28 or 29.
At the same time, politics has become less prestigious: the public increasingly holds them all in contempt. Politics is also no longer a place to make “real” money: You can grab a decent salary, sure – but if you’ve real talent you can make much more and live with much less notoriety or pressure in a career in the law, or management.
The only way to fix this, I think, is to change the incentives.
First, we should have far fewer politicians than we have: Ireland could manage quite effectively with an Oireachtas fixed at sixty parliamentarians.
Second, we should pay them vastly more: I would be inclined to benchmark political pay for Ministers to that of CEO’s of similarly sized companies. If you’re running the Department of Health, with over 127,000 employees across the department and HSE, then you should be on a similar salary to the head of a company with that number of employees. Pfizer, for example, has only 88,000 employees worldwide, but its CEO earns a base annual salary of $33million annually, before bonuses.
“But that’s absurd, John”, you say.
Maybe it is, but someone with the talent to effectively run an organisation that large can command that kind of salary in the private sector – so why are we paying our Ministers for Health the salary of a modestly successful country solicitor? In any case, who do you expect to win out in negotiations between the Irish state and big pharma? The firm paying its talent top dollar to negotiate good deals, or the country appointing 29-year-olds with no management experience to the gig? Contrast what we pay our Minister for Health to what Fulham FC pay their manager, Marco Silva: He gets Stg£4m per year for managing a bang average Premiership side with a few hundred employees. Are his skills really more rare than the skills needed to effectively run the Irish health system?
There’s another good reason to do something like this, too: Accountability. For one thing, give a Minister €33m per year and a lot more people will want his job. What’s more, a lot more people will want him out of his job so that they can have it. Voters, as well, might be more interested in who gets the €33m per year job than they are in who fills cabinet seats these days, and it might just make some voters take the whole business of elections more seriously if TD jobs were worth millions annually. Drive that salary up high enough, and you might even break the idea of voting for somebody because their father had the seat before them – you never know.
Incidentally, let’s talk about what my crackpot proposal would cost: Let’s assume a base salary for TDs of €1m per year, and an average salary for 15 Cabinet Ministers plus the Taoiseach of €18m per year (tied to the number of employees in each department).
That’s €270m per year on the cabinet, and €45m per year on the 45 TDs not in the cabinet. (We would, of course, abolish junior Ministers in this system, since they’re largely pointless jobs for the boys anyway). That comes to a total annual salary bill for national politicians of €315million, or 0.2% of what the country spends every single year. With the kind of talent that attracts, do we think might save that much on one project – the Children’s Hospital for example – alone? I do.
Third, we should downsize the civil service, and pay them more, as well. The fact that the HSE has 127,000 staff is, I suspect, the first problem that a capable manager would identify: What are all those people doing? How many of them are actually improving the nations’ health? If the biggest pharmaceutical company on earth can survive with fewer staff than the Irish health service, isn’t that a problem?
Ultimately, if we want an effective Government that delivers the kind of society most people want, then we need a system that attracts efficient and effective and talented leaders. We do not have that at the moment. Dominic Cummings is right, and we should pay him some heed.