Sky Views: What do you get if you mix technology and populism? Dominic Cummings

Sky Views: What do you get if you mix technology and populism? Dominic Cummings

It's been one of those summers when it feels as if everyone is reading the same thing. Well, perhaps reading isn't quite accurate. What's the word for failing to choke down the book everyone else seems to be holding forth on at great length? Pikettying, maybe? A Brief History of Time-ing? Anyway - it's been a summer of that.

"I've been trying," a friend confessed the other day, "but I just can't make it through." I nodded wearily. How we longed for something more digestible: Karl Ove Knausgaard perhaps, or the complete works of Immanuel Kant. But because he worked in the civil service and I worked in the media, we both felt the same leaden duty.

Image: As campaign director for Vote Leave, Mr Cummings came up with the phrase 'Take Back Control'

We had to read the blogs of Dominic Cummings.

To be fair to the prime minister's new senior adviser, Mr Cummings's writing can be entertaining, thoughtful and incisive. His reflections on technology are consistently interesting. He has considered the impact of algorithmic trading. He appreciates the complex interplay between science and productivity. He understands, as well as anyone involved in high-level politics in the West, how and why the world is changing.


Which begs a question: how did he end up running a Vote Leave campaign that suggested the entire Turkish population was headed for the UK and told voters "the European Union wants to kill our cuppa"?

Here we come to the true fascination of Mr Cummings's blog posts - their unreliable narrator. The questions have only been made more urgent by his sudden rise to power.

In Cummings's writings, that disdain is visceral. He scorns the ignorance of MPs and the journalists they listen to. He laments the vacillation of a civil service that excludes scientists and entrepreneurs

How can he excoriate government "gimmicks", yet be part of an administration vowing to "make criminals scared again"? How can he condemn the civil service for its "bureaucratic cancer", yet believe it can handle no-deal Brexit? How can he plead for fewer "Oxbridge egomaniacs", yet work for the biggest one of all?

To many of his critics, the answer lies in their author's character, or in the unique nature of the Brexit project. Yet, if we look away from Britain, these contradictions seem less unusual or individual - indeed, not so long ago, they formed the basis for an entire European government.

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In June 2018, a new Italian coalition took power, as the Five Star Movement united with the far-right League party. Both groups were unwaveringly anti-establishment and anti-EU. Yet, in their cabinet, they selected numerous members of Italy's technocratic elite. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was a former EU official; figurehead prime minister Giuseppe Conte was a law professor at the University of Florence.

Rather than choosing between technocracy and populism, Five Star and the League contrived to be both. They were, as the political historian Lorenzo Castellani put it at the time, techno-populist.

Image: Rather than choosing between technocracy and populism, Five Star and the League contrived to be both

On the face of it, the term appears nonsensical. How can cold-blooded, chart-loving technocrats work alongside emotional, bureaucrat-hating populists? Because, Castellani argued in an influential essay entitled The Age of Techno-Populism, they share a disdain for the old, slow compromises and uncertainties. They have united against a common foe: representative democracy and conventional politicians.

In Cummings's writings, that disdain is visceral. He scorns the ignorance of MPs and the journalists they listen to. He laments the vacillation of a civil service that excludes scientists and entrepreneurs. Why isn't there a chief scientist with a seat at Cabinet, he asks. Why doesn't the media learn from the science of communication?

For inspiration, Mr Cummings looks to Silicon Valley - and when he talks like this, he sounds like many of its leading figures. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel embody the idea that technology can solve even the toughest problems, as long as it is wielded by daring entrepreneurs, unhindered by red tape or considerations of ethics.

They moved fast and broke any number of industries. Mr Cummings wants to repeat that trick with the model of British government.

In techno-populism, he has an effective recipe. His desire to smash the system means he's not afraid to think in slogans: as campaign director for Vote Leave, he famously came up with the phrase "Take Back Control".

Yet he also understands the hard reality of execution and delivery matter, and how to use digital technology to make it work.

Image: The US could arguably have been described as techno-populist during the time of George W. Bush

Rather than buying Vote Leave's campaigning software off the shelf, he decided to build his own - a decision that contrasts painfully with the repeated failure of governments to do the same thing. If he proceeds the same way in Number 10, he may just well succeed.

And yet. Populism is a dangerous ally. To see that, take a look at Italy, where the techno-populist coalition is in danger of collapsing, leaving the far-right League on the verge of power. Or the United States, which could arguably have been described as techno-populist during the time of George W. Bush. Now, under Donald Trump, it is just populist, pursuing anti-science policies as its civil service comes close to collapse.

If those attempts have collapsed, one reason is because technocrats don't truly check populism. While the scientific method is good at deciding how to do something, it's a useless guide to why. That's what democracy, in the old-fashioned sense of representative democracy, has been so good at. If Mr Cummings moves fast and breaks that, the blog post justifying his actions might end up being as long as his regrets.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Lewis Godall - We can't prepare for no deal nearly as much as you might think