Complexity and the dysfunctions of central government
October 31, 2014 3:22 AM   Subscribe

One of the most interesting psychological aspects of Whitehall is that their inability to fix their own lifts in no way dents their confidence in advocating that they manage some incredibly complicated process. If one says, ‘given we’ve failed to fix the bloody lift in four years, maybe we should leave X alone’, they tend to look either mystified or as if you have made a particularly bad taste joke.

Dominic Cummings, a former special advisor writes a cutting dissection on the issues of complexity in modern politics and the increasing dysfunction of the executive branch via Bond movies, the First World War, political screwups and some unfixable lifts.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory (44 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
This would be the same Dominic Cummings who advised the Education Minister Michael Gove that genetics outweighs teaching. I think he is safe to be left well alone with his lunatic ideas.
posted by amil at 3:40 AM on October 31, 2014 [6 favorites]


Yes, this is *that* Dominic Cummings.

It's funny, because a close family member just retired from working in Whitehall. And pretty much the highlight of her day would be to tell me stories of how she would get in the lift, wearing her scruffy gym gear, and be eyeballed by various governmental ministers for stinking up the place. So I'm not saying that Dominic Cummings is full of shit and a lying asshole, but...
posted by The River Ivel at 4:00 AM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Science and markets have reliable mechanisms for coping with complexity.

Is it possible the lifts couldn't be fixed because Ministers advised by people like you insisted that instead of running them itself the Department had to sign up a ruinous PFI agreement with some bunch of shysters who were supposed to represent the infallible private market?
posted by Segundus at 4:17 AM on October 31, 2014 [11 favorites]


Fixing lifts in London is surprisingly difficult. I was assured, by the otherwise extremely competent building manager of a place where I worked and the lifts never did, that lift maintenance is effectively a cartel where extremely long lead times and indifferent work is to be expected - and don't even think of switching companies or complaining effectively. Not if you want someone out to fix the thing in the next six weeks - everyone's terribly busy.
posted by Devonian at 4:29 AM on October 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


What's the DfE?
posted by Sand at 4:32 AM on October 31, 2014


Department for Education
posted by pipeski at 4:34 AM on October 31, 2014


Absolutely fascinating, thank -you so much for posting this.
The situation is so bad that many Ministers have been reduced to FOI-ing their own departments

I saw some excellent civil servants in the DfE, particularly women 25-35 in private office who kept the show on the road, but the HR system generally promoted middle-aged male conservative mediocre apparatchiks.

One of the most interesting features of politics is the way in which Insiders see failures daily yet it almost never stops them continuing to expand the organisation’s formal goals.

Basic spreadsheet skills were so lacking that financial models and budgets could never be trusted and almost every figure released to the media or Parliament was wrong.
He is, of course, the ideological opponent of most Metafilter readers. I urge you all, though, to read this article. Your side will be in office again someday - perhaps next year! - and will face the same organizational challenges.
posted by alasdair at 4:52 AM on October 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


It's amazing how reminiscent this is of Yes Minister. It's almost as if the civil service have some kind of interest in keeping ministerial advisors buried under a barrage of inconsequential nonsense. This is what Westminster must look like if you're completely shut out.
posted by xchmp at 5:05 AM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Blofeld: Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof?

Kronsteen: Yes it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of counter-move.

Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality... Chess is merely 32 pieces on an 8×8 grid with a few simple rules but the number of possible games is much greater than 10^80.

Kronsteen’s confidence, often seen in politics, is therefore misplaced even in chess yet chess is simple compared to the systems that scientists or politicians have to try to understand, predict, and control.


This is very poor stuff. Yes, there are a lot of chess games that are literally possible, according to the formal rules of the game. But all apart from a very few are irrelevant to any actual strategic consideration. Kronsteen demonstrates a deeper tactical understanding than Cummings does. Cummings would not, presumably, ask that the DfE have a plan in place for the contingency that half the children in England break their arm on the same day; it's a possibility in the abstract sense, but being good at chess precisely that your notion of "possible" is more restrictive than that.
posted by escabeche at 5:09 AM on October 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


One of the most interesting psychological aspects of Whitehall is that their inability to fix their own lifts in no way dents their confidence in advocating that they manage some incredibly complicated process. If one says, ‘given we’ve failed to fix the bloody lift in four years, maybe we should leave X alone’, they tend to look either mystified or as if you have made a particularly bad taste joke.

Whitehall's take on this is correct. What does getting the elevator fixed have to do with education policy? I can't figure out from the helpful little picture which way to put my credit card in the slot, and yet I can prove theorems in higher-dimensional geometry. Different problems are different.
posted by escabeche at 5:14 AM on October 31, 2014 [10 favorites]


I mean, don't get me wrong; plenty of what he says here seems right to me! Being a scientist, of course I like his cheerleading for science's self-correction mechanisms. He's right that we are usually overconfident about our ability to understand and anticipate the behavior of complex systems. He's right that the bureaucracy of working for the government can be annoying at times. But all this stuff is buried in a thick slurry of vague technicality and chest-beating and a lot of things in italics because they are important, you fools and "This reminds me of another occasion on which my judgment was superior to those around me, who once again inexplicably failed to recognize this fact."
posted by escabeche at 5:19 AM on October 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's amazing how reminiscent this is of Yes Minister

It's not amazing at all. Yes Minister was written by Antony Jay, a Tory activist and advisor to Margaret Thatcher, as a vehicle for his political ideas. His agenda and Dominic Cummings's are basically the same.
posted by riddley at 5:36 AM on October 31, 2014 [8 favorites]


Different problems are different.

Yeah, but to someone like Cummings, all problems have one answer: the market.
posted by amil at 5:48 AM on October 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


One of the most interesting psychological aspects of Whitehall is that their inability to fix their own lifts in no way dents their confidence in advocating that they manage some incredibly complicated process. If one says, ‘given we’ve failed to fix the bloody lift in four years, maybe we should leave X alone’, they tend to look either mystified or as if you have made a particularly bad taste joke.

Probably because that's a blindingly stupid point. That's just a variant of "we can put a man on the moon, but we can't fix this traffic jam?!?!" It's idiocy.
posted by spaltavian at 6:18 AM on October 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


He is, of course, the ideological opponent of most Metafilter readers. I urge you all, though, to read this article. Your side will be in office again someday - perhaps next year! - and will face the same organizational challenges.
alasdair

alasdair, there is nothing new or of interest in this article. It's the standard right-wing libertarian "government can literally never do anything right, free markets uber alles" bullshit.

No one pretends any government is perfect or lacks bureaucratic problems, but scum like Cummings use that as excuse to try to dismantle everything, rather than trying to improve things and actually help people.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:38 AM on October 31, 2014 [10 favorites]


In the United States outdated facilities with broken hvac, mold and failing plumbing is a serious problem in education policy. Hard to teach the class when the power and heat are unreliable.
posted by humanfont at 6:39 AM on October 31, 2014


One should keep in mind that even on its own terms, Govey's term as minister of educatin was a dismal failure, as his precious free acadamies turned out to be overwhelmingly shitty, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:39 AM on October 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


The lift problem is illuminating because a "fixing a lift" is not like fixing traffic jams: fixing traffic jams is hard, and not under the direct control of the bureaucracy. And "fixing a lift" is not like "education policy" because policy is different from implementation.

Rather, "fixing a lift" is like "improving teacher quality" or "reducing illiteracy" or "maintaining the school infrastructure": implementation. It's a thing you have to do to achieve your policy aims and is, in theory, under your authority. This article isn't about policy: it's about implementation.

And Cummings' point is that the British state can't implement things well, and that this is a problem: it's a problem for his Government, and it'll be a problem for the next one.
posted by alasdair at 7:24 AM on October 31, 2014


In the United States outdated facilities with broken hvac, mold and failing plumbing is a serious problem in education policy. Hard to teach the class when the power and heat are unreliable.

Sure, but that needs to be fixed with a properly funded and empowered government agency. The Right's answer to this is to open a charter school that somehow fixes the problem because "the market".
posted by spaltavian at 7:25 AM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Rather, "fixing a lift" is like "improving teacher quality" or "reducing illiteracy" or "maintaining the school infrastructure"

I don't think of "fixing a lift" as being very much like "improving teacher quality," except insofar as they are both things that you do.
posted by escabeche at 7:34 AM on October 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


Gove introduced free schools, not academies, which were introduced by the last labour government. Your post suggests you don't understand what they are or the distinction between them which is troubling if you are going to pronounce one or both a dismal failure.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 7:35 AM on October 31, 2014


I think it's obvious he is referring to free schools and that academies was simply a slip of the tongue.
posted by longbaugh at 7:39 AM on October 31, 2014


Despite the problems with his ideology, there's a lot of interesting stuff there about how the current government actually functions.
Many of these problems can be seen particularly starkly in those who did courses like Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE). PPE is treated as a cross-disciplinary course suitable to educate future leaders. It is failing. Part of the reason for this is that the conventional economics that is taught often gives students a greatly misplaced confidence in their understanding of the world. They are taught to treat some economic theories as if they are similar to physical theories, and there is often spurious precision involving mathematical models but no explanation of the conceptual problems with these models, or the critique of them by physical scientists. I have watched many PPE graduates give presentations of forecasts, complete with decimal points, of economic numbers years into the future, then dismiss arrogantly those who point out the repeated failure of such predictions. PPE also teaches nothing about project management in complex organisations so they have little feel for how decisions will ripple through systems (including bureaucracies) into the real world.

At its worst, therefore, students leave university for politics and the civil service with degrees that reward verbal fluency, some fragments of philosophy, little knowledge of maths or science, and confidence in a sort of arrogant bluffing combined with ignorance about how to get anything done. They think they are prepared to ‘run the country’ but many cannot run their own diaries. In the absence of relevant experience, people naturally resort to destructive micromanagement rather than trusting to Auftragstaktik (give people a goal and let them work out the means rather than issue detailed instructions) which requires good training of junior people. This combination of arrogant incompetence is very widespread in Westminster and responsible for many problems.

...

Given all this, what do MPs do all day? Media manipulation, not operational planning on priorities.

Unsurprisingly, most senior MPs in all three parties are locked into a game in which they spend most of their time on a) launching gimmicks, and b) coping with crises. These two forms of activity are closely related. The only widely understood model of activity in Westminster (and one which fits well psychologically with the desire for publicity) is a string of gimmicks aimed to manipulate the media (given the label ‘strategy’ to make it sound impressive) which are announced between, and in response to, media crises, some of which are trivial and some of which reflect structural problems. Many, drawing perhaps only on the bluffing skills rewarded by PPE, have no idea what else to do.

Most media commentary on politics therefore enormously overstates the extent to which news derives from ‘plans’ and understates the extent to which news derives either from, first, panic driven by chaos exacerbated by lack of operational grip, and, second, unthought out gimmicks aimed only at shaping the media environment for a day or two. Whenever I read commentators explaining to the public things involving Whitehall, particularly No10, that I have been involved in, they always assume an average level of ‘planning’ much higher than actually existed and they assume processes of analysis and discussion that seldom happened. Commentators are always looking for specific things as explanatory factors but the reality is that similar things keep happening in very similar ways because of general features of the political system. Often a focus on specifics clouds understanding. Events are over-interpreted because journalists do not want to face the idea that they are usually spectators of over-promoted people floundering amid chaos – actions must be intended (‘their strategy is…’), farcical reality must be tarted up. (I will explore this subject separately.)

To some extent democratic politics is always going to involve gimmickry. My point is that the British state has degenerated to the point where that’s about all there is and the public increasingly understand that’s all there is.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:39 AM on October 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


Rather, "fixing a lift" is like "improving teacher quality" or "reducing illiteracy" or "maintaining the school infrastructure": implementation. It's a thing you have to do to achieve your policy aims

But it's literally not. There is no policy aim advanced by fixing the elevators in a building.

There's a whole host of reasons why the elevators might not be working properly and there's absolutely no reason that the state of the elevators has any connection to or reflection on the ability of policymakers to implement policy.

Again, this is a standard conservative tactic: fixating on some minor failing of government that has no bearing on actual performance or competence, and appealing to a gut-feeling "isn't this silly!" sentiment.

Anyone who has worked in a big company can tell you all sorts of similar stories about pointless bureaucracy, problems not being addressed or fixed, and all manners of inefficiencies and fools being put in positions of authority for things they don't understand. It's so common that it's become part of the popular culture in things like Dilbert and Office Space.

This isn't some magic problem unique to government alone, which is what people like Cummings want you to believe.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:50 AM on October 31, 2014 [7 favorites]


In economics, what do you call the costs associated with swapping providers? Like... going to another restaurant is easy, swapping to another education provider is hard?
posted by Leon at 7:56 AM on October 31, 2014


In economics, what do you call the costs associated with swapping providers? Like... going to another restaurant is easy, swapping to another education provider is hard?

Switching costs.

posted by bassooner at 8:10 AM on October 31, 2014


Many thanks.
posted by Leon at 8:15 AM on October 31, 2014


This isn't some magic problem unique to government alone, which is what people like Cummings want you to believe.

Indeed not. ANY organization of sufficient size (which I will bet is surprisingly small) will be plagued with similar problems.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:17 AM on October 31, 2014


>I don't think of "fixing a lift" as being very much like "improving teacher quality," except insofar as they are both things that you do.

The point of that bit - and of the whole of the very long rant, which I've just now finished - is precisely centred on this bureaucracy in particular's systemic incapacity for accomplishing "things".

Being unable to get your shit together enough to fix a single lift over a timespan of years is a legitimate bellwether on your overall ability to accomplish more important tasks. To substitute it with an even more inadequate analogy, it strikes me as trying to run a marathon while being unable to tie one's own shoes.

Mind you, despite his ideological handicaps, I did not detect an innate pessimism about the overall goals of the enterprise - i.e. that of there being a role for the State - and he spends much of it rather impolitically maligning his former colleagues and his superiors.

Much as I am wont to disagree with his policies, if you take away the chest beating, the overbearing confidence in his own ability and the obnoxious references to 'startup mentalities', it remains a rather cogent critique of the current machinery of the UK government.

To writ: incentives are horribly misaligned, the system self selects for shameless, sociopathic hacks and nothing will change because the people at the top are uninterested in changing it.
posted by pmv at 8:58 AM on October 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


I don't think of "fixing a lift" as being very much like "improving teacher quality," except insofar as they are both things that you do.

Yes, exactly. Not the policy, but the ability to implement it. Things you try to do.

Anyone who has worked in a big company can tell you all sorts of similar stories about pointless bureaucracy...

I can too! It went bankrupt, and a better company took over. Is there any chance of the DfE going bankrupt? No. That's why this is an important and interesting problem. We can't replace the state with the market, how do we make it work well? [1]

1 Assuming (1) you're not a libertarian - I'm not (2) you think the state's operations could be improved.
posted by alasdair at 8:58 AM on October 31, 2014


There are tons of valid critiques to be made of bureaucracy and of government but even putting aside the politics of this which apparently boil down to “government bad unfettered capitalism good”, the writing here was just impenetrable. What is he trying to say? Why is there such a long introduction and a million sub-sections to this, each of which has its own introduction and weird self-aggrandizing statements? Why does he use italics all the time? Sentences start and stop seemingly at random and individual paragraphs are at times un-parsable. What is this, for example?

Maxwell, one of the handful of the most important scientists in history, asked whether the application of intelligence (an intelligent ‘demon’) could allow an escape from the inexorable increase in entropy mandated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It was an extremely subtle problem and took about a century to vanquish (the answer is No, intelligence cannot provide an escape) and the solution revealed all sorts of connections between the concepts of energy, entropy and information/intelligence. There is an analogous problem in politics: how best to apply intelligence to reduce local entropy? The insuperable problem of the lifts shows how hard this can be and gives a clue to what is really happening in Whitehall: most of everybody’s day is spent just battling entropy – it is not pursuing priorities and building valuable things.

What the hell? Wild unsupported assertions! Weird, un-followable sentence structures! Italics all over the place! Bizarre comparisons of apparently unrelated topics! Non-specifics left and right! What the hell is this article even saying?!

I don’t want to be a jerk and poop on the original link – so I apologize if I’m being harsh – but I don’t understand this article and find the writing basically terrible. As much as I can parse it, I find the ideology unsupported and also terrible.
posted by latkes at 9:18 AM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


There are tons of valid critiques to be made of bureaucracy and of government

This would be a great place to post them!

I find this Marxist (Marxian?) ex-banker economist really interesting: he makes similar arguments about the limitations of the state - though more in sorrow than in anger: Stumbling and Mumbling
posted by alasdair at 9:23 AM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


amil:
Yeah, but to someone like Cummings, all problems have one answer: the market.
Cummings:
Academia and markets are not aiming the most able people at our biggest problems. For example, sucking a huge proportion of the cleverest and most expensively educated people in the world into high-frequency algorithmic trading (in which, for example, advanced physics is used to calculate relativistic effects that bring nanosecond trading advantages) is an obvious extreme mismatch between talent and priority.
... and ...

sangermaine:
Anyone who has worked in a big company can tell you all sorts of similar stories about pointless bureaucracy,
[...]
This isn't some magic problem unique to government alone, which is what people like Cummings want you to believe.
Cummings:
The biggest contrast in personality type and outlook of relevance to politics is not between ‘business’ and ‘politics / civil service’. The real contrast is between ‘bureaucrats‘ (private and public sector) and venture capitalists, start-up entrepreneurs, and small businesspeople (‘startups‘ for short). Many of those who dominate FTSE-100 companies and organisations like the CBI are much more similar to the worst sort of bureaucrats than they are to startups.
Personally, I think this guy bloviates way too much for the amount of substance he has to present. And I don't agree with everything he's saying. But maybe people ought to read what he actually says before telling us all what he means.
posted by Hizonner at 9:36 AM on October 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


I can too! It went bankrupt, and a better company took over. Is there any chance of the DfE going bankrupt? No.

Oh, don't kid yourself. Many wildly mismanaged companies manage to stay afloat in the marketplace for any number of years, for any number of reasons.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:40 AM on October 31, 2014


Usually mismanaged businesses survive until the market changes and they can't adapt to it. The next most common failure mode might be criminal fraud, as in Enron. I think there's a case to be made that change is now frequent and rapid enough that mismanaged companies now need significant countervailing advantages like political support in order to survive. Government depts are going to seem more and more unlike the average successful business in this environment.
posted by topynate at 9:47 AM on October 31, 2014


ANY organization of sufficient size (which I will bet is surprisingly small) will be plagued with similar problems.
My personal employment history was involved with several Private Companies with severe Bureaucratic Problems, all of whom were smaller than what most would consider "of sufficient size", and the only one that actually failed was the one everyone considered the most "innovative and entrepreneurial". It's only failing was it inability to grow fast enough to reach the "too big to fail" level before its intrinsic flaws brought it down.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:48 AM on October 31, 2014


>I don’t want to be a jerk and poop on the original link – so I apologize if I’m being harsh – but I don’t understand this article and find the writing basically terrible. As much as I can parse it, I find the ideology unsupported and also terrible.

It is. It's all a bit rah-rah and ideologically driven - but recall this is a conservative hating on members of his own 'team', sort of speak.

Skip the terrible bits, stay for the amusing anecdotes, tho ymmv. i.e.,
For the first few months, all sorts of things spewed from the Department causing chaos. The organisation was in meltdown. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. It was often impossible to distinguish between institutionalised incompetence and hostile action. Things were reported as ‘Gove announces…’ that he did not even know about, never mind agree with. Then pundits and bloggers would spin to themselves elaborate tales of how the latest leak was ‘really’ deliberate spin, preparing the ground for some diabolical scheme. (I would guess that <5% of the things people thought we leaked actually came from us – maybe <1%.)

From that day for over a year, about every 2 hours, officials would knock at our door bearing news of the latest cockup, disaster, leak, and shambles, all compounded with intermittent ‘ideas for announcements’ from Downing Street. The last one would be at about 9ish on Friday evening – thump, thump, thump down the corridor, the door opens, ‘Dominic, bad news I’m afraid…’ One measure of ‘success’ was that the frequency of episodes fell from hourly towards a few per day, then daily, then, by the last quarter of 2012, a few days with nothing important obviously blowing up.

For all of these problems, Gove was held ‘responsible’. With all of them, regardless of how incompetently they had been handled – nobody was ever fired.

[…]

To every new person who would arrive (minister, spad, official, outsider coming in for a project, NED), I would give them roughly this advice:

‘There’ll be the odd exception but it’s safest to assume this… Every process will be mismanaged unless it involves one of these officials [XYZ]. No priority you have will happen unless spads and private office make it a priority. Trust private office – they’re the only reliable thing between you and disaster. Every set of figures will be wrong. Every financial model will be wrong. Every bit of legal advice will be wrong. Every procurement will blow up. Every contract process will have been mismanaged. Every announcement will go wrong unless Zoete [my fellow spad], Frayne [director of communications], or [names withheld to protect the innocent] is in charge – let them sort it out and never waste your time having meetings about communications. Never trust Clegg and Laws who only care about party politics, though you can trust Leunig who is honest. Never make an announcement on a Monday [see below]. Never announce budgets without Sam [Freedman] checking. Every process described as ‘cross-Whitehall’ will be a fiasco – especially if it is being coordinated by Number Ten. Don’t tell Number Ten anything about anything – leave that to us. Don’t give Ofsted anything else to do as it can’t do its core functions now. In short, assume that everything that can go wrong will go wrong and when you catch yourself thinking ‘someone MUST have done X or it would be crazy’, stop, because X will not be happening. Your only hope is to focus on a few priorities relentlessly and chase every day and every week. When you cock something up, tell us straight away, and when you think we or Michael are cocking something up, tell us straight away.’

People had the same reaction. A sort of nervous laughter and a ‘mmm yes sounds ghastly, well we’ll see.’

Within two weeks they would rush through the spads door gabbling something like: ‘OhmyGOD you won’t believe this meeting I’ve just been to in the Cabinet Office, this place is crazy, I can’t believe it, it’s Alice in Wonderland.’

Me: You’re through the looking glass.
posted by pmv at 9:55 AM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Maybe they don't have time to fix the lift because they're making sacrifices for operational efficiency on higher priority policy goals? This same little point of anecdata could be held up as an example of working smarter and focusing on core mission in the right context. The ideological impulse here is to overgeneralize and totalize the thing--so that every isolated fact no matter how trivial is proof of the larger, overarching claim, but it's not clear at all that this example demonstrates anything more than fixing lifts may be a low priority for a big organization with a larger public service mission.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:40 AM on October 31, 2014


Much as I am wont to disagree with his policies, if you take away the chest beating, the overbearing confidence in his own ability and the obnoxious references to 'startup mentalities', it remains

about a page and a half long.
posted by escabeche at 12:45 PM on October 31, 2014


This is an interesting case. Normally I'd be inclined to dismiss most of the above criticism as ad hominem, not really dealing with the author's points on their own terms- many of which seem prima facie quite interesting and plausible about institutional failures. However, if the guy really does have such horrible policy ideas, it's possible that he's only really aware of the obstructions that he faced because the bureaucrats were justifiably trying to prevent him enacting his horrible policies.

However, I recall that Tony Benn complained about the resistance of the civil service towards his radical policies as well. I'd be more willing to bet that they are hostile to radical change in either direction.
posted by leibniz at 2:54 PM on October 31, 2014


A lot of the friction between politicians and civil servants can be attributed to differing goals. In a Westminster-style system, ministers have one overarching priority: get reelected. In a traditional merit-based (or at least patronage-free) civil service, civil servants mainly want to keep their job (not very difficult) and stay sane (harder).

So politicians want to change stuff now now now! and don't much care about the long-term consequences of their choices (beyond the next elections). Meanwhile, civil servants have an incentive to passively rein in the pace of change, especially since they know that if they delay long enough, someone else will get the top post and decree changes that go in another direction entirely.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 3:53 PM on October 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


I work in DfE, but didn't work there at the same time as Cummings. The building services, including lifts, are managed by a private company. I'm not sure when that became the case. It's also a rented building rather than part of the government estate.
posted by knapah at 5:23 PM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh, and the lifts all work... Occasionally one or other is being repaired, but no more than I've seen in other large office buildings. There are 8 lifts in the central lobby.
posted by knapah at 5:35 PM on October 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Ahh Cummings, he's the one with the ever so slightly taller man always standing behind him.
posted by fullerine at 7:19 PM on October 31, 2014


« Older On science, social issues and liberal bias.   |   Cheers: 5 Cast Members, but mainly Kirstie Alley Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments