Some Governments are in office but not in power; the Civil Service is always in office and always in power.Prime Minister Baldwin, 1925From the decision to elevate the general administrator, the mandarin, and grant to his corporation supreme influence, much of the present discomfiture of the country has followed. Hardly ever has so anachronistic a change occurred in a vital organ of a great empire at a worse moment. The discrepancy between tasks and means is still steadily increasing.Thomas Balogh, The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, 1959The failings of the upper echelons of the Civil Service were an important part of the British sickness. The Civil Service helped to shape, and was shaped by, Britain’s post-war malaise.HoskynsWhy did the politicians and civil servants seem so completely out of their depth? Were we in the grip of some historically inevitable process about which we could do nothing? Was some new political coalition … a necessary preconditions for any cure?…They [SW1 discussions] did not start from a shared understanding of the problem. The discussions would therefore range haphazardly over problems, causes, symptoms and possible solutions, getting nowhere…All big problems in human affairs have these characteristics. They are not problems of the kind one deals with in day-to-day life. They are systems problems in which complex processes are beginning to go wrong, where destructive chain reactions run out of control. Hoskyns’ reflections, mid-1970sA country’s history is not changed by politicians who are unable to control their own diaries.Norman StraussThis blog is for the overlapping networks thinking: How could the next No10 not be like the post-Thatcher No10s and instead be at least as important as the Thatcher project and ideally on the historic scale of Lee Kuan Yew genuinely transforming a country’s political economy and governance?There have been successful political/electoral projects after Thatcher but there has been no other No10-government project successful on anything like the scale of the Thatcher project, able to combine:A. A real leader. Thatcher had flaws and some of them are characteristic of the MPs who select into modern SW1 such as a lack of skills seen in great CEOs — prone to hopeless chairing of meetings, difficulties running a team etc. But she also had genuine leadership abilities, she had moral courage, she was very determined, she was interested in ideas and power, and she was focused on the real job, she’s the last PM who did *not* see No10’s core job as Content Provider for Legacy Media Entertainment. No Pitt but obviously more consequential than her successors.B. An accurate map of the core problems.C. Agreed goals and a plan for how to get there including changing Whitehall.D. A team with the skills to get it done.E. A story for the country.F. The leader, map, goals, plan, team, story and execution etc sort of (barely) coming and holding together for years such that a real transformation happens.The story is told by John Hoskyns (JH) in his memoir, Just In Time.Hoskyns’ father was killed in the defence of Calais to buy time for the Dunkirk evacuation. JH served in the army then created one of the very first British software startups in 1964. Dealing with the disintegration of the British economy in the 1960s-70s as an entrepreneur, he became obsessed with the complex causes of the problems and how to fix them. He sold his company so he could pursue politics. He set out to become friends with the people around the IEA and CPS in the 1970s and through those networks got to know Thatcher, Howe and Keith Joseph. He wrote plans, including the Stepping Stones memo, and tried to corral leading politicians to consider a systematic explanation of the problems and therefore an agreed step-by-step plan for fixing them. When she won the 1979 election he went to No10 to run the Policy Unit. He worked with her through the first tumultuous critical years until resigning in 1982. His Memoir draws on a detailed diary he kept.For all those thinking about the next regime, Hoskyns’ memoir will be fascinating and rewarding. It is amazingly little known in SW1. I think that of MPs I’ve asked ‘have you read it’, only one or two have said Yes. There is no other post-1979 British book like it partly because there has not been since then a combination of a) someone with his training and intellectual perspective at the heart of power working for b) a real political leader trying to change deep things. (The best example of something modern written in another country is Lee Kuan Yew’s memoir which I did several blogs on in 2021.)I had the privilege of writing to JH before he died and he sent me thoughts and some old things he’d written about Whitehall. Many of the things I’ve said since 1999 were more elegantly explained by him decades ago.His situation obviously rhymes with today:A failed economic consensus which has produced stagnation, misery, investment fleeing and a doomloop of negativity.Whitehall stuck repeating the failed consensus and resisting change. Senior civil servants strongly resistant to outsiders explaining their mistakes and showing how to do things better, a determination in Whitehall to continue with what they’ve been doing and how they’ve been doing it which seems increasingly crackers outside SW1.Parties struggling to find new ideas or explain them.Parties struggling to make Whitehall act differently even when they came up with new ideas. MPs unwilling to take responsibility for governing and impose their will on the civil service then blaming officials for failure while the officials blame the MPs — as they say in Moscow, ‘everyone’s right and everyone’s unhappy’. Very powerful self-reinforcing elite networks across politics, civil service, academia, and legacy media telling themselves that the answers to everything are essentially: higher taxes, more state control, ‘trust and support the civil service’, and all alternatives to SW1 consensus are ‘extremist’. A growing feeling of a ‘systems crisis’ in which many different failures interacted with each other to make it very hard to see how to escape and what to focus on first, so many things feel like a precondition for other things.MPs lacking the skills to cope with a systems crisis so they go around in circles and default to focus on the legacy media news cycle and diaries organised by officials (often to keep them out the way). Widespread assumptions that attempts to break out of the doomloop were doomed.Talent, especially young talent, leaving for America in despair. Talent which talks to senior SW1 figures rapidly becomes more despairing of the prospects of recovery!Declining international confidence in SW1 and the capacity of UK elites to bootstrap themselves out of perpetual crisis.Some of you reading this will find particularly striking in the Hoskyns-Thatcher story the combination of:One of Britain’s very first software startups.A nuclear physicist.A causal wiring diagram of Britain’s core problems. (Imagine what LLMs could do with this concept now, see below.)History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes…The country has been living off the wealth generated by the Thatcher project ~1976-1985 which turned many things around and put us on a different path. That project had economic momentum which carried us through the failures of Major, Blair, Cameron etc. But Thatcher’s successors have cumulatively done so much damage to infrastructure, regulation, capital budgets, critical capabilities etc — while in parallel very long term dynamics with elite talent and SW1 played out, rotting the system — such that the economic momentum of the Thatcher project has run out and left us stalled with unprecedented stagnation in productivity and wage growth. The economic stagnation is a big cause of our rolling political crisis. Hoskyns makes clear that the main failure of the Thatcher project was her failure to face the reality of modern Whitehall and how the senior civil service had evolved. If she had done, history would have been very different. This failure led to other failures including Thatcher getting conned over the Single Market and other aspects of the European project which Insiders successfully misled her about (and later bragged about). Much of recent history has been driven by the country and its political elites struggling to cope with the effects of the errors and delusions of Tory politicians between the 1940s, when the appalling FO dismissed Monnet’s plans for supranational European institutions as fantasies, and the 1980s, when the appalling FO fooled Thatcher and itself and the rest of Whitehall about the next phases of the Monnet-Delors European project. It’s a story of conscious deliberate deception by a tiny subset of elites (e.g some senior officials in the FO) and 99% of the rest of SW1 Insider-world swallowing the propaganda, deluding itself and parroting errors and delusions to each other, the media and the public (similar to Ukraine). Like all such elite projects, those engaged in the pro-EEC/EU lies saw themselves in Platonic terms — noble lies for the greater good. The history of 2015-25, with Cameron’s fateful decisions over the referendum and how it played out, are downstream from Thatcher’s inability to face a) the reality of modern Whitehall and b) the reality of the Monnet-Delors project as its own advocates described it. Much of our political-legacy media-academia-Whitehall elite continues to delude itself about all this. Brexit, Whitehall and another chance to face reality The chance to get to grips with the cancer of Whitehall didn’t come again until forty years later in 2019-20 when Brexit and the collapse of central institutions in the pandemic provided the sort of opportunity that takes decades to appear. It was blown again.Obviously, I saw the combination of Leave winning the referendum and a new government with a new team and plan as the way to do something historically even bigger than the Thatcher project — to change the economy deeply, make science and technology and the R&D ecosystem a core priority for economic and security policy and for the PM’s weekly diary, replace the broken civil service model, psychopathic focus on building critical capabilities, force the parties to change radically or be replaced, change the core of No10 and the Cabinet Office etc. I saw the referendum partly as a chance to fix the two core failures of the Thatcher project: delusions on Whitehall and on the Monnet-Delors project. My hopes partly happened, partly stalled. Leaving the EU has, as intended, been a huge discontinuity exposing the rot of the old system, which spent three years after the referendum showing how little it grasped, even after the referendum, about what EU membership truly involved and how much power had been given away, hence partly why they couldn’t cope with the result, and both parties plus Whitehall drove themselves into a cul-de-sac. So a new project was begun in fits and starts 2016- 2020. But then it stalled in Q3 2020. The senior civil service, shocked by their own collapse, surrendered in summer 2020, the whole space opened up for a historic shift: an 80 seat majority, four years to an election, the system accepting radical change because of its collapse, massive public demand for huge changes in the aftermath of the spring nightmare, a supportive network of Outsider talent (partly mobilised by covid). Then the Trolley rejected the surrender and surrendered himself and told the old system ‘business as usual’. Tory MPs mostly cheered the Trolley when he sank back into the warm embrace of the Whitehall deal — you leave us alone and we’ll pretend you’re in charge. The old system’s momentum re-asserted itself and has carried it forward through a pandemic and the Ukraine war and unprecedented productivity stagnation, regardless of the change of three PMs and a change of party. Starmer was elected promising again to ‘change’ yet has presided over the continued momentum of the broken old system — a lost, broken lawyer with the mentality of the worst officials looking around blinking in bafflement with nothing to do but read out scripts providing content for the old media’s new cycle, self-contradictory content which rarely maintains narrative coherence for even 24 hours. But the continuity of Sunak-Starmer driven by their shared determination to do as advised by the senior civil service, despite the overwhelming desperate desire of voters for discontinuity, has stunned many MPs and forced many to re-evaluate core beliefs. This will grow as the old parties continue to fragment and lose support to Outsiders.A big and important difference with 2015-24 today, near the end of 2025, is that the world of ‘mainstream’ SW1 is being forced to face that it told itself and the country that the problem was ‘Brexit’ and the ‘mad Brexit people’ and the old system would work great once ‘serious people’ like Starmer, Sue Gray and Reeves were in charge of it — then it’s imploded and the so-called ‘grownups’ look just like the end of the Trolley, Truss and Sunak. Meanwhile Whitehall’s pathological institutions can only generate failure and despair.Andrew Marr’s comments last year on how Starmer and Sue Gray would be a ‘serious’ government with ‘stable’ plans and make the system work etc was the conventional wisdom among the NPC army last year. Click here to watch 90 seconds:Optimistic looking forward… A stable government… Serious people in charge… A plan that doesn’t shift… Britain will look a haven of stability relative to Europe and America…Then a fortnight ago, he wrote the New Statesman cover story in which he repeats some arguments I’ve made for 20 years.Shot/chaser — as they say on the line!Such delusions were very widespread in pundit world as it was axiomatic that Starmer is ‘a serious person’ just as for me it’s axiomatic that he embodies the precise opposites of what I consider ‘a serious person’.The SW1 mainstream’s delusions are no longer completely sustainable even in the closed world of Parliament, never mind in wider elite networks. Business confidence in the old political system has quickly collapsed and the appetite for radical measures outside SW1 is through the roof. The so-called Overton window has shifted fast and hard on Whitehall itself such that some who described things I said even 2 years ago (never mind 20 years ago) as ‘mad’ now talk like it’s ‘just obvious’ fundamental changes are needed such as dramatic PM use of his full power over appointments and ending the Whitehall hiring/firing/HR system.So there is now a profound crisis of confidence in mainstream political world, as in the late 1970s. Also like the late 1970s, there are numerous groups running around with ‘ideas’ and ‘plans’. But so far the groups are mainly focusing on specific policies. There is no (public) equivalent to the Hoskyns-Price-Strauss analysis which developed a map connecting the root causes of the crises, showing how they interacted with each other, and providing a true strategy for solving them in a systematic manner. In order to do regime change properly next time, there must be something resembling Hoskyns’ wiring diagram and Stepping Stones plan which also sets out the core things which must start changing together from Day 1 and a plan for dealing with Whitehall, without which all policy work will prove pointless. Policy is not strategy and a government strategy is not a collection of policies, however important. Thousands of pages of interesting, thoughtful, detailed policy cannot amount to a true strategy. A true strategy needs, inter alia, defined goals, a plan for controlling the government and building a team, a story for the country and a communication machine which can function in the rapidly changing information ecosystem. It must connect ends, ways and means. It must connect leader and policy with story etc. It should include action like writing key primary legislation well in advance of an election, as we did for school reform pre-2010 which was critical to progress.Much, much more important than any individual policy is a team determined that, for the first time since Churchill, from Day 1 the Prime Minister’s Office controls the centre of government, not vice versa. This means, for example, immediately transferring control of 99% of the Cabinet Office to the PM Office and out of the control of the Cabinet Secretary and immediately replacing senior officials. Without this — which needs a major project of elite talent recruitment — all big policy changes, however well thought through, will not happen. The thing which is starting to make me a little hopeful is that realisation of this is spreading fast outside SW1 for the first time in living memory. It will not take much for it to be an accepted principle of a mass movement propelling regime change. It’s important to grasp how big a deal this is. The system evolved without elites really noticing, partly under the impetus of two world wars and the Cold War, as I described in the big summer blog on the Cabinet Office which acquired over 50 years a load of powers which it was explicitly agreed would be disastrous for it to acquire when it was created in 1917 — yet the MPs were boiled like frogs and barely noticed. The centre of government moved from the PM and Chancellor in charge to the PM’s Office being treated by the Cabinet Office as a sub-division under their control. All without a master plan and in many ways counter to intentions. Anybody who complained about this and suggested change was seen as at least half-mad. The Hoskyns story is central to understanding this.But no longer! Now, finally, crucial arguments about this are going mainstream in elite circles and it has quickly flipped from ‘mad/fascism’ to ‘obvious’ with many elites in a very short period. This is important! In some ways, the next regime change project will be easier than the Thatcher project. In other ways, it will be harder. The rot of Whitehall is deeper, more profound and more existential. Much of Whitehall and the BBC radicalised to a set of extreme Left views which they have defined as a new ‘mainstream’ since the West generally went through this radicalisation process from ~2010-12 — a process so big and powerful it’s almost invisible inside SW1, which is almost totally baffled about why it’s been acting as it has. (E.g Tory MPs now routinely denounce the trans-psyop madness after defending and entrenching it in Whitehall themselves as ministers just a few years ago.) Per Marshall McLuhan, such huge events tend to be largely invisible to those living through them, other than to a few artists — hence why Rick Rubin could see it clearly while DC, Brussels and SW1 appeared in the grip of a mass psychosis. Elite fragmentation/polarisation is critical and can only continue. On one hand, more and more elites defecting from the Insider to Outside camps — particularly elites connected to entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the core of the old system can only dig in for another round of doubling down, as it has since 2016. You can see this psychology at play in the last few weeks.The latest ‘serious gronwups’ to go into No10 are making a tragi-comic attempt to try to shift the blame for the public finances and stagnation off Labour and Tories and onto Nigel Farage, who has never been part of any government. It’s the latest instalment in SW1’s 70 year fairy tale about the EEC/EU. The way in which the most delusional parts of SW1 can come up with no other plan than to reopen the Brexit debate and blame Farage for Tory and Labour failures since 2015 is part of the general phenomenon we can see across the West. The old parties and old bureaucracies and their supporting elites cannot see our crises as the result of counter-actions to how they governed 1991-2015 and the ideas they enshrined as ‘mainstream’. They cannot see Brexit and Trump as generated by the failure of their ideas and institutions. After the initial shocks of 2016, these elites developed a story for themselves in which Brexit and Trump were malign creations of a secretive evil elite, ‘the fascist tech-enabled oligarchs in league with fascist Putin’. They can only dig in, deeper and deeper.The attempt by No10 to ‘blame Farage for tax rises’ will obviously fail in one sense. It will not persuade swing voters because it’s ludicrous. It will fail in terms of No10’s immediate political objectives of escaping blame for the disastrous economy and finances. And it won’t even keep the Bluesky nutjobs happy because they’ll just say ‘the new plan is failing because half-hearted Starmer isn’t embracing Rejoin which is the only solution to our woes’ (alongside censorship). But it will succeed in one limited way: it will meet the emotional need in SW1 to vent about a hated enemy, the Tories are too irrelevant for this, and Farage works as a hate figure for pundits and MPs. Overall, it’s a sign of how intellectually and politically bankrupt the old Insider world is.We must build counterforces and, after we win, retire this Insider network — forcefully but not violently. (Forcefully is the opposite of violently, done right.) Stop trying to think ‘debate’ will persuade them. Focus on building forces outside SW1 that will retire forces inside SW1. As these forces build, there will be more elite defections to the Outsider forces but this will rarely be because of any ‘rational debate’. That’s not how history works. It will mostly be because of the spreading feeling, hard for most to articulate, that the creative power of the political elites has dissolved and the public has, in response, withdrawn mimesis and obedience. This is the classic condition in which new elites step forward and make new offers to engage the energy of the masses. It’s a good time to consider the last successful British ‘government transformation project’. As usual, at the bottom is a summary and big questions for a new PM. All bold is me.Below the blog are some random thoughts on recent news.The series on People, Ideas, MachinesXIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political PhilosophyX: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.II: Thinking about nuclear weaponsI: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]Other related stuff…On rationalism and politics (2022).On Lee Kuan Yew’s brilliant, fascinating, extremely valuable Memoirs.On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.JUST IN TIMEIntroduction… Read more