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Sir Keir Starmer has launched a new drive to bring freethinking innovators into the heart of Whitehall, echoing efforts by the arch-disrupter Dominic Cummings to hire “weirdos and misfits” to redesign government.
Salaries of up to £200,000 a year are being offered to potential recruits, in a highly selective process intended to bypass career civil servants in favour of “elite technical talent” drawn from industry and academia.
Cummings, former prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, famously went out in search of outsiders to work with him in government and his mission has, only half-jokingly, been picked up by Starmer’s government.
In a speech last December, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden said: “You might remember a few years ago, there was a call for weirdos and misfits in the system. Well, whatever term you want to use, we do want innovators and disrupters and original thinkers.”
As part of the sifting process for the recruitment process, aimed at people with “exceptional maths and reasoning skills”, the Financial Times can reveal a puzzle used to help filter applicants.
McFadden said: “This puzzle is an invitation for some of our best minds from academia and business to apply their brainpower to some of the most pressing challenges of our time, from waiting lists to prison reform.”
The “No 10 Innovation Fellowship for Transformative Government Projects” is intended to create a team of engineers, developers and data scientists to “help us rewire the state,” a Cabinet Office spokesperson said.
“It has been set up to attract people who have done great things in industry who may not have considered a role in government before,” the spokesperson added. Fewer than 1 per cent of applicants are accepted.
Cummings took the view that the sometimes stuffy and hierarchical Whitehall machine, which he called “The Blob”, needed a radical overhaul.
Two fellows have already started with another four to begin soon. The first group includes a scientist who worked at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, an executive from a consultancy with a background in big data and AI, and a leader of a tech company with a record in delivering government data.
Government officials said they wanted to build “a significant new capability at the heart of government”. They will work alongside the existing 10 Downing Street Data Science team (10DS), set up by Cummings, where they will be “protected from bureaucracy”.
The Cabinet Office said the first fellows had developed a frontier AI model to deliver health tech solutions, and tools that helped officials mitigate last year’s riots “in real time”.
Last year, Starmer annoyed civil servants when he appeared to embrace some of Cummings’s critique of the government machine when he said: “Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.”
Cummings, who left Downing Street in 2020 after falling out with Johnson, has described the Labour government’s embrace of “weirdos and misfits” as “More ‘Cummings was right’.”
Data visualisation by Cleve Jones