One first-hand account of Cummings’ thinking has come from Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University, who was invited to a meeting last August to discuss new funding strategies for maths.
“He did not grasp the extent to which scientific research is an international activity, and breakthroughs depend on teams with complementary skills and perspectives, rather than the occasional ‘lone genius’,” she wrote afterwards.
After only a brief mention of Darpa, discussion reverted to the less glamorous topic of “capacity-building within existing structures”.
Yet Arpa UK has ministerial and prime ministerial backing, and seems certain to happen. For Cummings, it must. Because for him, its creation is far more significant than any dramatic scientific breakthrough. For him, the creation of “out of control” agencies, prioritising small teams of brilliant people beyond the reach of the small-minded (“no micromanagement, bureaucratic cancers treated like the enemy”, he once wrote) is not just a way of accelerating innovation, it is a recipe to be applied, again and again, across government.
Arpa UK will explore new ways of funding science, but in doing so it will be exploring vastly more effective ways of running government. This, to Cummings, was the entire point of Brexit – not because it was a good or a bad idea (“both perspectives are reasonable”, he once wrote) but because it was a route to re-engineering domestic political institutions.
The success of failure of that enterprise, he insists, “will have much much greater influence on our long-term future than whatever deal is botched together with Brussels”. If Dominic Cummings has his way, Arpa UK is only the beginning.
