Dominic Cummings

"[On arriving at the Department for Education in 2011] Documents were stolen from desks and leaked to papers, there were determined efforts to drive us out. It was beyond parody. Dysfunction was not the word, bedlam was the word."

"To begin with, it was a disaster every half hour, then every day, by the time I left it was once a fortnight. All the basic things didn't work — every financial model would be wrong, every bit of legal advice, every set of figures. The system had gone toxic. People had to go, a lot of changes had to be made. [...] It would work a lot better if you got rid of even more. There should be between 500 and 1,000 people, but we still have 4,000-5,000."

"The poor buggers are caught between structural dysfunction and politicians running around who don't really know what they're doing all day or what the purpose of their being in power is. Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door."

"[On then education secretary Michael Gove] They could see he was willing to take a lot of flak. He wants to do what he can for schools in five years. If that means being carted off in a bodybag at the end, so be it. They now work with him to screw other people in Whitehall. So if [[Nick Clegg|[Nick] Clegg]] comes along with another mad idea, our officials work with Michael to scupper it."

"If you’ve got Covid and you kill the queen, you’re finished."

"[On then deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara] I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I don't care how it is done but that woman must be out of our hair. We cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that c***”."

"[On Boris Johnson] Nobody could find a way around the problem of the prime minister, just like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle to the other."

"Well, I think there is a very profound question about the nature of our political system that means that we got at the last election a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. I think any system that ends up giving a choice between two people like that as the people to lead is obviously a system that has gone extremely, extremely badly wrong. There are so many thousands and thousands of wonderful people in this country who could provide better leadership than either of those two, and there is obviously something terribly wrong with the political parties if that is the best that they can do."

"It is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position, in my personal opinion. I am not smart. I have not built great things in the world."

"[Referring to school half-term in February 2020] Your fundamental point is obviously correct, that there was indeed a massive crisis. It was indeed pretty insane that so many of the senior people were away on holiday at that time. It's also important to realise that it's not like the civil contingencies secretariat or the national security council, or any of the organisations in charge of this were beating the drum and saying, "We’ve got to get the PM back, this is a massive crisis" — in fact quite the opposite."

"[Cummings lived in Russia from December 1994 until late 1996] Different places and different times in history are the epicentre of mad energy and in 1994 the epicentre of mad energy in the world was Moscow."

"Career psychopath"

"Ian Hislop: He literally is an arsonist pretending to be a firefighter. Paul Merton: When you say he's an arsonist, is that word not slightly too long?"