Gavin Barwell has shown why Theresa May failed

Gavin Barwell is a decent enough chap, but the more you read of his time as Theresa May’s chief of staff, the more you realise why her government was doomed. He paints a picture of a low-energy government in the midst of high-energy national crisis.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the corresponding reading lists of Barwell and his successor at 10 Downing Street, Dominic Cummings.

This is the reading list Cummings set for data scientists interested in applying to his ‘weirdos and misfits’ job advert at the beginning of the year:

• This Nature paper, Early warning signals for critical transitions in a thermoacoustic system, looking at early warning systems in physics that could be applied to other areas from finance to epidemics.
• Statistical & ML forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward, Spyros Makridakis, 2018. This compares statistical and ML methods in a forecasting tournament (won by a hybrid stats/ML approach).
• Complex Contagions : A Decade in Review, 2017.