What the Babylon scandal tells us about the British government

One of the consistent themes of Dominic Cummings’s kamikaze mission to reform the machinery of the British state was that we urgently needed more politicians with backgrounds in science, maths and engineering, and fewer with 2:1s in PPE.

As he argued, the latter sort (see also: historians like Dom, classicists like Boris Johnson and pompous English graduates like me) are very well equipped to get themselves into a position of power, what with their networks of university chums and ability to produce plausible bullshit to a deadline. But once they get there they are out of their depth amid problems that require systems thinking, numeracy, the ability to weigh probabilities, technological literacy and so forth. Reality being, as a rule, less forgiving than a hungover Ancient History tutor, and vibes being a less good guide to it than a close-up understanding of how stuff actually works.