Dominic Cummings, data-driven failure

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, anyone who is capable of getting themselves made special advisor should on no account be allowed to do the job. We’re looking at you Dominic Cummings, bete noir of UK in Europe and person who doesn’t understand the difference between an eye test and a driving test. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a takedown of perhaps his greatest failure: for all his talk of putting data-driven innovation at the heart government, he proved to be worse than useless at creating change through technology. The pandemic demanded the best in the kind of data-led decision making he was supposed to introduce, and he fluffed it. He was directly responsible for squandering money and opportunity alike, left government exposed as a charlatan, and the full sorry story is here.