 Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former chief advisor, was given at least a 40% pay increase this past year. So he saw his salary rise from 95K to 100K, so 95,000 to 100,000 pound pay bracket to the 140,000 to 145,000 pay bracket. This is how pay is reported in government. Now, this is according to the annual report on pay transparency by the Cabinet Office. This year's pay rise will have made Cummings the joint highest earning political aid along with Lee Cain in Downing Street, with his pay being between 140K and 145K. He's earning almost as much as the Prime Minister, who is on 150,000 pounds. Now, controversially, this comes after a pay freeze for public sector workers such as police and firefighters. The housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, was on sky this morning. Here's how he defended that pay rise. Another of your colleagues, Dominic Cummings, once again in the headlines today, reported that he has had a 40% pay rise. What on earth is going on in government that someone hired on 100 grand can get an extra 40,000 pounds in their pay packet? Well, Dominic Cummings obviously left the government now, but I understand that he was given a pay rise to bring his salary broadly in line with those of his predecessors, other people who'd been the chief of staff to former Prime Ministers. This is a significant amount of money, obviously, but it's in line with, say, the chief executive of a medium-sized local council. And the amount of money that we spend on political advisers within government, both this government and its predecessors, is very small by international standards. It's a very small portion of the amount of money we spend on the broader civil service. And I think they do do a good job for us. 40% pay rise. It's an important function. A 40% pay rise. We are delivering on our promises at general elections and it ensures the political impartiality of the civil service. So I think special advisers play an important role in our political process. But I completely understand that ensuring pay restraint amongst politicians and the public sector is going to be very important in a time when other people in the private sector are finding their way to squeeze. So that was Robert Jenrick. As you might expect, Downing Street took a similar line. They had the same defence of Cummings pay rise. This is Johnson's Press Secretary Allegra Stratton. She said it's the correct level of salary for the role that Dominic Cummings performed. Not everyone, though, in the Conservative Party is willing to defend the pay rise. The Financial Times had some interesting quotes from other government aides and ministers. So they wrote, several government aides said they were told that pay had been all but frozen because of COVID-19. Dom lecture does pretty much weekly that in the people's government pay was not the object, said one adviser. Under Dom and Lee's dynasty, you wouldn't have dared ask for a pay rise. It would have been basically asking to be sacked. Another government aide described it as classic Dom, adding he talks a good game but is actually a massive disappointment. Ministers said Mr Cummings pay rise looked very bad for the government. Dominic Cummings has done more than anyone else to retoxify the Conservative Party's image. First Barnard Castle, now this. Voters will look at this and say it's one rule for us and another for them and they would be right, a member of the government said. We're going to give you some analysis of this story in one moment. First of all, if you're enjoying what you're seeing, do make sure you hit that subscribe button. As you know, we go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm and we have videos going out every day on the Navarra Media YouTube channel. Now, I want to focus on those defences that Jenrick and Stratton gave for a moment. So they say, look, he's getting paid the normal amount for the job he is doing. He is, he clearly was. Well, he's not anymore, but he was a very senior adviser to Boris Johnson, the most senior in fact. And he was at the top of the pay scale for government advisers. You might think that makes sense. And on one level, it does. There are a couple of problems though. One, as those quotes from those civil servants suggest or from those other advisers, those junior advisers, he wasn't supposed to be just any other government adviser. He was supposed to be, you know, part of the people's government, an anti-establishment figure. He was supposed to accept that, you know, people are, you know, the median wage in this country is about 21K. So why should I be on 140K? Then he got into government. I mean, that's actually why his pay was lower to begin with, I think, because he went in there. He said, you know, I'm a different kind of adviser than after a few months. You know what? I want the whole thing. I want the whole thing. The bigger problem, though, is the year that this happened, right? So the argument they're making is that it's normal for someone in Cummings's job to be earning 145,000 pounds. So that's what he should earn. But this wasn't a normal year. It's also normal for doctors and nurses to work a 40-hour week and not risk their lives when they go into hospitals because there is an adequate PPE. That didn't happen this year. There'll be lots of doctors and nurses saying it's never normal for us to work 40 hours a week. But it should be. It should be. I'm pretty sure that's what was in the contract. You can say the same about teachers, right? It's normal that teachers shouldn't have to go into their workplace and risk catching a deadly virus from their students. That didn't happen this year. This year, teachers have been forced and told to go back into school, even though there is a clear risk of catching a virus from their students, which presents a great risk of death for people who are within certain categories in terms of age or prior vulnerabilities. Aaron, I want to bring you in. This clearly isn't the worst thing that Cummings has done this year, giving himself this pay rise. But it still doesn't look good, does it? What do you make of this? Well, Michael, I have an alternative. Rather than him get a 40% pay increase, what would have been far better and I'm sure Dominic Cummings would have infinitely preferred it was for us to stall to collapse. If we just clapped for Dominic Cummings, that would have been obviously more than adequate. After all, it's good enough for the NHS, surely it's good enough for Dominic Cummings. I mean, it is absurd and I think the argument you make there is incredibly acute. It's not a normal year. It's not a normal year to be locked inside your home for months and then it's not a normal year for children and teachers to be risking their safety by simply going to school. And in that context, where you do have a chancellor, Rishi Sunak, saying that we're going to have effectively austerity, he hasn't used that word because it's a bottom word in British politics now, but they would call it pay restraint. You know, we had the public sector pay freeze, for instance, except the NHS going forward for this year into next year. And yet his pay is going up 40%. So, no, I think you're right and I do think it's a big story. But what I think really bugs me the most is that, for instance, Allegra Stratton is saying, well, this is just a normal amount of money for a guy to get earning working in number 10 Downing Street. First of all, it shouldn't be. And this isn't like socialist, you know, prudish nurse and me being absurd and he's got bills to pay. The guy has a house in central London. What does he need the money for? Right? He doesn't need the money for a deposit to buy a place. What does he need it for? You tell me what he needs it for. He doesn't need it for clothes. The guy dresses like a clown. We know that. What does he need it for? Kid's school fees, expensive holidays. I mean, he can't spend that money quickly enough. He obviously enjoys working. So I think, you know, he doesn't need the money. It just seems a really strange thing for him to have gone after. But the response from Allegra Stratton is normal. Just shows for me anyway, that for these people effectively, these huge extraordinary sums of money are effectively chicken feed. Right? There seems to be actually no gratitude about the fact that they're incredibly privileged to be earning that kind of money. We can have the debate and some people will say they deserve it. Others will say they don't deserve it. Some say they work really hard. They don't work hard enough. And then that's fine. But at least if the public purse is giving you six times the median wage, you could at least be grateful for it. You know, it reminds me of Boris Johnson when he was commenting on his income for writing the Daily Telegraph just sort of saying that chicken feed. The guy was being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to write a column. And I think that really does speak to the fact of where these people are coming from and their economic and political and social backgrounds. You know, we know Dominic Cummings background, his wife's background, Allegra Stratton's background, Boris Johnson's background. They all come from incredibly privileged parts of society. And it's almost like the money is an afterthought, you know. And to say, oh, well, somebody in local government gets this much money. Well, it's too much money. They shouldn't be getting that much money. I don't think anybody in government should be getting more than the Prime Minister. Sorry. And so, and also the thing with Robert Jenrick, when he said, he, I mean, maybe you can correct me here, Michael. Maybe I wasn't paying attention. He said, Dominic Cummings getting a 40% pay rise in one year proves that the government was delivering on its agenda. I mean, how does that make any sense whatsoever? So no, they should be rightly torn to shreds on this, particularly because Dominic Cummings has always tried to articulate himself. As a tribute of the people, somebody who was there for the left behind. Well, we know that pay in this country is effectively stagnated for 12 years. And in one year, his pay went up almost 50%. You know, this is a man who couldn't be a bigger hypocrite. And the fact that he hasn't lasted there, I don't think should subtract from the story one bit. You know, he really is a supreme, a supreme charlatan in more ways than one, not just intellectually, but I also think in terms of his political commitments, a supreme charlatan. And you can be damn sure if this was the Labour Party and the boot was in the other foot, this would be a huge national story for weeks, for weeks, heads would roll. This would be different because the Tories play by different rules. I know I have a sort of similar tendency to sometimes switch off when Robert Jenrick speaking. I think the argument he was making is not so much that the 40% pay increase was proof that the government were doing a good job. But rather what Boris Johnson always does with regard to sort of test and trace in the NHS, where any criticism that comes, he says, ah, to criticise me is to criticise the NHS. Robert Jenrick was saying, ah, to criticise us would be to criticise the whole civil service because many people with top jobs in local government and the civil service are also 140k. So to criticise Dominic Cummings is to criticise the rest of the civil service. How dare you in the middle of a pandemic? The problem there being that the government are addicted to briefing against the civil service every time there is something that goes wrong. So they say, ah, the reason we locked down like the reason testing wasn't working very well initially was because our civil servants are so complacent and they can't do their jobs properly. That was their justification for giving all of these contracts and all of these roles to people or their mates essentially in the private sector, who then basically screwed things up and handed out millions and millions and millions of pounds to their chums. So it's an argument where you say, ah, the civil servant, local government officials, brilliant when that's to deflect criticisms of Dominic Cummings pay package. And then when you have a fuck up in terms of government policy implementation, they say, ah, it's the terrible overpaid civil servants. So again, it's the complete opportunistic handpicking of whichever argument best serves the defence against the questioning you're being faced with, even if they're completely inconsistent with one another. I just want to go to you for one more point on this, Aaron, because I think, you know, there seems to almost be consensus now that what Dominic Cummings is going to be remembered as is a fraud. He was someone who has written long blog posts about how he's going to transform the civil service and make it more effective. Ultimately, he went in there obsessively briefed against various people, didn't really achieve anything at all and sort of walked out with his tail in between his legs. He had written as if he could do this job better than anyone possibly could. Everyone else was an idiot except for him. Then he found himself with that responsibility and he, you know, he was crap. He was really, really bad at that job. And there's sort of a second point which comes out of this, which what you're seeing from sort of lots of political journalists now is they're saying that now Dominic Cummings has gone. Boris Johnson can assert himself as a new consensual leader. People were suggesting that we've seen that today with him potentially. I'm not quite sure what the compromises are supposed to be, but they say he's taken a more consensual approach to shifting the advice on Christmas and that he's more willing to bring people around the table now than under Dominic Cummings. I don't know if you think that's, is that sort of silly Westminster lobby gossip or do you think there could be something to that? No, I think that's correct. I think Dominic Cummings is clearly somebody who's quite good with his back to the wall and where he's the underdog and the older against him. You know, we saw it with Brexit. You know, I think Johnson winning the majority he did, you know, in June 2019 looked very unlikely. It was possible, but it looked very unlikely, even getting a deal looked unlikely. So he's clearly good at that, but it's a very different mindset to be in government with a mandate and then to deliver on things and to project management to lead. Clearly, he's not very good at that. And I think you're right. You know, I think he will be remembered as a bit of a charlatan, as somebody who just wasn't very good at his job. And again, it boils down to a certain understanding of how good things get done. You know, how did big projects happen? As a socialist, I'm going to say it's cooperation, but it's true. You know, that's one of the great insights that Marx had about capitalism. He said, yes, you have private enterprise, but actually the more complex capitalism becomes, the greater it draws upon the innate cooperative capacities of human beings. A great example is the modern firm. You know, the modern firm is often incredibly centralized, huge division of labor, and there's a great deal of cooperation. Marx would say, well, this is drawing upon our natural sort of aptitudes and tendencies as a species, of course, not necessarily in the interests of the social interests of human beings. However, it shows the basis of organizing society differently. We are more prone to cooperation than competition. So what Dominic Cummings has done when he went into Tandana Street is to basically say, I'm the big I am. He's got this kind of Promethean idea of who he is, almost like he's somebody from sort of Greek mythology, some figure from an iron rand novel where he single-handedly is going to create this huge, enduring national legacy. That's not how history works. That is not how it works. And the great man theory of history, peddled by people like Thomas Carlisle, a great hero to Dominic Cummings, a conservative writer in the mid-19th century, they might have thought that maybe that was a little bit more true back then, although it probably wasn't. It's certainly not true in the 21st century. To get things done, you have to be able to bring people together. You have to be able to pacify dissent. You have to be able to put your ego aside to get the best out of those around you. Dominic Cummings was incapable pathologically at all of that. That said, they may miss him next time round at a general election because that's where he does excel. He's very good at compartmentalizing problems. The exact same things which undermine his leadership style in power, not listening to dissent, tunnel vision, singly focused on a particular target. That doesn't work when you're trying to manage number 10 Downing Street and you've not got a general election for four years, but come 2024, it might be a really useful skill to have. He may come back into the picture then, but I think for now Boris Johnson and the conservatives are much better off from their own point of view without him.