The Cummings Revolution – help or hindrance?

Ed Amory | Issue 2 | Magazine, Politics

From the Archive

Ed Amory

I’ve experienced the world of government communications from multiple different angles over my career. As a staffer in Conservative Central Office, I worked alongside department comms teams. As a journalist on the Mail for 12 years, I spent hours trying to extract information from unenthusiastic press officers. Then over the last eight years as a communications consultant, I had central government departments as clients. So I was fascinated to read about Dominic Cummings’ reported plan to streamline government communications teams, with the apparent intention of cutting the numbers in any one department to an average of 30. Given that some currently have around 300 people working in marketing and communications, this would be a significant contraction as well as a further shift of power towards the centre, mirroring the process that has already taken place with special advisers. With some of my former hats on, I have sympathy with those who want reform. When I was a journalist, many of...

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