What’s the empirical basis for this attitude, though? Why did you associate him with “dark arts”? What makes you think he made the world economy worse, and how would one even quantify long-term effects of something like that?
In any case, he would not agree with any of those propositions. Among other things, in his ridiculously long Brexit essay he claims:
that the pro-EU side was no more honest than the anti-EU side;
that both pro-EU and anti-EU sentiment among most voters (even the well-educated ones) are in any case more like fashion than stemming from serious analysis (‘the thing is Dominic, we like foreigners and cappuccinos and we hate racists’), and basically no-one on either side actually understands how the EU-UK relationship actually functions in terms of laws, treaties, etc.; and
he’s pro free-trade and therefore favors “limiting free movement which is the biggest threat to continued free trade” (because it sours voters on free trade; for instance from my understanding the rise of the far-right and euroskeptic party AfD in Germany happened as a protest to Merkel’s refugee policy); relevant quote:
I will go into the problems of the EU another time. I will just make one important point here.
I thought very strongly that 1) a return to 1930s protectionism would be disastrous, 2) the fastest route to this is continuing with no democratic control over immigration or human rights policies for terrorists and other serious criminals, therefore 3) the best practical policy is to reduce (for a while) unskilled immigration and increase high skills immigration particularly those with very hard skills in maths, physics and computer science, 4) this requires getting out of the EU, 5) hopefully it will prod the rest of Europe to limit immigration and therefore limit the extremist forces that otherwise will try to rip down free trade.
One of our campaign’s biggest failures was to get even SW1 to think seriously about this, never mind millions of voters. Instead the false idea spread and is still dominant that if you are on the side of free trade, think controlled immigration generally a positive force, and want more international cooperation rather than a return to competing nation states then you must support the EU. I think this error is caused by the moral signalling and gang mentality described above.
Of course one can disagree with all that, but even then it can occasionally be valuable to read things one disagrees with. (If only he were remotely concise...)
Regarding the rest, I think you’ve just admitted that there were places where lies were used in service of a supposed greater truth, and that the claims used to promote Brexit were willfully inconsistent—but that’s exactly what we mean by dark arts, and no additional empirical data is needed to support the claim. Of course I agree that neither side was honest—but a policy of getting involved in (epistemic) mud fights isn’t about relative muddiness, it’s about actually staying clean. If we care about our epistemic health, there are lots of things we might want to avoid, and dishonesty in service of our prior (debatably effective / correct) ideas seems like a great candidate.
Mostly agreed, but one lesson I took from the pandemic was that far more of public communication seemed to be outright explicit manipulation than I could’ve previously imagined. Examples include the initial policy on masks, as well as the endless asymmetric claims that “there is no evidence for <thing we don’t like>”.
So insofar as politics appears to me to be inherently manipulative, it does not make much sense to me to single out a specific person for using misleading rhetoric in a political campaign. And conversely I can’t quite envision a successful political campaign that no-one would accuse of misleading rhetoric.
For instance, we just had the German federal elections, and our election posters are full of slogans I’d describe as both empty and misleading. <10-word slogans are just too short for nuance. A similar problem applies to Twitter discourse, too.
So insofar as politics appears to me to be inherently manipulative, it does not make much sense to me to single out a specific person for using misleading rhetoric in a political campaign. And conversely I can’t quite envision a successful political campaign that no-one would accuse of misleading rhetoric.
Let’s suppose that you need to be at least (say) 5⁄10 manipulative in order to get anything ambitious done in national politics.
And let’s further say that the Leave and Remain campaigns were equally manipulative* -- say, maybe both were 8⁄10 manipulative.
Given those assumptions, it could still be perfectly sensible to say ‘5/10 is OK, but 8⁄10 is beyond the pale, and it’s no excuse that the other side was doing beyond-the-pale stuff too’.
(Or you could just say that any successful political strategist should be shunned on LW, because 5⁄10 manipulativeness is already too high and LW’s rationality, research, and cooperation goals would be compromised if we absorbed too many memes from that kind of person.)
___________________________________________
*I have no idea whether this is true—I’d be pretty surprised if any two sides in a dispute are equally bad on a given dimension, since I expect there to be lots of idiosyncratic decisions in a political campaign that come down to the personalities of a few people running the campaigns.)
I intended to make something like the last claim here. I don’t need to shun political strategists, but I do think we should shun their methods.
Yes, perhaps current politics requires a level of dishonesty and manipulation (but I’d agree wuth your supposition that it is not usually at the level seen in Brexit,) and even if it’s critical for some people to engage in these dark arts for laudable goals (which is unclear, and certainly contrary to the goal of raising the sanity waterline,) Lesswrong will be worse off for trying to communally learn the lessons of how to lie to the public.
To use an analogy, learning how to be a pickpocket might be useful, and might even have benefits aside from theft, but I don’t want to need to guard my wallet, so if some of the people I knew started saying we should all learn to be better pickpockets, I’d want to spend less time with them.
My unease with studying Cumming’s ideas is not just because it’s horrific PR—though I think it is—and definitely not just because I don’t think it could teach anything, but because it is geared towards learning things which enhance distrust among people. Given that we’re otherwise involved in honest and truth-seeking conversations, this seems particularly bad. Otherwise, every conversation that even potentially relates to the real world becomes subject to lots of really bad epistemological pressures, with LWers trying to operate on simulacra level 2, or even worse, playing levels 3 and 4. In my view, that would be a tragic loss—so maybe we should avoid trying to get better.
My unease with studying Cumming’s ideas is not just because it’s horrific PR—though I think it is—and definitely not just because I don’t think it could teach anything, but because it is geared towards learning things which enhance distrust among people.
You could say the same thing about learning about the discourse that lead to the replication crisis. It’s a discourse about creating distrust among people.
Improving existing institutions is inherently about distrusting how they operate.
Improving existing institutions is inherently about distrusting how they operate.
That’s true, and a fair criticism, but the replication crisis was about object-level criticisms of the science—it certainly did not start with strategizing about convincing people to take political action.
You’ve replied several times in this thread and I still don’t know where your criticism and specifically the “dark arts” accusation (and now the analogy to theft) is coming from. Is it from reading Cummings, from reading Cummings’ critics, from guilt-by-association with the Brexit campaign, from following media coverage of Cummings, or what? What makes him uniquely bad?
EDIT: I saw this comment of yours, but I didn’t find it a satisfying answer—unless you’re willing to accuse all political strategists, and politicians of all political persuasions, of dark arts.
First, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of his writing, albeit only up to a couple years ago. And no, he’s not “uniquely bad”—quite the opposite. But I wouldn’t advise people interested in rationality to read about political strategy generally. Even though Cummings is significantly better than most—which I think he is, to clarify—that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading his material.
For those familiar with LW, I thought the distaste for politics was obvious. And yes, I think it’s rare for political strategists not to almost exclusively play level 3 and 4 simulacra games, and engage in what has been called dark arts of rationality on this blog for years.
Thanks, that clarifies things. I agree that frontpaged politics stuff has a good chance of doing more harm than good on LW. (EDIT: I originally had a typo saying “more good than harm” despite meaning the opposite.)
That said, do you think his writing on policy, rather than political strategy, has the same problem? I’ve read <5-ish essays from him, and while the Brexit stuff mostly seemed to be about political strategy, e.g. the Hollow Men essay was mostly about stories of ludiscrously dysfunctional institutions, terrible incentives throughout government, a systematic inability to fire incompetent people, people getting promoted to organisations with budgets and responsibilities which are far out of proportion to their own expertise, and so on.
These stories were surprising to me (and yet they seem quite plausible after following Covid policy in the last year), so I was in turn surprised when you said elsewhere that there was nothing to learn from him. Was that stuff obvious to you beforehand, or do you think he’s misrepresenting things, or what?
Or put differently, suppose I want my map to not have a blind spot around policy. Who or what could I read instead?
I’m happy to make more specific recommendations on how to think about policy, depending on what you’re looking for—but I’m generally happy recommending James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” and Eugene Bardach’s “A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis”—he former largely explains why things would be so dysfunctional, and the latter is a generally great introduction to understanding what policy analysis and interventions can do.
(Or you could just say that any successful political strategist should be shunned on LW, because 5⁄10 manipulativeness is already too high and LW’s rationality, research, and cooperation goals would be compromised if we absorbed too many memes from that kind of person.)
Taking a step back, I thought Less Wrong had a no-frontpaged-politics rule and Zvi’s Covid posts were specifically whitelisted. So now I’m a bit confused why this post on Cummings was frontpaged (though I appreciated OP making the significant effort of summarizing Cummings’ ridiculously verbose writings).
On the other hand, Cummings’ perspective on making policy and working in governmental institutions is so different from how I usually see this stuff described that not having this kind of perspective around seems like it would diminish our maps. A conundrum.
I made the decision to frontpage it, probably a mistake so I’ve changed it. My interpretation (which is maybe a bad one) about the frontpage ban on politics is it’s to avoid hot-button topics that people get riled up. I was thinking of Cummings having a lot of general dry/abstract policy models more akin to economics than right/left issues.
I haven’t read the posts Connor linked—if those posts are generally about hot-button topics, I’d treat this post as a hot-button political thing. If the posts themselves are fine, I wouldn’t de-frontpage just because the author (Cummings) is controversial.
One problem here is that Cummings writes ridiculously long essays instead of sequences split up into separate short essays, so it seems likely to me that most of his essays will include both controversial politics and his idiosyncratic perspective of policy. Which makes it much harder to share any of his specific insights without giving the impression that one endorses the whole package.
I haven’t followed the Brexit campaign myself, but here are the quotes from the essay.
On lies and on the NHS:
Many of those who blame defeat on ‘lies’, including Cameron, Osborne, and Clegg themselves told flat-out lies. One example will do. Cameron and Osborne claimed repeatedly on TV, almost always unchallenged, that their new deal meant ‘after six months if you haven’t got a job you have to leave’. This is not an argument over the fairness of using a gross/net figure, like ‘£350 million’, or even a properly bogus figure like the Treasury’s £4,000 per household figure. It is a different category of claim – a flat out 100% lie. (For more details see HERE.) How much time did Today, Newsnight, and the Guardian spend explaining to people that the PM and Chancellor were lying through their teeth? Approximately none. Why? Because very few of those complaining about lies really are cross about ‘lies’ – they are cross they lost and they are not so interested in discussing a lie that undermines the pro-EU campaign’s attempt to neutralise fear of immigration.
Further, many of the same people spent the entire campaign saying ‘Vote Leave has admitted a Leave vote means leaving the Single Market, this is what will happen make no mistake…’ and now say ‘the Single Market was not an issue, Vote Leave never had a policy on it and there is no mandate for leaving it’. Cameron, Osborne, Mandelson, Campbell and Clegg spent much of the last 20 years lying through their teeth to further their own interests and prestige. Now they whine about ‘lies’. They deserved worse than they got – and reasonable Remain-ers deserved better leadership.
And elsewhere:
Some people now claim this [claim about the NHS] was cynical and we never intended to spend more on the NHS. Wrong. Boris and Gove were agreed and determined to do exactly this. On the morning of 24 June they both came into HQ. In the tiny ‘operations room’ amid beer cans, champagne bottles, and general bedlam I said to Boris – on day one of being PM you should immediately announce the extra £100 million per week for the NHS [the specific pledge we’d made] is starting today and more will be coming – you should start off by being unusual, a political who actually delivers what they promise. ‘Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY. We MUST do this, no question, we’ll park our tanks EVERYWHERE’ he said. Gove strongly agreed. If they had not blown up this would have happened. The opposite impression was created because many Tories who did not like us talking about the NHS reverted to type within seconds of victory and immediately distanced themselves from it and the winning campaign. Unlike Gove and Boris they did not learn from the campaign, they did not listen to the public. Until people trust that the NHS is a financial priority for Tories, they will have no moral authority to discuss management issues. This obvious fact is psychologically hard to absorb because of the strength of gang feelings in politics.
A tangential quote on data:
IN started with legal access to vast amounts of electoral data from at least three political parties, unofficial / illegal access to vast amounts of data from things like CCHQ data and the Crosby/Messina models built during the campaign, and vast amounts of commercial data. (CCHQ laughably claimed that there were ‘Chinese walls’ that prevented any abuse of Party data.) VL had none of these things. We could not even afford to buy standard commercial datasets (though the physicists found ingenious ways around this). We had no way even to acquire the electoral roll until the official process allowed us in early 2016, after which we had to wait a couple of months for LAs to fulfil their legal obligations to provide us with the data (which they did patchily and often late).
Finally, if you want to see his overall views of the IN campaign, it’s the section “Rough balance of forces” of the essay. He mentions having to go up against numerous enormous structural disadvantages (which isn’t surprising, since the government was pro-IN). For example:
IN set the legal rules. VL [Vote Leave] faced a huge imbalance in how these worked. For example, Cameron even during the official campaign could do huge events at places like the British Museum and the IN campaign did not have to account for such events as part of their £7 million. Meanwhile VL was told by the Electoral Commission that if people we did not even know put up huge signs that appeared on TV we might get billed for them.
Of course, Turkey does want to join the EU...they have been trying to get in for decades. But they never did get in, and it’s not like Erdogan is a particularly EU friendly figure,so it’s not like it’s suddenly likely.
Many of those who blame defeat on ‘lies’, including Cameron, Osborne, and Clegg themselves told flat-out lies. One example will do. Cameron and Osborne claimed repeatedly on TV, almost always unchallenged, that their new deal meant ‘after six months if you haven’t got a job you have to leave’. This is not an argument over the fairness of using a gross/net figure, like ‘£350 million’, or even a properly bogus figure like the
Treasury’s £4,000 per household figure. It is a different category of claim – a flat out 100% lie. (For more details see HERE.)
Some people now claim this [claim about the NHS] was cynical and we never intended to spend more on the NHS. Wrong. Boris and Gove were agreed and determined to do exactly this. On the morning of 24 June they both came into HQ. In the tiny ‘operations room’ amid beer cans, champagne bottles, and general bedlam I said to Boris – on day one of being PM you should immediately announce the extra £100 million per week for the NHS [the specific pledge we’d made] is starting today and more will be coming – you should start off by being unusual, a political who actually delivers what they promise. ‘Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY. We MUST do this, no question, we’ll park our tanks EVERYWHERE’ he said. Gove strongly agreed.
Ok. So The Dome’s justification of the £350m lie is that BJ kind of verbally agreed in principle to an extra £100m for the NHS.
So...a ballpark figure is OK on his side, but the Treasury can’t make an estimate of Brexit losses?
If they had not blown up this would have happened
What does this mean? BJ and MG fell out? They’re BFFs now.
So...a ballpark figure is OK on his side, but the Treasury can’t make an estimate of Brexit losses?
They can make a estimate. The question is whether “GDP loss / amount of households = loss per household”. That doesn’t seem to be true because “total household income loss / amount of households = loss per household” is what you should calculate when you want to calculate a loss per household.
What does this mean? BJ and MG fell out? They’re BFFs now.
How do you know?
Cummings has non-public information based on which he likely makes that claim.
(Gove and Boris agreed in 2016 that Boris would be their push for PM, then at the last minute Gove withdrew his support and announced his own candidacy, splitting support, causing Boris to withdraw, and neither got PM. [1,2] By a few years later, they seem to have mended things significantly.)
What’s the empirical basis for this attitude, though? Why did you associate him with “dark arts”? What makes you think he made the world economy worse, and how would one even quantify long-term effects of something like that?
In any case, he would not agree with any of those propositions. Among other things, in his ridiculously long Brexit essay he claims:
that the pro-EU side was no more honest than the anti-EU side;
that both pro-EU and anti-EU sentiment among most voters (even the well-educated ones) are in any case more like fashion than stemming from serious analysis (‘the thing is Dominic, we like foreigners and cappuccinos and we hate racists’), and basically no-one on either side actually understands how the EU-UK relationship actually functions in terms of laws, treaties, etc.; and
he’s pro free-trade and therefore favors “limiting free movement which is the biggest threat to continued free trade” (because it sours voters on free trade; for instance from my understanding the rise of the far-right and euroskeptic party AfD in Germany happened as a protest to Merkel’s refugee policy); relevant quote:
Of course one can disagree with all that, but even then it can occasionally be valuable to read things one disagrees with. (If only he were remotely concise...)
Thanks for the response. First, economists and experts seem pretty unified in thinking that Brexit will be bad for the UK, and somewhat less bad but still negative for the EU. That’s not proof, but it’s fairly convincing data, and I haven’t seen plausible claims to the contrary.
Regarding the rest, I think you’ve just admitted that there were places where lies were used in service of a supposed greater truth, and that the claims used to promote Brexit were willfully inconsistent—but that’s exactly what we mean by dark arts, and no additional empirical data is needed to support the claim. Of course I agree that neither side was honest—but a policy of getting involved in (epistemic) mud fights isn’t about relative muddiness, it’s about actually staying clean. If we care about our epistemic health, there are lots of things we might want to avoid, and dishonesty in service of our prior (debatably effective / correct) ideas seems like a great candidate.
This might not be a crux, since someone could object to misleading rhetoric even if both sides in a political dispute are doing it.
Mostly agreed, but one lesson I took from the pandemic was that far more of public communication seemed to be outright explicit manipulation than I could’ve previously imagined. Examples include the initial policy on masks, as well as the endless asymmetric claims that “there is no evidence for <thing we don’t like>”.
So insofar as politics appears to me to be inherently manipulative, it does not make much sense to me to single out a specific person for using misleading rhetoric in a political campaign. And conversely I can’t quite envision a successful political campaign that no-one would accuse of misleading rhetoric.
For instance, we just had the German federal elections, and our election posters are full of slogans I’d describe as both empty and misleading. <10-word slogans are just too short for nuance. A similar problem applies to Twitter discourse, too.
Let’s suppose that you need to be at least (say) 5⁄10 manipulative in order to get anything ambitious done in national politics.
And let’s further say that the Leave and Remain campaigns were equally manipulative* -- say, maybe both were 8⁄10 manipulative.
Given those assumptions, it could still be perfectly sensible to say ‘5/10 is OK, but 8⁄10 is beyond the pale, and it’s no excuse that the other side was doing beyond-the-pale stuff too’.
(Or you could just say that any successful political strategist should be shunned on LW, because 5⁄10 manipulativeness is already too high and LW’s rationality, research, and cooperation goals would be compromised if we absorbed too many memes from that kind of person.)
___________________________________________
*I have no idea whether this is true—I’d be pretty surprised if any two sides in a dispute are equally bad on a given dimension, since I expect there to be lots of idiosyncratic decisions in a political campaign that come down to the personalities of a few people running the campaigns.)
I intended to make something like the last claim here. I don’t need to shun political strategists, but I do think we should shun their methods.
Yes, perhaps current politics requires a level of dishonesty and manipulation (but I’d agree wuth your supposition that it is not usually at the level seen in Brexit,) and even if it’s critical for some people to engage in these dark arts for laudable goals (which is unclear, and certainly contrary to the goal of raising the sanity waterline,) Lesswrong will be worse off for trying to communally learn the lessons of how to lie to the public.
To use an analogy, learning how to be a pickpocket might be useful, and might even have benefits aside from theft, but I don’t want to need to guard my wallet, so if some of the people I knew started saying we should all learn to be better pickpockets, I’d want to spend less time with them.
My unease with studying Cumming’s ideas is not just because it’s horrific PR—though I think it is—and definitely not just because I don’t think it could teach anything, but because it is geared towards learning things which enhance distrust among people. Given that we’re otherwise involved in honest and truth-seeking conversations, this seems particularly bad. Otherwise, every conversation that even potentially relates to the real world becomes subject to lots of really bad epistemological pressures, with LWers trying to operate on simulacra level 2, or even worse, playing levels 3 and 4. In my view, that would be a tragic loss—so maybe we should avoid trying to get better.
You could say the same thing about learning about the discourse that lead to the replication crisis. It’s a discourse about creating distrust among people.
Improving existing institutions is inherently about distrusting how they operate.
That’s true, and a fair criticism, but the replication crisis was about object-level criticisms of the science—it certainly did not start with strategizing about convincing people to take political action.
You’ve replied several times in this thread and I still don’t know where your criticism and specifically the “dark arts” accusation (and now the analogy to theft) is coming from. Is it from reading Cummings, from reading Cummings’ critics, from guilt-by-association with the Brexit campaign, from following media coverage of Cummings, or what? What makes him uniquely bad?
EDIT: I saw this comment of yours, but I didn’t find it a satisfying answer—unless you’re willing to accuse all political strategists, and politicians of all political persuasions, of dark arts.
First, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of his writing, albeit only up to a couple years ago. And no, he’s not “uniquely bad”—quite the opposite. But I wouldn’t advise people interested in rationality to read about political strategy generally. Even though Cummings is significantly better than most—which I think he is, to clarify—that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading his material.
For those familiar with LW, I thought the distaste for politics was obvious. And yes, I think it’s rare for political strategists not to almost exclusively play level 3 and 4 simulacra games, and engage in what has been called dark arts of rationality on this blog for years.
Thanks, that clarifies things. I agree that frontpaged politics stuff has a good chance of doing more harm than good on LW. (EDIT: I originally had a typo saying “more good than harm” despite meaning the opposite.)
That said, do you think his writing on policy, rather than political strategy, has the same problem? I’ve read <5-ish essays from him, and while the Brexit stuff mostly seemed to be about political strategy, e.g. the Hollow Men essay was mostly about stories of ludiscrously dysfunctional institutions, terrible incentives throughout government, a systematic inability to fire incompetent people, people getting promoted to organisations with budgets and responsibilities which are far out of proportion to their own expertise, and so on.
These stories were surprising to me (and yet they seem quite plausible after following Covid policy in the last year), so I was in turn surprised when you said elsewhere that there was nothing to learn from him. Was that stuff obvious to you beforehand, or do you think he’s misrepresenting things, or what?
Or put differently, suppose I want my map to not have a blind spot around policy. Who or what could I read instead?
I’m happy to make more specific recommendations on how to think about policy, depending on what you’re looking for—but I’m generally happy recommending James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” and Eugene Bardach’s “A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis”—he former largely explains why things would be so dysfunctional, and the latter is a generally great introduction to understanding what policy analysis and interventions can do.
Taking a step back, I thought Less Wrong had a no-frontpaged-politics rule and Zvi’s Covid posts were specifically whitelisted. So now I’m a bit confused why this post on Cummings was frontpaged (though I appreciated OP making the significant effort of summarizing Cummings’ ridiculously verbose writings).
On the other hand, Cummings’ perspective on making policy and working in governmental institutions is so different from how I usually see this stuff described that not having this kind of perspective around seems like it would diminish our maps. A conundrum.
I made the decision to frontpage it, probably a mistake so I’ve changed it. My interpretation (which is maybe a bad one) about the frontpage ban on politics is it’s to avoid hot-button topics that people get riled up. I was thinking of Cummings having a lot of general dry/abstract policy models more akin to economics than right/left issues.
I haven’t read the posts Connor linked—if those posts are generally about hot-button topics, I’d treat this post as a hot-button political thing. If the posts themselves are fine, I wouldn’t de-frontpage just because the author (Cummings) is controversial.
E.g., if Cummings himself posted on LW I assume we wouldn’t de-frontpage his stuff just because of who he is; it would depend on the contents.
The links contain the Brexit campaign story.
One problem here is that Cummings writes ridiculously long essays instead of sequences split up into separate short essays, so it seems likely to me that most of his essays will include both controversial politics and his idiosyncratic perspective of policy. Which makes it much harder to share any of his specific insights without giving the impression that one endorses the whole package.
For context it would be worth noting that David Manheim seems to be okay with telling those kinds of lies himself.
The issues in the leave (ie Brexit) campaign were
the misleading claim about extra funding for the NHS,
and the claim about the entire population of Turkey settling in the UK, which was both misleading and racist
The use of personal data by a company he hired, which has now folded under legal issues.
So what were the specific lies of the remain campaign.
I haven’t followed the Brexit campaign myself, but here are the quotes from the essay.
On lies and on the NHS:
And elsewhere:
A tangential quote on data:
Finally, if you want to see his overall views of the IN campaign, it’s the section “Rough balance of forces” of the essay. He mentions having to go up against numerous enormous structural disadvantages (which isn’t surprising, since the government was pro-IN). For example:
There’s no quote on Turkey.
The Dome was questioned about that a few months ago.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/cummings-smirks-when-confronted-with-vote-leaves-turkey-claim-282324/amp/
Of course, Turkey does want to join the EU...they have been trying to get in for decades. But they never did get in, and it’s not like Erdogan is a particularly EU friendly figure,so it’s not like it’s suddenly likely.
Ok. So The Dome’s justification of the £350m lie is that BJ kind of verbally agreed in principle to an extra £100m for the NHS.
So...a ballpark figure is OK on his side, but the Treasury can’t make an estimate of Brexit losses?
What does this mean? BJ and MG fell out? They’re BFFs now.
They can make a estimate. The question is whether “GDP loss / amount of households = loss per household”. That doesn’t seem to be true because “total household income loss / amount of households = loss per household” is what you should calculate when you want to calculate a loss per household.
How do you know?
Cummings has non-public information based on which he likely makes that claim.
(Gove and Boris agreed in 2016 that Boris would be their push for PM, then at the last minute Gove withdrew his support and announced his own candidacy, splitting support, causing Boris to withdraw, and neither got PM. [1, 2] By a few years later, they seem to have mended things significantly.)
Connor has answered the first point.
As to the second, BJ was singing DG’s praises at recent Conservative conference.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/16343362/boris-michael-gove-belting-total-eclipse-heart/amp/