There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.
Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better 'returns on investment' than from early stage Amazon.
I know from my nightclub days that when local cops need to show a fall in crime for political reasons there are all sorts of ways in which they can easily cheat numbers.
Politics is profoundly nonlinear.
Vote Leave argued during the referendum that a Leave victory should deliver the huge changes that the public wanted and the U.K. should make science and technology the focus of a profound process of national renewal.
Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.
In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals).
Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard - there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use - yet we can't embed it in government.
CRISPR-enabled 'gene drives' enable us to make changes to the germ-line of organisms permanent such that changes spread through the entire wild population, including making species extinct on demand. Unlike nuclear weapons such technologies are not complex, expensive, and able to be kept secret for a long time.
People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.' That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.
Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave - she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won.
In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park.
One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.
Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.
Those of us from the Vote Leave team would never have gone to No10 to help if Boris hadn't told us that he is determined to change the Conservative Party - change its priorities and change its focus so it really serves the whole country. Most of us were not 'party people.' For us, parties are a means to an end - a means to improve lives.
Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.
Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works - never mind the question 'what could work much better?'
Most security failings happen because of human actions that are not envisaged when designing systems.
The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but management and operational ideas which are extremely hard to change fast.
Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies.
