There's never a dull moment in UK politics right now.
Especially when Boris Johnson's right-hand man appears to fancy himself as some kind of wizard slash evil mastermind.
The prime minister's chief adviser Dominic Cummings — once portrayed on screen by Benedict Cumberbatch — has penned a 3,000 word job advert calling for "weirdos and misfits with odd skills" to apply for jobs at Number 10.
It is, it's safe to say, not your average job ad. There's the fact it's published on Cummings' personal Wordpress blog (no, you haven't travelled back in time to 2010). For those unfamiliar, Cummings was once called a "career psychopath" by former UK PM David Cameron. He was also the director of the Vote Leave campaign — a campaign which notably broke electoral law.
Dominic Cummings, author of said blogpost. Credit: Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images Aside from the fact that the rambling blogpost features a 150 word pre-amble comprising obscure quotes from an AI expert, a mathematician, and Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, one (well, more than one) thing's unclear: why are they hiring?
"We do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed. This must change fast so we can properly serve the public," writes Cummings. Great. Always a great thing to inform the public in the aftermath of a historic landslide victory.
So, who are they hoping to hire? One particular highlight is a bizarre section outlining requirements for junior researchers.
"We want to hire some VERY clever young people either straight out of university or recently out with with extreme curiosity and capacity for hard work," writes Cummings. "One of you will be a sort of personal assistant to me for a year — this will involve a mix of very interesting work and lots of uninteresting trivia that makes my life easier which you won’t enjoy."
I mean, I suppose we can commend Cummings on his honesty here. How many job ads call a spade a spade and admit when a job is kinda boring? Alas, you won't have any time for fun outside work either.
"You will not have weekday date nights, you will sacrifice many weekends — frankly it will hard having a boy/girlfriend at all. It will be exhausting but interesting and if you cut it you will be involved in things at the age of ~21 that most people never see," he writes.
I don't really know what to say about the above two sentences. Guess he hasn't read the European Working Time Directive — which stipulates EU workers need a minimum daily rest period of 11 consecutive hours...
"I don’t want confident public school bluffers. I want people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment," he adds. "If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned."
Binned. Now there's a word I never thought I'd read in a government job ad.
'Super-talented weirdos'
Then we come to a section entitled 'super-talented weirdos'. Again, not your usual sub-category in a Number 10 job description, but if you've made it this far, I think we're all rapidly coming to the conclusion that this is perhaps the strangest job ad in the history of UK employment.
Cummings goes on to say people in Westminster "talk a lot about 'diversity' but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity.'" "They are usually babbling about 'gender identity diversity blah blah,'" adds Cummings. HR? Anybody?
Sadly, the sprawling, self-indulgent musings of a man with far too much power did not end there.
"We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB," he writes.
Oh yeah, that girl hired by Bigend. Love to see women referred to as nameless girls in a government job spec. Regarding the remainder of that outrageously long sentence, and the fact that these are the words of the prime minister's chief adviser, might I proffer a simple WTF?
"By definition I don’t really know what I’m looking for but I want people around No10 to be on the lookout for such people," he adds (after writing 3,000 words outlining very specific qualities he's looking for).
PLEASE DOM MAKE IT STOP I NEED THIS JOB AD TO END.
Right at the end, there's another gem. "Send a max 1 page letter plus CV to [email protected] and put in the subject line ‘job/’ and add after the / one of: data, developer, econ, comms, projects, research, policy, misfit," he adds.
IDEAS FOR NUMBER 10 AT GMAIL DOT COM.
Apply at your own peril.