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A data specialist recruited into the civil service following Dominic Cummings’ call for “weirdos and misfits” to work for the UK government was recently fired after posting on social media that police should use live rounds against Black Lives Matter protesters, The Guardian may reveal.
The data architect appointed to a senior position in the Cabinet Office after running through a scheme revealed by Boris Johnson’s senior adviser was fired in July after his colleagues discovered his post on Twitter and reported it to senior managers.
It is the second known outing of a government recruit hired under the project established by Cummings, to tempt an “unusual group of people” into high-level government positions. Both outings involved recruits who publicly expressed sentiments deemed racist.
In February, Andrew Sabisky, who described himself as a “super forecaster,” resigned from a Downing Street post after it emerged that in some of his earlier writing on genetics he had suggested that blacks on average had an IQ lower than whites.
After Sabisky resigned, suggesting he had been selectively cited, No. 10 refused to answer questions about how he had been recruited and whether he had been properly vetted.
Will O’Shea, 57, posted the commentary on the Black Lives Matters protests on July 5, at the time marches were being organized in Britain following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in the United States .
Responding to a tweet from one person suggesting that protesters had expelled Metropolitan Police officers from a London housing estate, and another calling the police cowards, O’Shea replied: “Time to get out of the rounds live.” .
At the time, the Government Digital Service (GDS), the Cabinet Office department where O’Shea worked, had already been harassed by complaints from some black, Asian and ethnic minority staff members that they had been subjected to systemic racism and bullying at work. .
Contacted by an undercover Guardian reporter posing as a hiring agent, O’Shea confirmed that he had applied for a government job through Cummings’ hiring announcement, which was posted on his personal blog on January 2. O’Shea said that Ben Warner, another aide to the prime minister who works closely with Cummings, interviewed him in person.
In subsequent emails, O’Shea initially said “I was fired for my tweet,” but later said they never gave him a reason for the abrupt termination of his job at the Cabinet Office.
He accepted that his former colleagues found his tweet to be racist, inflammatory and offensive, and interpreted it to mean that the police should shoot blacks in London who were demonstrating.
“I can see how it was taken that way, and I’m sorry,” O’Shea said. While he regretted sending the tweet, which he said was “wrong,” O’Shea emphasized that he wasn’t serious. He added: “I didn’t say ‘shoot black people’ and that was not what I meant or what I wanted.”
O’Shea subsequently deleted his personal Twitter account, which he said was to “get rid of any of the things he had said.”
Cummings’ blog post in January calling out “weirdos and misfits” focused on some of his key obsessions: the government’s leveraging of digital data, forecasts, and allegations of “deep trouble” in the decision-making of the public administration. It was titled, “Two Hands Is A Lot – We’re Hiring Data Scientists, Project Managers, Policy Experts, A Variety Of Weirdos …”
Areas of work for the “unusual group of people” the prime minister’s adviser said he wanted to recruit included “the frontiers of prediction science,” “data science, alternative intelligence, and cognitive technologies” and “institutions of decision making. decision-making at the apex of government ”.
In a process seemingly parallel to normal public service recruitment, would-be recruits were invited to apply by sending a CV and letter of up to one page to a dedicated email address.
O’Shea did not meet with Cummings, but said Warner, a data scientist known for being close to the prime minister’s top adviser, interviewed him in Downing Street. He worked closely with Cummings on the Vote Leave Brexit campaign. After working in the 2019 Conservative election campaign, Warner was hired by Cummings in December last year to work alongside him at No. 10.
O’Shea said that Warner interviewed him in the Downing Street Great Room where the daily televised Covid-19 press conferences were subsequently held. He said he was later approved to work on a 10th project to reshape the government’s use of data, which would mean breaking free of the controls each department has.
“Basically, they wanted to see how they could break the rules of government,” he said.
The project was suspended when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, O’Shea said, and Warner told him that he could get him a job at the Government Digital Service.
He told the undercover reporter: “Ben Warner said… ‘We can’t hire him right now, but I have some friends in the Cabinet Office. They’re looking for a similar skill set, but it’s not long-term. ‘
In April, O’Shea joined the GDS, the Cabinet Office department responsible for digital production, working on policy documents that set standards for how other government departments can operate digitally.
It is understood that he first caused concern among black, Asian and ethnic minority colleagues with the contributions he made to internal debates on race, including one after an article published by the Daily Mirror on July 5 on alleged racial discrimination in Whitehall. , which was titled: “Whites are 15 times more likely than black candidates to get jobs in public administration.”
O’Shea emphasized to The Guardian that he had not been a racist in those discussions and had been asking white staff members not to criticize another white colleague too harshly for his intervention. But he accepted that his contributions led some of his colleagues to look at his social media accounts.
On his Twitter account, they were shocked and distressed to see his July 5 tweet about the police and BLM protesters: “Time to get out of the rounds live.”
In a statement to The Guardian, a government spokesperson said: “Will O’Shea was … employed by the Cabinet Office as an outside contractor for the Government Digital Service on coronavirus. All standard verification processes were carried out for a contractor role through a commercial framework. “
