Elon Musk takes a tip from the Cummings playbook

“If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek [Ramaswamy, Musk’s co-leader at Doge] will review the top 1% of applicants.”

In a separate post from his own account, Musk added: “Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero. What a great deal!” He added a laughing emoji (Musk is 53 years old).

If all this sounds familiar, it is. Back in 2020, Boris Johnson’s own consigliere, Dominic Cummings, made a similar call-out for outcasts to join his governing operation, writing a rambling blog calling for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” to apply for new jobs within No 10.

Cummings wrote that he wanted to bring in “super-talented weirdos” with “genuine cognitive diversity,” adding: “We need some true wildcards, 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.

“If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about [French psychoanalyst Jacques] Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news.”

Cummings lasted little more than nine more months in his role after making his call-out, the governing facilities of Whitehall remaining pretty much identical to when he arrived. Whether Musk will prove any more successful in the task Trump has given him – to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies” – remains to be seen.