It was one shocking tweet that led to a data specialist being sacked from the Cabinet Office, just three months after he was recruited following Dominic Cummings’ call for “weirdos and misfits” to work for the government. Yet packed into that single episode were the fault lines of Britain’s traumatic summer: racial division, Covid-19, and the assault by Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, on the way the civil service works. The tweet, posted on 5 July by Will O’Shea, 57, a data architecture designer in the Government Digital Service (GDS), a department of the Cabinet Office, appeared to call for the Metropolitan police to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators. O’Shea was recruited in April through a process set up by Cummings and advertised in a notorious blogpost on 2 January, in which he held forth about the civil service’s “profound problems” and his plan to reshape it by hiring “an unusual set of people”. O’Shea was one of those attracted to Cummings’ call for a range of experts including, famously, “weirdos and misfits with odd skills”. In the same blog, Cummings derided the prevailing approach to encouraging diversity in the civil service. “People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’,” he wrote. “They are usually babbling about gender identity diversity blah blah [sic]. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity.” The first known recruit to Cummings’ diversity project was Andrew Sabisky, a writer and blogger who described himself as a “superforecaster”, and was brought in as a Downing Street adviser. In February, he was forced to resign after some of his earlier writings were highlighted in the media, including that there were “very real racial differences in intelligence”. When Cummings published his blog, O’Shea tweeted a link to the post. He also “liked” his own tweet. He then applied under the process set out by Cummings, who asked for a one-page letter and CV to a dedicated email address. O’Shea said he was interviewed by Ben Warner, another Downing Street adviser known to be close to Cummings. He told an undercover Guardian reporter he was initially offered a senior role on a major government project, reorganising the use of data across departments to enable more rapid internal communication. That project was put on hold, he said, because of the coronavirus pandemic. However, O’Shea said, Warner told him he had “some friends in the Cabinet Office” who needed similar skills, and he was found a position in the GDS. ‘Rebels and pirates’ Before O’Shea arrived at the GDS, some of the black, Asian and minority ethnic civil servant had made sustained complaints about racism and discrimination within the department. As recently as last month, several staff are understood to have reported in an internal forum that they had suffered racist abuse and felt anxious or depressed as a result, with five saying they had lost trust in the GDS. These concerns had intensified after the killing of George Floyd by police in the US city of Minneapolis, which spurred Black Lives Matter protests. On 25 June, Cummings held a video meeting with GDS staff, appearing alongside Ben Warner and Alex Chisholm, the Cabinet Office permanent secretary. The Cabinet Office told the Guardian the meeting was intended to thank and congratulate GDS staff for their work on rapid-turnaround digital projects during the pandemic. Cummings approvingly told staff that he saw them as the “rebels” and “pirates” of Whitehall.
Several employees took the opportunity to ask questions about discrimination and the lack of diversity in the civil service. Cummings’ responses left some staff underwhelmed and prompted formal complaints about the language he had used. Asked how he believed more women could attain senior positions, Cummings is said to have replied that there were already young “thirty–something” women working effectively as private secretaries, so they needed to “bang” these women into more senior roles. At another point, Cummings used the phrase “tits up”, which stunned some staff . Those who asked questions about alleged systemic racism and discrimination within the GDS were not satisfied with the answers given. A Cabinet Office spokesperson insisted it was made clear to staff in the meeting that “we have a zero tolerance approach to bullying, harassment and discrimination and have a range of measures in place to make sure that inappropriate behaviour is stamped out”. After the meeting, some people on the staff forum commented that Cummings needed to learn about inclusive communications and how to talk to a diverse group of people, and asked senior managers that those concerns be relayed to him. The then acting director-general of the GDS, Alison Pritchard, was understood to have told staff that another civil servant was going to talk privately to Cummings. Pritchard told staff she would write to Chisholm’s office to let him know the strength of feeling. The Cabinet Office and Downing Street declined to say if this conversation had taken place. ‘Get out the live rounds’ It is not known if O’Shea took part in the June staff meeting with Cummings. But 10 days later, with BLM demonstrations continuing and conversation about racial diversity in Britain intensifying, O’Shea contributed to discussions on the GDS internal staff forum. The conversation was about a recent article in the Mirror, which reported that white applicants to the civil service were 15 times more likely to get jobs than black people. Shortly after, another internal discussion was held in which GDS staff were encouraged openly to discuss their experiences of racism. O’Shea’s contributions to both of these conversations raised concerns among some colleagues, leading them to find his personal Twitter account. They discovered that after Floyd’s murder, O’Shea had tweeted frequently about BLM, mostly focusing on incidents of violence. On 7 June he tweeted a video by the hard-right US commentator Candace Owens, who said that while Floyd’s killing was wrong, there was something “ugly and broken” about America’s black community, whom she said made martyrs of criminals such as Floyd. Linking to the video, O’Shea tweeted: “Here is an alternative point of view.” Responding to questions from the Guardian, O’Shea said he did not know who Owens was. “I thought it was a view of a black [person] on BLM,” he said. “I did not endorse it or agree with it. I put it there for people to see and make their own judgment.” On 5 July, O’Shea replied to a tweet by somebody saying the Metropolitan police were being chased out of a London estate by BLM demonstrators, and a reply calling the police cowards. O’Shea tweeted: “Time to get out the live rounds.” That was met with revulsion by O’Shea’s colleagues at the GDS, who brought it to the attention of senior managers. On 10 July, O’Shea’s contract was terminated. O’Shea initially told the Guardian he was “let go because of my tweet” but then said that he was never given a reason for the termination. He acknowledged that, taken overall, his tweets could be considered racist and offensive, and understood why his colleagues at the GDS took him to mean that police should shoot black people on demonstrations in London. But he said he had not meant it seriously, and now regrets the tweet. A government spokesperson said “all standard vetting processes” were carried out when hiring O’Shea to the Cabinet Office as an external contractor. After a final tweet on 8 July, O’Shea deleted his Twitter account. He told the Guardian he did so “to get rid of any of the things I had said”. He has since registered a new Twitter account, with the bio, “End the Cancel Culture”.