If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.

Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g 'witch doctor') to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).

The audience for facts, evidence and research about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is tiny.

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.

Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.

As I've said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment's OODA loops are broken - as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily - and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.

Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.

MPs are so cowed by the institutions and the scale of official failure that they generally just muddle along tinkering and hope to stay a step ahead of the media.

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.

Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.

When comparing many things in life the difference between average and best is say 30% but some people are 50 times more effective than others.

We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.

The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure and, second, everybody keeps their heads down focused on the particular and they ignore the system.

The stock market is an exploitable market where being right means you get rich and you help the overall system error-correct which makes it harder to be right (the mechanism pushes prices close to random, they're not quite random but few can exploit the non-randomness).

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.

It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.

The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.

MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.

Economics is clearly a vital area of prediction for people in politics.

While our ancestor chiefs at least had some intuitive feel for important variables like agriculture and cavalry our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors.

If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.

I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.

We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.

Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.

Politics is profoundly nonlinear.

A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.

The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.

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 editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.

Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics.

People are always asking 'how could the politicians let X happen with Y?' where Y is something important. People find it hard to believe that Y is not the focus of serious attention and therefore things like X are bound to happen all the time.

If you think of politics as 'serious people focusing seriously on the most important questions,' which is the default mode of most educated people and the media (but not the less-educated public which has better instincts), then your model of reality is badly wrong.

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.

In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to reality plus startups pop up.

Most political operations - and government - don't try to be rigorous about decision-making or force themselves to think about what they know with what confidence. They are dominated by seniority, not evidence.

Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called 'Hacking the Electorate.' It's pretty much the best book I've seen on the use of data science in U.S. elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.

There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.

The Single Market is no-where defined in the E.U. treaties. If you suddenly ask people to define the Single Market, the number who can do that, who are specialists in the area, is pretty small.

For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.

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).

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.

Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind's journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.

Abstracting human wisdom into models often works better than relying on human experts as models are often more consistent and less noisy.

Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.

Inevitably, the world of 'communications' / PR / advertising / marketing is full of charlatans flogging snake oil. It is therefore very easy to do things and spend money just because it's conventional.

It is hard to change people's minds.

Priorities are fundamental to politics because of inevitable information bottlenecks: these bottlenecks can be transformed by rare good organisation but they cannot be eradicated.