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.

The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.

Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.

Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of 'the educated classes' in general, tended to hold a broadly 'blank slate' view of the world mostly uninformed by decades of scientific progress.

If you go back to the Euro campaign in 1999, how many chief executives and chairmen of FTSE 100 companies were speaking out on this? I think two. Two out of 200 people. Did that represent the reality of what businesses in Britain thought about the Euro? Of course it didn't. Did it represent what CBI members thought? Of course it didn't.

Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.

The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.

Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.

Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.

Britain could contribute huge value to the world by leveraging existing assets, including scientific talent and how the NHS is structured, to push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field - genomic prediction - that is revolutionising healthcare in ways that give Britain some natural advantages over Europe and America.

Usually in politics everything is done on hunches.

Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways.

Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates.

People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won't get poor by shorting such promises.

One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.

People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.' That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.

Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave - she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won.

In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park.

Those of us from the Vote Leave team would never have gone to No10 to help if Boris hadn't told us that he is determined to change the Conservative Party - change its priorities and change its focus so it really serves the whole country. Most of us were not 'party people.' For us, parties are a means to an end - a means to improve lives.

Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.

I know from my days working on education reform in government that it's almost impossible to exaggerate how little those who work on education policy think about 'how to improve learning.'

Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works - never mind the question 'what could work much better?'

Most security failings happen because of human actions that are not envisaged when designing systems.

The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but management and operational ideas which are extremely hard to change fast.

Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better 'returns on investment' than from early stage Amazon.

Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies.

In many areas, the E.U. regulates to help the worst sort of giant corporate looters defending their position against entrepreneurs. Post-Brexit Britain will be outside this jurisdiction and able to make faster and better decisions about regulating technology like genomics, AI and robotics.

I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.

People in politics tend to spend far too much time on higher profile issues affecting few people and too little time on such basic processes that affect thousands or millions and which we know how to do much better.

In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.

In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make it almost impossible for startups to contribute and so on.

In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree - not rigorous thinking and not solving problems.

Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

Fundamental to real expertise is 1: whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it's possible to make good predictions and 2: does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction.

Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.

Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence - i.e adapt to feedback.

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.

Judea Pearl is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field.

In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.

In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.