Tim Stanley
Rest in Peace, Silvio Berlusconi. Makers of Clairol hair dye are inconsolable. The 86-year old swinger was to politics what Roger Moore was to James Bond, proof that age doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you love. Bookies now have him as odds-on favourite to win the next election.
We do love to laugh at the Italians, with their countless prime ministers and shameless corruption. None of that for us in Britain, where the PM is so clean he could give Daz a run for its money – and consequently is quite dull. Rishi gave a speech to a group of techies in London, and whereas Boris would have riffed on a half-remembered history lesson about the industrial revolution (“Britain invented the bath plug”) Sunak sounded as though he knew this snoozy subject inside out.
What can AI do? It has “helped the paralysed to walk”, he said, “discovered superbug-killing antibiotics” and will find “ways to grow crops to feed the entire world”. AI is Jesus, though He comes not in the form of a lowly carpenter from the Middle East but a billionaire graduate at Harvard who must be bribed to relocate. To turn the UK into the new Silicon Valley, Rishi ticked off the visa programmes set up by the Tories. A “scale-up” visa for companies; an “innovator founder” visa; and, my favourite, a “high potential” visa that says you can come here even if you don’t have a job so long as “you graduated from one of the top 50 unis”, have cash and can speak English.
The Conservatives might be promising to “stop the boats” for refugees, but they’ve made it possible for rich kids at Yale or MIT almost to walk on water to reach the UK. Then came the question about Boris and his honours list. A chance to reassert the dignity of one’s office. “Boris Johnson asked me to do something I wasn’t prepared to do,” said Rishi, as if Boris had asked him to strip naked and dance the Carioca, when all he wanted was some peerages for his mates. Ah, but it’s against procedure (Rishi not only loves the rules and has memorised the rules, I’m told he’s working with Andrew Lloyd Webber to set them to music). “When I got this job, I said I was gonna do things differently cos I want to change politics,” he told the audience, and earned a little applause. He doesn’t realise that when you pick a fight with a Boris, or a Trump, or a Berlusconi, it changes nothing. They only dominate the media cycle even more.
Rishi asked us to imagine a future in which AI can “transform our lives” by helping us do our jobs better, but it’ll never work for governance – for politics is universally corrupting. Were Britain to install its first ever automatic prime minister, have no doubt that within 24 hours of going online, R2-D2 would start soliciting bitcoin bribes and be caught in bed with a laser printer.
