John Power

In the Aeneid, after the purported departure of the Greeks, the Trojans find two things left behind: a great wooden horse and a Greek soldier named Sinon. Sinon is brought before King Priam of Troy. He tells an emotive story about being persecuted at the hands of his enemies while imploring the Trojans to accept the wooden horse into the city, promising that it is a gift from Minerva. Priam is so moved by Sinon’s story that he tells him: ‘Whoever you are, forget the Greeks lost to you, you’ll be one of us.’ That night, now unchained and trusted to walk the city, Sinon opens the wooden horse and out comes a group of hardened soldiers, who set about burning and razing his supposed sanctuary.

No belief binds the nation’s pub bores together more strongly than the idea that we need to do away with ‘career politicians’ and replace them all with businessmen. This banausic bleat seems to be the animating spirit behind some recent posts which have gone viral on X comparing the private and public sector experiences of the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet.  Underneath his tweet the CEO of Datablast, Sebastian David Lees, said he ‘would love a law that says 10 years private sector experience before eligible to run as an MP. You can be a cleaner for all I care, as long as it’s not public sector’ and ran a poll asking if MPs without ten years in the ‘real world’ or the private sector should be banned from running.

Andy Burnham’s government is reportedly pressing ahead with further restrictions on promoting unhealthy foods with deals like ‘buy one get one free’. These regulations were introduced by Boris Johnson, but Labour now wants to update – and broaden – what is defined as unhealthy. Up to now, this has been determined by a 2004 nutrient profiling model. The government wants to use a model created in 2018 which, among other things, distinguishes between ‘free’ sugars (those which have been added to a product or released from its structure) and intrinsic ones. This means that many foods which use lots of added sugar, like a yoghurt with honey, will be considered unhealthy and barred from aisle-end promotions or multibuy deals.

When Industry actress Myha’la was kicked off Celebrity Traitors this week, she did not appear to take her exit very graciously. Responding to a comment on her Instagram branding the BBC’s show as ‘racist’ Myha’la said: ‘I sealed my own fate! And that early in the game there is VERY little to grasp on to, and I gave them … a lot.‘I do agree that unconscious racial and cultural bias exists in this game where my authenticity or honesty or the ways in which I choose to express myself look suspicious to people who are unfamiliar with people like me. ‘I had this fear coming into the game, as I am a BIG fan and also clocked right away how prevalent this is in this game.

On Tuesday morning, three people were arrested by Home Office immigration enforcement because of their suspected links to a criminal network which is believed to help asylum seekers pretend to be gay, providing fake photographs and letters to Bangladeshi men to convince the courts that they are at risk of persecution back home. This followed an undercover BBC investigation from April which exposed a cottage industry of lawyers and advisers who help migrants fake homosexuality in order to remain in the country, and a Home Office whistleblower telling the Times that ‘hundreds’ of Pakistani asylum seekers have said they were in a gay relationship with the same man, who provided letters in support of their claims.

In March 1983, Ronald Reagan announced on television that the era of mutually assured destruction could come to an end thanks to developments in science which would make nuclear missiles ‘impotent and obsolete’. The US president's aim of developing sophisticated interception systems was quickly nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ and would later become formalised as the ‘Strategic Defence Initiative’ or SDI. For a population which had been terrified to its wits’ end since the Soviet Union first developed nuclear weapons in 1949 the response was broadly positive, but in practical terms the building of a foolproof interception relied on untested technologies like particle beams and space-based lasers which were found to be impractical.

Another day, another claim by a frontier AI company to have achieved a huge breakthrough in science. Most recently, it’s Anthropic, saying: ‘Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA – a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR. We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.

Andy Burnham told Donald Trump this week that we need to 'rein in AI’, and given who he is getting advice from it’s no surprise. The Turing Institute, a government research institute which has focused on national security and defence since last year, released a report today on ‘Frontier AI risks’. The report calls for ‘formalised testing and verification regimes’ at an international level to mitigate AI risks.  The report is only 25 pages long and is mostly a prosaic recapitulation of recent developments in AI, with a few promises to ‘collaborate’ with other stakeholder bodies on designing a solution (public sector-ese for meandering talking shop calls which lead nowhere).

A somewhat bemusing interview took place between Victoria Derbyshire and Geoffrey Hinton last week on Newsnight. Hinton, an eminent computer scientist who has won both a Nobel prize and a Turing award, told Derbyshire that a ten per cent chance of human extinction at the hands of AI by the end of this decade ‘seems not an unreasonable estimate to me’, leaving Derbyshire almost speechless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZMjJGi4YhI It is strange that a senior broadcaster could have made it as late as September 2026 without encountering Hinton’s perspective, which is not particularly controversial among either AI researchers or safety advocates. Hinton even quit his position with Google in 2023 so that he could voice his concerns about AI risk publicly.

When Mel Stride put out a YouTube Short last month, it got zero views. That, surely, is worth repeating: zero views. Stride’s unloved ‘short’ was a poorly cropped clip of a GB News interview, similar to dozens of other clips he had posted on his YouTube channel before being sacked as shadow chancellor. Most of them have fewer than ten views. Stride was born in 1961, so he can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with the latest meta on social media. But most of our MPs have similarly amateurish operations, despite recognising the importance of social media in modern communications.

Andy Burnham said this week that he has made a ‘clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong’ in Britain since the 1980s, when he returned to Parliament after 10 years in the wilderness. Is his diagnosis correct? Yesterday I looked at Burnham’s claims about political centralisation and the privatisation of economic power, neither of which happened. What other claims did he make? The country deindustrialised – mixed Burnham claimed that Britain deindustrialised in the 1980s. Manufacturing as a share of GDP has indeed declined since 1979, falling from 28.5 per cent in 1979 to around 8.5 per cent today. But this was already the direction of travel: manufacturing output was 32 per cent of GDP in 1973.