John Power

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.

On Tuesday, Andy Burnham returned to the House of Commons after almost ten years in the wilderness, bringing with him ‘a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong’ in the country. Burnham’s claims about how the country has been governed since the 1980s do not stand up to scrutiny According to Burnham, the problems started in the 1980s when a ‘series of wrong turns’ were made. The Prime Minister said that ‘political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised, austerity followed, hollowing out councils and depriving them of the agency to act to reverse any of this’. People who can remember Britain before the supposed wrong turns may find the recasting of the 1960s and 70s as a prelapsarian golden age surprising.

At Prime Minister’s questions today, Andy Burnham was pressed by Kemi Badenoch on the sharp rise in government borrowing costs over the last few days. This is what he had to say: ‘The turbulence on global markets is because of that exposure that they [the Conservatives] left behind. We are turning the corner. In the first half of this year, we have had the fastest growth in the G7. Borrowing fell to its lowest level in six years. We are cutting the deficit faster than any other G7 country. I say to the Conservative party and particularly to the right hon. Lady: that is problem solving rather than point scoring.

Earlier today we found out there has been another fatal traffic accident related to a police chase, following the death of five men and two police officers on the A66 near Middlesbrough on Saturday morning, which led to the arrests of 14 men and three women. Meanwhile, in County Kildare, Ireland, five teenagers were killed driving the wrong way down the motorway less than two weeks ago. What is behind this sudden spate of deaths? One familiar bogeyman invoked by the government is social media. Apparently young people are watching videos showing dangerous driving online and this is inspiring them to get behind the wheel and try it for themselves. Andy Burnham has called these videos ‘truly reprehensible’.

The ‘worst drought in decades’ is how Novara headlined an article attacking data centres at the beginning of this month. ‘This summer isn’t as bad as the drought of 1976’ ran the Telegraph’s headline. ‘The UK is reeling from its worst dry spell since 1976’ was the subheading of an article in the Australian Daily Telegraph, inviting readers to ‘see the pictures’ for a bit of schadenfreude. Andy Burnham’s government has also started telling the press that further restrictions on our water consumption are around the corner. Water companies may apply for non-essential use bans covering car washes, window cleaning and refilling commercial swimming pools.

Jason Arday has resigned from his post at the University of Cambridge, but as the story rumbles on and new revelations about him emerge by the hour, The Spectator thought it would be useful to create a comprehensive reference guide of all the outlandish claims made by our modern-day Walter Mitty. Arday claimed that he went to both South America and West Africa to install water points Athletic prowess: Arday claimed that he once ran six hundred miles between Edinburgh and London in six days for charity, an accomplishment which would put him in the upper tier of world ultra marathon runners. He also claimed that he ran run thirty marathons in thirty-five days. On the twenty-first marathon he suffered from an epileptic fit and fractured his leg after falling down.

In a speech yesterday Andy Burnham promised that there will not just be ‘fair pay’ in social care but ‘bigger reform to improve the workforce’. He said that this could include a restructure to make pay work as it does in the NHS, ‘progression routes’ from care to the health service and even thinking about NHS and care ‘as one workforce’. This builds on the ‘fair pay agreement’ (FPA) which Keir Starmer’s government was working on, which is planned to take effect from April 2028.  Burnham said after his speech that much of this will be ‘possible within existing resources’ and without breaking the 2024 manifesto pledges to freeze income tax and national insurance.

Just one day after Ed Miliband was made Foreign Secretary we heard in the Telegraph that the White House is upset about the appointment, and even warned against it. Donald Trump is apparently unimpressed by Miliband’s role in blocking North Sea oil drilling. Miliband has also railed against Trump in the past, calling him a ‘racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper’ on the BBC’s World at One in 2016, as an example – but in fairness his predecessor David Lammy called Trump ‘beneath contempt’ before he became foreign secretary. Trump can forgive and forget – so long as his interlocutor is willing to forget their own pride. Miliband could bend the knee, but there is also some appetite to confront Trump.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, who has just become the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – and has been very involved with helping Burnham’s strategy over the past few months – is so far the most successful MP from the Labour party’s 2024 intake. She has risen from the backbenches to a full senior cabinet position within two short years, a very rare achievement made even more impressive by the fact that Labour won a landslide majority in 2024 after a dismal performance in 2019, meaning there are many new, sharp-elbowed MPs also trying to make their way up. Part of the explanation for her meteoric rise may be her experience in Westminster, both in the Cabinet Office and think tanks.

Zia Yusuf gave a speech yesterday on the security of MPs, in which he accused several politicians of inciting violence against Ann Widdecombe through their words. He called out David Lammy for saying ‘we must stand up to them [Widdecombe] before it’s too late’. He criticised Wes Streeting for saying ‘if only science had a cure for Ann Widdecombe’, Jess Phillips for saying ‘Ann Widdecombe better go this week’ and Ed Davey for describing Reform as a ‘threat from within’ worse than Iran or Russia. He said we should not be surprised, given such ‘reckless rhetoric’ against Reform, that people could be moved to confront that apparent threat with violence. This is not the first time that Yusuf has complained about rhetoric endangering Reform politicians.