Lloyd Evans

Two of the world’s great unelected power-brokers met last night at Bletchley Park. Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak held a joint interview after the international conference about AI. Their topic was regulation. ‘What should a government like ours be doing?’ said the PM. What an odd start. Why is the Prime Minister asking a foreign billionaire to pre-empt parliament by shaping our internal regulations for us? But Elon seems to get a free pass. He’s regarded as a disinterested operator who supports the powerless against the mighty. And his air of eccentric innocence is fortified by his appearance. He hadn’t bothered to shave. His jowls are rimmed with bum-fluff and he grins constantly like an excited schoolboy. No stylist gets anywhere near him.

Dominic Cummings showed up at the Covid Inquiry dressed in his signature white shirt. Plus, in a nod to formality, he’d added a shoe-string tie , rakishly askew. He was interrogated by Hugo Keith KC, a lawyer with a plausible manner and an expensive tailor. He looked like one of those shiny new MPs with an answer for everything. The kind who switches parties as easily as changing energy suppliers. Keith obviously hoped to make Cummings blush by reading out his famously sarcastic emails. He recited this from the archive. ‘The cabinet’, wrote Cummings, ‘is largely irrelevant to policy or execution… it’s seen by everyone in No 10 as not a place for serious discussion.’ Cummings stuck to his guns on the stand.

Sexism struck early in Rachel Reeves’s life. Last night the shadow chancellor gave a talk about her new book on female economists, and she recalled an early brush with toxic masculinity. Aged eight, competing in a public chess tournament, she faced a little boy who foresaw a swift and easy victory. ‘Lucky I’m playing a girl’, he said. Reeves duly thrashed him. ‘He didn’t say it again after that,’ she told the crowd. At Oxford and the LSE she was a keen sexism detective and she noted with dismay that there were no women teaching economics at either university. Things got worse at the male-dominated Treasury where her colleagues created a new computer graphic, BOEQM (Bank of England Quarterly Model.

A harrowing session at PMQs. Rishi Sunak seemed subdued and de-energised. His fizz had gone flat. The usual hip-wriggling shuffle at the despatch had been replaced with a hunched, anxious pose. Heavy shoulders. Head drooping. The Middle East crisis has snapped his elastic. The issue Sir Keir had ducked was Gaza. Too hot to handle Sir Keir, by contrast, was beaming like a City embezzler celebrating his daughter’s wedding. Spreading one arm wide, he turned munificently towards his backbenchers and welcomed the victors from last week’s by-elections. He poked fun at the defeated Tory in Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, who had dismissed the complaints of voters who can’t buy food but can afford a mobile phone.

The gears were grinding hard at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer shifted his party decisively away from its Corbynista past and pledged full support for Israel after the recent atrocities. He said he was ‘still mourning the terrorist attacks’. And having met relatives of British hostages held by Hamas, he was unequivocal. ‘Release them immediately.’ Sunak hid behind legal sophistries It’s a shame that his rhetoric felt so polished and poetic. Almost like song lyrics. ‘Too much blood, too much darkness,’ he crooned. ‘The lights are going out and innocent citizens are terrified they will die in the darkness, out of sight.’ And he indulged in a lot of glib verbal counterpoint. ‘Hamas are not the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people are not Hamas.

It might have been an inside job. The saboteur who threw a handful of glitter over Sir Keir Starmer at the start of his speech turned the Labour leader into a hero for a few seconds. The assailant was frogmarched away while protesting in a very expensive accent. ‘True democracy is citizen-led’ he brayed, using the cultivated tones of a duke giving orders to his grouse-beaters. On the podium Sir Keir shrugged his jacket to the floor and revealed a manly torso. His white shirt was bulging in all the right places (and a few of the wrong ones). He stood before the conference like a veteran wrestler, an undefeated champion, a sturdy prize-fighter who throws upstart challengers out of the ring. They loved him for it.

It was preposterous. A prime minister at the head of a party that’s been running the country for 13 years posed as a revolutionary today. Rishi Sunak presented himself to the Tory conference as a dashing anarchist, an upstart rebel, a fearless saviour who wants to wrest power from an authoritarian clique and hand it back to the people. ‘Our mission is to fundamentally change our country’, he cried. Evidently he’d forgotten that the Tories have been in office for the last decade-and-a-bit. To the surprise of no one, he announced that HS2 will be scrapped. The Birmingham-to-Manchester leg is no more, he declared. ‘The right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction.

Partygate has morphed from a half-forgotten scandal into a new drama-documentary which airs on Channel 4 tomorrow night. This rehash of old news depicts Boris Johnson as an amiable tyrant, played by Jon Culshaw, who presides over a gang of chaotic law-breakers as they hold riotous parties in Downing Street at the height of lockdown. The fizz of topicality has vanished from this story which came to an end last year when Boris was forced to relinquish the keys of Number Ten. So viewers already know whodunnit, why he dunnit, and what happened after he dunnit.  Still, the show has a decent stab at dramatising the nitty-gritty details. To create a sense of freshness, the script introduces us to a fictional intern, Grace, whose video diary follows her early days in Downing Street.