Comment
Hassabis at last year’s Time100 gala in New York. Taylor Hill/Getty
The Brexit boost Labour won’t talk about
British politics has become a “competition in catastrophism”, says Fraser Nelson in The Times. Nigel Farage moans that the country is “broken”, Andy Burnham says we’ve been “on the wrong path” for 40 years. Things are not nearly as bad as these would-be leaders would have us believe. Between January and March, UK start-ups raised £6bn in venture capital, “more than the next three countries combined”. London’s King’s Cross – once known for prostitution, crime and seediness – is now a thriving tech campus, home to Google, OpenAI and a small army of British tech start-ups.
The “godfather” of the new King’s Cross is DeepMind, the most important AI lab outside America. When the firm was bought by Google and founder Demis Hassabis insisted it remain in London, one of its backers thought he was mad – “like investing in Somalia”. The Nobel Laureate’s bet has paid off in part because of Brexit. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang describes the UK as a “Goldilocks” regulator – not clogged up like the EU, but assertive enough to protect people. Leaving the EU has also helped with drug discovery, which can get stuck for years in Brussels red tape, as well as AI-powered cancer screening and self-driving cars. Credit should go to the Labour government for using these Brexit powers wisely, as they have on cutting low-skilled migration and attracting the high-skilled kind. But Brexit squeamishness means Rachel Reeves would rather talk about “alignment” with Europe, which is also why she and her fellow ministers won’t brag about their success cutting migration. Governments usually lose power because they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. “It would be ironic if Labour implodes because it doesn’t know what it’s doing right.”
🏛️🥙 Hassabis talks movingly about how, as a student, he’d buy a late-night kebab in Cambridge and walk down King’s Parade at 2am, “thinking of all the incredible people who had walked down that same exact street, probably looking pretty much as I saw it”. He was mindful that the university buildings and cobblestones had been there for centuries. “It’s like visiting a Buddhist school where monks have meditated and prayed for hundreds of years. Their efforts are layered on top of each other and together they have left a residue in the rocks.”
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Property
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Comment
Nathan Howard/Getty
Netanyahu’s quest for security has achieved the opposite
Benjamin Netanyahu was once a cautious hawk, says Max Boot in The Washington Post. He undermined the Oslo Accords rather than tearing them up; his wars were short, meant to “mow the grass” rather than uproot the lawn. His proudest achievement was the 2020 Abraham Accords, normalising ties with Arab states. Then came October 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israelis were traumatised and radicalised into seeking total vengeance and absolute security. Netanyahu now talks of “obliterating” Israel’s enemies and of “redrawing” the map of the Middle East; his forces have undertaken military action in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Yemen. This urge to lash out after Israel’s version of 9/11 is understandable. But it is backfiring.
In chasing absolute security, Netanyahu is undermining Israel’s long-term interests, overstretching its army and making the country more dependent than ever on Washington even as American sympathy collapses. An astonishing 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavourably. The war on Iran was meant to destroy Tehran’s nuclear programme and topple its regime. Neither has happened, and the Iranian military is reportedly “reconstituting much faster than initially estimated”. Donald Trump, meanwhile, sidelines and humiliates his ally, boasting that “he’ll do whatever I want him to do”. One US official put it brutally: Israel “is not capable of fighting and winning wars on its own”. At home, Netanyahu’s military chief of staff has warned that the army is “collapsing in on itself” after relentless combat. How I miss the old Netanyahu, who knew Israel’s limits. A nation of 10 million, however mighty, cannot dominate a region of 500 million. Trying to achieve that “chimerical objective” will only sap Israel’s strength and security.
Zeitgeist
Bartlett at Web Summit Qatar in February. Sam Barnes/Getty
Give us a break from these wellness gurus
When I heard that the inexplicably popular podcaster Steven Bartlett had “ruined” his life after a boozy evening, says Emily Watkins in The i Paper, I was “momentarily rapt”. Could it be that the Diary of a CEO host had a “redeeming dark side” after all? Had he phoned a friend’s wife to confess his undying love? Posted something career-endingly offensive online? No such luck. After three (three) glasses of wine, Bartlett explained, he “got worse sleep”, ate poorly, didn’t go the gym and “podcasted worse” because he “felt really bad”. Stop the press. Britain’s most over-exposed self-optimiser has discovered... the hangover.
What’s worrying is that Bartlett’s mentality is no outlier in our wellness-obsessed world. If you think life is about crunching your sleep data, resting heart rate, gym attendance and so on, then yes, wine will “ruin” your life. If, on the other hand, you want to blur the edges a little after a long day, or settle into a great conversation with an old friend, wine is the only thing. If the cost of that is the odd groggy morning, I’d say it’s cheap at the price. Who lies gratified on their deathbed, reminiscing about all the times they checked their resting heart rate? After all, what’s the point of being alive? “Relentless optimisation, or, er, having a nice time?”
The Knowledge Crossword
Inside politics
Anna Moneymaker/Getty
Will Democrats never learn?
I’m worried Democrats are “getting it wrong again”, says Tina Brown on Substack. When Donald Trump’s preferred candidate, Ken Paxton, beat the veteran incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary in Texas this week, liberal commentators claimed it was “good news”. Millions of dollars, they chortled, would now be diverted from other imperilled Republicans to defend the normally safe seat of Texas. Really? The Democrats’ big hope for the state, James Talarico, is a man who proudly tweeted in 2021 that his office was “the first in the history of the [Texas] Capitol to put pronouns on their business cards”. Paxton has already branded him “James Talafreako” and “Six-Gender Jimmy”.
Liberal commentators remain convinced that the Republicans will get a shellacking in this year’s midterms because of Trump’s universally unpopular Iran war driving up fuel prices. “I suspect they and the polls are wrong again.” The president’s hold on his party is as strong as ever, with Cornyn one of four prominent Republicans he has helped defeat in recent primaries. The Republican redistricting efforts – redrawing the electoral map to their advantage – are so far proving successful. More broadly, Trump has managed to separate his personal charisma from the destruction and corruption he has unleashed. The Wall Street honchos, the Silicon Valley bros, the Palm Beach plutocrats – they all know the presidency is “open for business”. And the rest of us, try as we might to resist it, are getting used to the erosion of free speech, and the rule of law, and so on. Like it or not, Trump has “refashioned the country in his image”. Anyone writing him off is deluded.
🩺🤔 The Democrats have belatedly released an “autopsy” into their 2024 election defeat, says Gerard Baker in The Times. Predictably, it says nothing about the party’s real problems – its embrace of extreme progressive ideologies, the abject failure of the Biden administration – and instead focuses on fundraising failures and ineffective messaging. As an autopsy, it’s like a group of pathologists standing around a body with a bullet hole in the head and strangulation marks around the neck, “arguing about which insect bite on the shin might have played a role in the victim’s demise”.
Quoted
“Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.”
Henry Ford
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