The Rishi Sunak and Elon Musk show

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘The Rishi Sunak and Elon Musk show’

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Camilla Cavendish
This part of the Covid inquiry you could really say has been the trial of Boris Johnson, because it’s just so obvious that when the prime minister is not doing his job, nothing else works.

Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. You heard there the FT’s Camilla Cavendish talking about revelations from the Covid inquiry. More from her later.

Also coming up, Rishi Sunak, the chat show host. The prime minister interviewed Elon Musk in front of an audience following the Bletchley Park AI summit. We’ll discuss that too. I’m joined now in the studio by my FT colleague Anna Gross, who was at the event. Hi, Anna.

Anna Gross
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
This week, Rishi Sunak gathered a high-powered group of politicians and tech execs at Bletchley Park to talk about the challenges of AI. He rounded off the event by sitting down for a fireside chat with Elon Musk. The prime minister spent nearly an hour quizzing Musk for his opinions on where AI might be going next.

Elon Musk
I do think overall that the potential is there for artificial intelligence, AI, to most likely a positive effect and to create a future of abundance where there is no scarcity of goods and services. But it is somewhat of the magic genie problem where if you have a magic genie that can grant all the wishes, usually those stories don’t end well. (Crowd laughs) Be careful what you wish for, including wishes.

Lucy Fisher
Awkward, or what? Anna, you were at the summit and we’ll talk about that shortly. But you were also there at Lancaster House with this slightly cringeworthy in parts interview, I think it’s fair to say. What was your main takeaway from what we heard from Elon Musk?

Anna Gross
Well, it was extremely unusual, I think, for a prime minister to be sitting there with one of the richest men and most powerful and incredibly controversial figures. And I guess my takeaway, I was thinking about it while I was there. I just cannot imagine any other leader doing something like that. Like, could you imagine Biden doing that? I think that it would have been slightly more acceptable for Sunak to use that format if he was actually challenging Musk on anything he said.

But it was so kind of craven and chummy, the whole exchange. Like, Musk at one point he was asking about job losses. Sunak, he said, one of the questions I get most about AI from the public and from the media is about are jobs gonna disappear? And then Musk said, basically, he said he thinks AI’s going to render all jobs obsolete. And Sunak just sort of chuckled and said, I think jobs are quite, you know, they bring meaning to life. It’s like, well, hang on, you’re the prime minister. Should you not be kind of pushing back and saying, well, there’ll be lots of new jobs or I think people shouldn’t be worried or whatever?

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, just starting with the premise of this interview taking place. What do you think was in Sunak’s mind? Was this an interview, essentially — the summit and then the fireside chat with Elon Musk, touting himself out to the tech giants in hope of a job if the Tories head out of power next year? Was it a bid to try and garner attention? Because to my mind, Musk crosses that boundary between business leader and celebrity. And I always think back to the amazing episode of The Thick of It, where when politicians get really desperate, that’s when they press the celebrity button. There’s a brilliant episode with Nicola Murray trying to get Andy Murray, the tennis player, involved. What do you think his motivation was here?

Stephen Bush
It is obviously true to say that basically, unless you are the leader of a global hegemon, you are less powerful than the leader of a tech giant and you can’t necessarily protect your own people from job losses or rapid technological change. However, if I were the prime minister of a midsized country, I still wouldn’t want to underline that in the way this very visibly did underline that imbalance. Voters are, for the most part, not relaxed about unemployment. It was astonishing to me that you have a situation in which Musk goes, yeah, all the jobs are for the meat grinder and he just kind of like sat there with a kind of pabulum statement about how like jobs give people meaning.

But I mean, I think ultimately, this is a summit best understood through the prism of Rishi Sunak’s personal interests and the fact that like the way he runs or in many ways doesn’t run the government is to like, dart about like a very hyperactive minister of state, roving across the policy piece on the stuff that he is particularly interested in, which is why, you know, he is able to successfully deliver things like this summit and the Windsor framework where that minister of state approach works. But why whenever you get to something which actually requires the prime minister to hold the ring and do that interdepartmental stuff like, you know, going from here’s my vague idea for an advanced British standard to have we actually got more maths teachers in schools? That kind of stuff tends to come unstuck.

Lucy Fisher
So Stephen, you’re right and it’s fair to say that I think Rishi Sunak does have a genuine interest in this area. It’s not pure cynicism. I’m also quite struck that, you know, what I hear from people in and around Downing Street is one of the big fears in the bunker is that people have given up looking at politics, particularly the Conservatives, since Liz Truss, since the Black Wednesday moment of the mini-Budget. And part of the strategy now is to make sure that Rishi Sunak gets noticed. And so I think that the Elon Musk interview sort of ticks that box to my mind, that it’s people who’ve given up aren’t necessarily interested, may have sat up and thought, this is something I might actually watch streamed on Twitter/X later.

Anna Gross
I would somewhat disagree with that. They may watch some of it. It was quite long, but I feel like coming out of it, you learn nothing new from Sunak. There were no news lines. There was not even a kind of personal, any personal detail given. We learned quite a lot about Musk’s position, about how he felt about open source, about what he thought about jobs. He even kind of gave a really interesting detail about his son who has learning disabilities and therefore would really benefit from an AI friend. And there were so many details that he kind of totally stole the show. And again, if you were to watch it, you really felt that Sunak looked kind of subservient to Musk.

Lucy Fisher
Let’s turn to the summit, Anna. What did we get out of that? I mean, give your scorecard for Sunak on what he achieved, what kind of lacunae remained at the end of that two-day meeting.

Anna Gross
Overall, I would say that the summit was a coup, honestly. I think, first of all, in terms of who managed to attend, I think there was quite a lot of attention on the fact that some world leaders didn’t attend who were potentially initially billed to, like Macron, Biden — there was some hopes that he might come. But there were serious senior representation from the vast majority of governments. And just the very fact that day one of the summit, you had Gina Raimondo, who’s the secretary of state for commerce, the US, sitting on a stage with a senior minister from the tech department in China, and them all agreeing to a joint communique on the risks posed by AI. I think that is genuinely quite incredible.

There were some kind of big takeaways. There was the creation of an AI safety institute in a very short period of time, and the US created the same. And then this commitment from companies that they would allow their models to be tested by governments, and then also the announcement that there’ll be subsequent summits in South Korea and then in France. They’re kind of creating momentum for what Sunak has created. It was successful in those regards.

But first of all, the tests that these companies have signed up to, they don’t really fully exist yet. So that, you know, it sounds very good and well, and there’s lots of headlines about companies have signed up to have their models tested for risks like disinformation and the ability to develop bioweapons and things like that. But the reality is that those tests are not really there yet.

Lucy Fisher
It sounds like what you’re saying, you think this kicked off a dialogue. That was a win for Rishi Sunak. Stephen, what do you make of the summit. Anna points out China came, their tech minister was up on stage. I was struck that Gina Raimondo used Rishi Sunak’s big moment to announce the US starting their own institute to police AI.

Stephen Bush
I think that the best way to think about the successes and limitations of this summit are to think about its geopolitical aims and its UK political economy aims. Even if it turns out that the AI risk stuff is wildly overblown, history does teach us that there is every possibility that we might look back in five years’ time and go, well, actually, if it hadn’t been for that tech minister in the United States and that tech minister from China being able to talk to each other about an entirely unrelated crisis in the back room of the fifth Bletchley summit, you know, in Howondaland, we would all be dead now, right? So the geopolitical stuff does matter and is a big deal.

But in terms of these kind of high-flown ideas, is the UK going to be a world leader in AI regulation? No. Indeed, the US quite deliberately did time what they did in order to establish that they are a leader in this field and they wish to remain so. Is this going to lead to a bonanza of British jobs and opportunity? No, because the amount of money that we are committing, a lot of the money has already been committed and is already being spent. So we’re not really moving the dial on that.

And in terms of reassurance to British voters that the huge changes we are likely to see are not going to sweep away their quality of life and way of living, that was the reverse of reassurance. So I would say it’s mixed. I don’t think there was enough of a kind of big bang Rishi Sunak success moment to really change the mood music in the way that there was an opportunity in the wake of the Windsor framework, I think, to change the mood music around the government, which wasn’t seized.

Anna Gross
Just to pick up on your point, I agree that the UK will never or is not likely to become a kind of centre of AI regulation, not least because it hasn’t developed any regulation yet. But I do actually think that it could be, at least in the short to medium term, a bit of a hub for AI safety testing because this AI safety institute is quite a big deal and is much more advanced than any other country’s, and I think that it is quite likely for the time being companies really will send their models in to the UK, even before the US, to test the technology.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. To my mind, we have a lot of credibility based largely around the fact that Google DeepMind is based in the UK. But it feels to me that without that huge tech giant, our claims to be these leaders in AI would be under scrutiny. I’d also say I slightly disagree with both of you that I think on the China question, and not just China but other autocracies.

I do wonder about how much collaboration we’re going to do because it seems that autocracies want to use AI for different purposes and ones that are completely at odds with, you know, the western world with respect for human rights, protection from surveillance, the right to privacy and so forth. I think, you know, so far we’ve seen China be a leader in developing facial recognition technology and so forth to use on their own populations in ways that I don’t think governments in the west could get away with.

Just before we move on, Anna, you were there at the summit. Tell us what it was like.

Anna Gross
It was quite an amazing location, this beautiful old manor called Bletchley Park, and it’s got this lovely pistachio-coloured roof.

Lucy Fisher
It being the home of the computer, the home of code-breaking.

Anna Gross
Exactly. So it was where the world war two codebreakers lived, including famously, Alan Turing. And so it’s got all of these little huts where amazing code-breaking took place. And there were signs up describing the history. And it’s quite a smart move, I suppose, to host it there, kind of a nod to a time when the UK was kind of really at the cutting edge when it came to science and mathematics. For us journalists, it was quite odd. I mean, as I think often it is with these summits. We were tucked off in a corner. Very little access to any of the members, all of the discussions, the bilaterals, obviously, but also the roundtables with 35 people we had no access to, no readouts from. So it was just this kind of desperate scramble and hustling going on to try and set up meetings with ministers and execs who were there.

Lucy Fisher
While you’re lifting the bonnet on how these things work, you remind me of covering the G7 in Carbis Bay, which is, as anyone who knows their geography, is on the north coast of Cornwall while the press centre was in Falmouth, (Anna laughs) on the south coast of the county, miles and miles away. I did not see Joe Biden or even the motorcade.

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Dysfunctional, a failure, insane and a dumpster fire. Those were some of Dominic Cummings more polite descriptions about the Boris Johnson government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. Cummings, along with Lee Cain, Johnson’s former comms chief, were giving evidence at the Covid inquiry. FT contributing editor and columnist Camilla Cavendish was there to hear it and see it in person. I spoke to her earlier and asked her what it was like.

Camilla Cavendish
So it’s one of those wonderful British scenes, Lucy, where it’s an anonymous building repurposed from a publishing company that I’ve walked past a million times in my life and never noticed. There is quite a few paparazzi outside, maybe one or two very polite protesters with placards. I mean, it’s a classic British scenario. (Lucy laughs) You’ve got this wonderful barrister, Hugo Keith, who’s kind of, again, you know, this kind of very, very high-ranking silk asking the questions. It’s all deference and it’s sombre. Dominic Cummings I mean, you know, in those situations becomes much more polite. So in fact it was all quite sanitised. You know, these terrible WhatsApp messages are read out and Cummings will then say, well, yes, I mean, I may have said that about Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary, but, you know, he’s a really talented diplomat. So in the room, (Lucy laughs) you know, everybody becomes a lot more polite.

Lucy Fisher
I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on what emerged, not only with your journalism hat on, but also your insights given you have operated at some of the highest levels in Downing Street yourself, having previously been head of the Number 10 policy unit under David Cameron. So if I may, I’d like to steer the conversation a little bit away from the specifics of the Covid pandemic and talk a bit more about what we learned from the testimony this week about the way the government operates in a crisis. So on that front, what were your key takeaways?

Camilla Cavendish
So I think anybody watching the testimony of particularly Lee Cain and Dominic Cummings, but also Martin Reynolds, who was the prime minister’s principal private secretary, would have come away with a strong impression that Number 10 was completely chaotic and that actually the guy who was supposed to be in charge was just not there. And this part of the Covid inquiry you could really say has been the trial of Boris Johnson, because it’s just so obvious that when the prime minister is not doing his job, nothing else works. But that’s quite an interesting reflection really on our system. The prime minister, in a funny way, doesn’t have as much power as he’s sometimes made out to have. I mean, obviously many things have to go through parliament. There’s a whole lot of constraints on the prime minister.

But in the Covid pandemic, what happened was that they bypassed parliament. There was no parliamentary scrutiny. It was a crisis, as you say, and the machine was lacking. And that does, I think, prompt some reflections about our system. You know, the truth is that Boris Johnson, I think, was a unique prime minister in being really not interested in doing the job. So one of the things that’s come out in the inquiry is that during February half term of 2020, there were 10 days in which Boris Johnson was not briefed. The reason for that, I assume, is that he didn’t ask to be briefed. So the advisers, you know — whatever we think about their expletive-ridden messages and so on and their sort of misogyny and destructive characteristics — the advisers are not entirely to blame because the guy at the top hadn’t got any grip.

But the wider machine is also very interesting, Lucy, because of course, what has happened is that after the coalition reforms to the NHS, the prime minister really doesn’t control the NHS and neither does Department of Health. And in the pandemic, I actually went back in March 2020 and worked in the Department of Health as an adviser in a national emergency. So I sort of saw it from the bottom up as well.

And the truth was that the NHS basically made, as far as I could see, its own decisions, and the Department of Health was constantly in a catch-up act. There was very, very little information. So one of the things Dominic Cummings has put his finger on in this testimony is that there was almost no data. I saw that from the Department of Health. We didn’t know how many people were dying. We had three different sets of data which didn’t match up with each other. And there were a lot of basic things like that, which really did make the job of government harder. So what happens is ministers then call for more data. Everyone gets on the phone, the poor people at the frontline who are actually trying to save lives in care homes and on the hospital end are literally trying to kind of, you know, assemble data sets. And that was a really big hole.

But I think overall, there were a lot of heroes in the pandemic. There were a lot of people who stepped up to do fabulous work. But the silo mentality within government was a major problem. It was also things like the Department of Health and the local government department, which is now called DLUHC, didn’t wanna talk to each other. Local authorities are responsible for social care, so the whole issue of care homes, which became so acute in the pandemic, fell under that department. The Treasury was giving local authorities money to pass on to care homes; many local authorities didn’t pass it on. We had to create an emergency fund through the Treasury to give the care homes money direct or they would have gone bust. And a lot of people are focused on there should have been a plan. I don’t think most countries had a plan for a pandemic. The countries that had been through Sars did. So some of the south-east Asian countries did really well because they were ready and they had test and trace systems.

In the UK, I fear that what happened was that we kept trying to reinvent the wheel. We didn’t learn from other countries. We didn’t say on day one, let’s just borrow South Korea’s test and trace system. We tried to build everything ourselves. And of course, the disaster that was the British test and trace system, which cost billions, is an example of that.

Lucy Fisher
I was also struck personally that Dominic Cummings, again, sweeping aside the invective, which has been well chewed over, made a lot of criticisms about the competence of ministers. He also made a lot of criticism of civil servants having this drag effect, effectively vetoing action by being blockers. Do you think there’s something in what he said on both those counts?

Camilla Cavendish
Yes, I do. And however difficult a character Dominic Cummings is, he is sometimes right about certain things. On the ministerial point, yes, it was an astonishingly weak cabinet. Boris Johnson was only prepared to appoint people who agreed with him on Brexit. Again, this is partly about leadership. If you have really clear leadership and direction, the civil service will come behind you. That is what it’s there to do. Civil service doesn’t set policy, it implements policy. And so it is difficult to disinter the total vacuum at the top from the drag and inertia of the system in this case. But I do feel Whitehall does need an overhaul and there are vast layers of people who, I’m afraid, certainly in that crisis felt that issuing guidance, for example, was the same as implementation. And it’s not. Also, from very early on in the pandemic, I would say, the civil service was already planning for a public inquiry and that for some individuals, limited, I think, what they were prepared to do.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, I know you’ve been watching the inquiry closely this week. What are the revelations that have caught your attention?

Stephen Bush
I kind of think, in many ways, like the fun bits this week have kind of been irrelevant, right? Dominic Cummings was deeply unsuited to the role of de facto chief of staff. He could not do it. I mean, essentially, like, we shouldn’t forget we’re talking about someone who basically was there about as long as some interns. Boris Johnson was not suited to the job of being prime minister. And again, there’s a reason why his premiership was a short one.

But the central issue of, you know, if Rishi Sunak or David Cameron or Keir Starmer or John Major or whoever you want to name had been prime minister in February 2020, they would also have been handed a bunch of preparations saying, yay, people won’t wear lockdown for longer than a couple of weeks. So here’s our chart showing 800,000 people will die instead. Yay. Love and kisses, the government’s pandemic plan. And I think actually that is the most significant thing because we will at some point have pandemics again. So this is a thing where the state’s going to have to do it again. And I kind of think the most significant thing, even more than the stuff about from Lee Cain saying there wasn’t enough diversity, which is why we got into a mess on free school meals or Helen McNamara saying, well, the fact that there weren’t enough women who were listened to is one of the reasons why the first lockdown in particular almost certainly did lead to the deaths of women in abusive relationships.

I mean, I think all of that is true, and it is certainly true to say that the UK’s lockdown model, when it belatedly came in, was very based around, you know, this model family of like two 50-somethings who are happily married, whose kids have left, who therefore can have a lockdown without gradually going insane. And it was quite difficult for almost everyone who didn’t fit that model that the government had. But actually, I think to me the big thing is still those chart after chart showing and then thousands upon thousands of people will die — guess that’s plan A.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. I want to pick up on one of the things you mentioned there, which is this lack of gender diversity around the table, because that really shocked me. As you say, this suggestion by Helen MacNamara, then the deputy cabinet secretary, that there will have been women who died due to a lack of provision for what would happen to victims of domestic violence and domestic abuse during lockdowns. Again, I just remember the confusion about access to abortions during the pandemic, confusion about pregnancy guidance. There’s horrific reports of women forced to give birth alone with, you know, their partners waiting in the car park outside. And you can see how that happened when there weren’t women in the room.

And I do kind of worry and I’m struck again, you know, that Rachel Reeves has talked about, you know, if she becomes chancellor if Labour win the election, how she wants to retool the economy in a way that takes women and the female economy into account because again, during the pandemic there was a lot of talk about, well, we’ll open up sort of football grounds and sports again for often male spectators. But again, businesses like beauticians, beauty salons that are often run by women were considered somehow trivial and left out of the softening of the lockdowns. Anna, what struck you from the inquiry this week?

Anna Gross
I was struck by Simon Stevens, who was the former chief executive of the NHS, saying that Matt Hancock, who was health secretary at the time, believed that he had the ability to make decisions on who could live or die if hospitals became overwhelmed, that there was a sense that, you know, someone has to make the decision. And I think that some of the Sage scientists were saying the politicians were turning to them and saying, when do we apply lockdowns, when do we do these things? And they were saying, you know, we can give you evidence, but we can’t necessarily make those decisions for you.

But at the same time, it just that those revelations, if true — and obviously Matt Hancock will have to answer to them next week — it just seems to suggest that there was this kind of incredible arrogance and belief and a lack of humility about this is a situation that we a) don’t understand very well, and b) hadn’t planned for particularly well. And we just have to listen to what people who run medical establishments, who run the NHS, who have looked into this for years say we should do. Matt Hancock is someone who has no medical background and the idea that he would be making a claim that he could make decisions about who would live or die in those situations was to me quite shocking.

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Lucy Fisher
We’ve just got time for our political stock picks. Stephen, Who are you buying or selling this week?

Stephen Bush
So I’m actually going to buy stock in the nudge unit. So nudge was basically the in-doctrine on Whitehall and the half of government when David Cameron came into power with loads and loads of policy interventions and small tweaks based on these findings. And it’s had for a variety of reasons, a dreadful couple of years.

Behavioural science was primarily blamed for, well, for the idea of plan A — this idea that the behavioural science showed that you could not get people to lock down for I think, you know, something like a fortnight before people would start to get obstreperous. And obviously, in the end we were locked down for much, much longer than that.

They’ve been hit, as has a lot of social science, by the replication crisis where they’ve struggled to replicate famous studies and findings. However, I think that has led to a bit of an overcorrection against nudge, and I actually think that the fact that it does appear and obviously the inquiry will report in 2026, I may end up losing my shirt on this particular stock pick. But I think when we get the full picture of what happened, I think some of the “it was all nudge’s fault, it was all behavioural science’s fault” will probably age quite badly and some of the useful lessons from it I think will probably come back into vogue in Whitehall and in governments across the world.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. Anna, who are you buying or selling?

Anna Gross
So I am buying as well. I’m buying Shabana Mahmood, who’s the shadow minister for justice. Labour’s obviously been going through quite a tricky time at the moment over the Israel-Palestine conflict and she’s become the sort of unofficial leader of those Labour politicians, many of them Muslims, some of them not, who’ve been calling for Keir to strengthen his position, take a much kind of harder line against Israel’s offensive. And I guess Keir has kind of purged the vast majority of the left from senior positions in the party. And I guess it seems to me that Shabana has gathered a kind of hidden strength within the party in those numbers who feel that they can speak through her to Keir.

Lucy Fisher
I think that tallies well with my stock pick this week. I’m selling Andy McDonald, who is exactly one of the leftwing Labour MPs. You mentioned he was in the shadow cabinet under Jeremy Corbyn and he’s not got away with his activism on the issue of the plight of the Palestinians. He has been suspended from the party and to my mind it’s just the latest development in a long line of moves to really take down the left. We’ve seen other prominent members — Diane Abbott also suspended for various reasons. The Labour leadership under Starmer has been very quick to spot any misdemeanour, any opportunity to discipline those Corbynite MPs. And I think this is yet another nail in the coffin, metaphorically speaking, for that wing of the party.

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Stephen Bush, Anna Gross, thanks for joining. And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes, so do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do leave a review or a star rating. It really helps spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline and Mischa Frankl-Duval. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here, same time, same place next week.

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