Should the Prime Minister add 'Chief Technology Officer' to his official title alongside First Lord of the Treasury? That's the question which has been prompted by Danny Kruger, who's leading Reform UK's preparations for government.
The East Wiltshire MP, who once served as a Political Secretary to the PM under Boris Johnson, thinks Number 10 must have digital transformation as a chief mission if the UK is going to meet the AI challenge. As such, a CTO should sit inside the Downing Street HQ.
Speaking in Westminster earlier this week, Kruger was able to diagnose the problem facing Britain: the country has to rely on other nation states, namely the United States, for AI hardware and software and therefore lacks meaningful technological sovereignty.
At the same time, as CapEx and OpEx costs surge, an indebted UK cannot currently put up the cash required to compete at the highest levels of the LLM hardware race. So what should we do about it? Kruger wants the government to help encourage more AI SMEs and scale-ups, whilst indicating that Reform would shepherd pension funds towards British AI companies to build a network of companies and organisations that would secure some technological sovereignty.
When I pressed him on the matter, Kruger said this proposed reform, alongside favourable tax code changes, are still to be decided and Reform's Shadow Chancellor Robert Jenrick and Richard Tice would have a say on the matter.
But Kruger did reveal that Reform, which is still leading the opinion polls, is actively considering whether to allow councils to keep all business rates generated by data centres, the digital infrastructure powering the AI revolution.
As for more modest state funding being directed towards AI licence grants for businesses and schools, Kruger told me that he was 'open' to such a proposal, but, instinctively, he was against mass amounts of taxpayer funds being directed towards interventionist initiatives.
Meanwhile, up in the North of England, Andy Burnham’s team are reportedly also thinking about AI sovereignty. Like Kruger, the advisors around the expected future PM are worried about the UK’s dependency on foreign-made and controlled technologies.
“Key Burnham advisers including former tech minister Josh Simons have drafted in figures in the AI sector to help craft a new tech and AI strategy, including researchers Antonio Weiss and Martha Dacombe, according to people briefed on the discussions,” The FT has claimed (link).
“Unfettered tech boosterism is a vote-loser,” said one person who has been involved in discussions, adding that Burnham’s team had discussed a new focus on ensuring that AI technology worked for British companies and the UK public rather than US tech giants.”
It sounds like we will be seeing less US mega-caps going into Number 10, at least by its famous front door, while AI Growth Zones, designated regional hubs designed to rapidly scale AI computing infrastructure, could be for the chop under a Burnham administration.
From a 2025 Goldman Sachs paper on Mag7 CapEx rates
I’m sure you could strap a smart-watch to a dog, float a sausage over its head and hope it chases after the mystery meat for five kilometres. Otherwise, it’s not really worth cheating running apps to set new ‘personal bests’.
Unfortunately, you will have to get out there and do the work yourself. To quote a phrase, “who’s going to carry the boats?” (link). You are and the good news is that you’re going to get loads of likes on the internet for it.
That’s just part of the secret to Strava’s success, validation and vanity.
The San Francisco-based company, named after the Swedish phrase ‘to strive’, launched more than two decades ago amid the aftershock of the 2008 financial crisis.
But the app’s origin story actually dates back much further. Co-founders Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey met on Harvard University’s rowing team in the late 1980s.
Horvath later earned a PhD, going into academia, while Gainey joined the world of investment banking.
The pair kept in touch and the itch to recreate those competitive and collegiate days got back under their skin in the early 1990s. This led to the creation of their first venture, Cana Sports.
The idea was to use the nascent internet to bring your friends together to train via a virtual locker-room.
But the year was 1995. With no broadband, universal computer access and smartphones, Cana was too far ahead of its time.
Though this business didn’t take off, it did give Horvath and Gainey vital experience in the start-up world.
The duo would leverage this knowledge again in the late 2000s as the Web 2.0 ecosystem was establishing itself. Strava was launched.
Things started off slowly and the company was bootstrapped until 2011, when Horvath and Gainey secured a $3.5m Series A round.
The thesis was prophetic: GPS-enabled devices would become exponentially more popular amongst consumers, including actual and wannabe athletes (link).
Sigma Partners was the first VC to back the plan, with Sequoia Capital joining the party in 2014. Their cash, including several other funding rounds, accelerated Strava’s growth, putting it in a near perfect position for what was to come next.
When the Pandemic broke-out at the start of 2020 the app had just 40 million users. It was still a niche destination, but thanks to government-enforced lockdowns people took to exercise to break their boredom.
Strava was the go-to app to test yourself against your safely distanced friends and colleagues and by the end of 2023 the platform had more than 120 million users.
The Privacy Paradox
That is the business’ other secret to success: timing. Strava, as its founders envisioned, had caught on as the wearable craze took off.
Smartwatches are now ubiquitous with our digital lives and so is our paradoxical approach to privacy.
Though we say we want less snooping on our movements and tastes, we are happy to forgo full privacy in order to engage with and play a part in the user-generated economy.
This is especially true of Gen Z, who have been dropped into an online world of TikTok, multi-screening and super-fast broadband.
This generation, more than any other, has also snubbed alcohol. The lockdowns shut the pubs and fitness apps promoted teetotal behaviour by showing the negative impacts of booze on sleep and your heart-rate.
It’s hard to escape last night’s bad choices when they’re on your wrist for the next week.
Source: Gallup
These trends have super-charged the popularity of running, cycling and swimming.
The London and New York marathons saw applications jump by 31% and 22% respectively last year, for example, while Hyrox, a cardio-intensive workout sport, has seen its own boom (link).
The self-described ‘fitness competition for everybody’ now regularly attracts thousands of participants to its events, which are deliberately limited to drive-up demand and maintain the quality of the production.
Hyrox has subsequently become notorious amongst fitness fanatics for its waiting lists, with the most physically and financially willing amateur athletes – one event can set you back $180 just for the entry fee – to travel abroad.
Factor in flights, food and accommodation, and you are easily hitting the $500 to $600 mark to run around a warehouse on a weekend.
It’s worth it for the Gram though, with many participants choosing to be upsold on the professional photography package (link).
This is the ecosystem Strava and its freemium model is thriving in (the upgraded version is $80 per year) – more and more people want to workout and they’re willing to spend a significant slice of their disposable income on wellbeing.
And that’s the app’s final secret, positivity. You can call it vainglorious, you can call it egotistical, but you still have to commit to self-improvement while someone cheers you on, albeit online.
As we move further into the AI-generated internet, Strava’s user-generated model is offering a genuine alternative to the doom and gloom seen elsewhere.
The company reportedly wants to take that proposition to the public markets and recently hired the former CFO of Pelton, Barry McCarthy (link).
With a most recent private valuation of $2.2bn, Strava is looking to see what Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley can bring to an IPO.
In the meantime, its user base continues to grow both organically and thanks to Strava’s acquisitions, including the recent purchase of Runna, an AI-supported coaching app (link).
As of January, Strava has 180 million users, a 350% increase on where it was in 2019. By comparison, Reddit has more than 120 million daily active users.
That virtual clubhouse idea doesn’t sound so niche anymore.
Other things I’ve found interesting
A young cinematographer couldn’t land a job so he went on a one-year birdwatching trip with his brother. They turned the adventure across America into a documentary (link)
Neural Foundry is a big fan of Anthropic’s language model, Claude (link)
A16Z has closed a $15bn mega-round and infrastructure will be the focus of one of its new funds (link)
The UK’s Raspberry Pi has warned of chip shortage thanks to the AI boom (link), while the UK government is looking for someone to lead its Sovereign AI Fund (link)
A long-form interview of Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind (link)
Surgical strikes, minimal casualties, night-time raids. We’ve been here before. But this time we’re not watching cable news correspondents embedded inside the American War Machine at prime time.
With the smartphone’s usurpation of the TV, memeable content is instead being beamed straight into our pockets via the White House at all hours of the day.
Uncensored and unedited, this digital propaganda has successfully established the initial narrative around Trump’s invasion of Venezuela.
There’s been little talk of those killed by the assault, as if the conflict didn’t really happen, while Nicolás Maduro’s moustached and blindfolded face has spread across the internet.
‘Who is Nicolás Maduro?’, SEO-friendly articles asked as live blogs furiously charted the reaction to the raid. Elsewhere, hot takes on the dictator’s downfall spread across social media.
Whether they were for, against or indifferent to the invasion, posters have been inclined to use Maduro’s now infamous capture-shot as a thumbnail.
If somewhat sinister, it’s good for engagement with its low-res, we’ve just caught a bad guy, quality.
For their part, the President and his allies quickly branded the now ex-President of Venezuela as a narco-terrorist, warned the rest of the world ‘not to play games’ with the US and falunted Trump’s man-of-action credentials.
“If he says he’s serious about something, he means it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a press conference, timed so America could wake-up to Trump’s hour-long reflections on the kidnapping.
No US personnel or equipment were harmed in the process, we learned, and the country’s “very large” oil companies would soon be deployed to Venezuela to re-establish the industry there.
“They sent everybody bad into the United States,” Trump, flanked by Rubio, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pete Hegseth’s brown shoes (oh so very brown), added for good measure.
We had to take his word for it, no mainstream media packaging needed. The President had served up Maduro and the memes. Soon emergency podcasts whirled up, one thousand and one reasons were given for the assault.
Was it China? Was it Russia? Was it energy prices? And what the hell is the Monroe Doctrine?
They only had the White House’s information to go on, but that didn’t stop the commentaries. Forget the fixers, the foreign correspondents too, there’s content to be made.
Trump knows this as he curated carefully worded missives to be fired-out over Truth Social. The fog of war means he can’t be fact-checked.
But it didn’t go all his way. Trump’s old TV producer brain must have been frustrated that he couldn’t release the footage of the Maduro operation, which would have been live-streamed into the President.
Creators, through their self-imposed sense of urgency, have used the hygienic White House account. There are no mangled bodies in this version of events, only victories – big and beautiful ones, to quote a phrase.
As for the military tactics deployed by the Americans as they raided Fort Tiuna, there is also no time for ignorance.
Media generalists must pose as experts, aggregating the slogans, images and narratives provided by Trump. It was those Special Forces/CIA chaps that done it, they parroted.
A representation of the invasion, abstracted from the real-world events they were created from, was quickly created.
The movie about the conflict played out in real-time and allowed all of us to participate in it thanks to social media.
It was like Chuck Norris’ The Delta Force, but we got to write the script and infinite versions of the production were allowed.
The only plot rule was that the main character had to cheat death and he had to be shown riding into town — the town being Caracas — to capture his rival.
Whether those characters are heroes or villains was up to you, so is the yet be written conclusion of the story.
You may want to write a sequel, a follow-up which focuses on other towns. Havana comes to mind.
A screenshot from Papers, Please, a popular video game where players serve as an immigration officer in the dystopian country of Arstotzka
For reasons no one else can understand or explain, the British government is very keen to spend a lot of money on what could be a very bad idea.
Like many of Keir Starmer’s freshest flagship policies, the universal and mandatory Digital ID idea was never actually endorsed by the electorate.
But regardless of the wishes of the pesky UK public, Number 10 is looking to plough ahead with the unpopular policy after its promotion by the increasingly influential Tony Blair Institute (link):
“Digital-ID systems improve governance, facilitate greater inclusion, fuel economic growth and help governments achieve their core goals. Far from enabling greater surveillance, digital IDs can actually make information more secure.
Beyond their public-sector benefits, they also allow citizens to interact more safely and smoothly with private-sector institutions. They are a critical component of a reimagined state fit for the 21st century.”
For his part, Blair has remerged in recent years as a Big Technology advocate, arguing that new software can fundamentally reshape how states deliver their services.
The former Prime Minister, like Starmer, is a globalist, who sees the Singaporean system, whereby collectivist discipline is promoted by a powerful centralised government in a highly multicultural society, as an ideal template to shape Western policies around (link).
It’s a technocratic expansion of New Labour’s supranationalism, one which in 1998 fully extended the remit of the European Court of Human Rights into British law.
A year after the introduction of the Human Rights Act and as a rising star in London’s legal world, Starmer published a 900-word book on European law. He has since gone on to promote an idealised international order (link), even as we move into a multi-polar world.
At his political core then the Prime Minister shares the same consequentialist views as Blair, including the belief that the state has a great amount of competence to deliver complex projects and a prima facie moral justification to limit individuals’ personal liberty in the right circumstances.
That’s a charitable view of the philosophy behind the Digital ID proposal anyway. A contrary view would come from advocates of the natural rights and resistance theories which shaped Anglo-American thought (Locke, Jefferson and Nozick et al).
They would reject such a stance, arguing that a government would considerably overreach its limited remit by interfering with a person’s individual liberty in such a heavy-handed manner.
On more practical matters, meanwhile, it appears that Starmer’s administration, with its high levels of debt and public spending, can’t actually afford it.
The UK government has subsequently entered into a gloriously bureaucratic row with The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the financial watchdog Labour championed heading into the last election.
For its part, the OBR has said (link) the Digital ID bill could surpass £1.8bn of ‘unfunded costs’ – that’s Whitehall-ise for fudging the books, an accusation the government hasn’t taken too kindly to.
In a reply to a ministerial question tabled in the House of Commons, the government responded by saying that it didn’t recognise the OBR’s figures and that the scheme would be put to a public consultation (link).
Crucially, however, we’re still none the wiser as to how much Starmer thinks this policy will cost taxpayers or how exactly the system will stop people illegally entering the country.
Here’s what Starmer said in September:
“Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK. It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure.
And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly – rather than hunting around for an old utility bill.”
The proof to back up these big claims is still pending and may never come. But if the Digital ID plan is forced through the Commons, thanks to Labour’s massive majority, it will only build on Starmer’s short but impressive anti-democratic résumé.
That currently includes limiting jury trials, cancelling elections and, amongst other things, instructing government lawyers to oppose the wishes of directly elected local authorities (link).
Alas, consequentialists always frame themselves as preserving the greater good.
Is the government happy to build new and centralised databases with a significant amount of personal data and, if so, at what cost?
Given past hacks and cyber-attacks (link), would the government admit that the project would immediately go on the National Risk Register?
How would enrolment and registration work?
Would the whole project impact trust in the government (especially amongst minority groups)?
Digital ID advocates claim, like a magical policy wand, it will help solve all manner of issues, including immigration. But why not make the existing systems work? As just one example, the past independent chief inspector of borders and immigration pointed out several flaws until the last government fired him (link).
We already have ID cards (passports, driving licences and so on) so why create another level of government infrastructure and a stealth tax on citizens?
Rural broadband (and the lack of it) is still an issue (link). Other adults don’t have smartphones. Will these people be excluded from society?
How would digital ID enforcement work and who would carry it out, the police?
What budget would a government give the NHS to help cope with the transition to digital ID?
How, practically, would you unify the DVLA, Passport Office and National Insurance databases?
How would the collected data be shared? How many functions/apps would the Digital ID have?
Overall, how would a Digital ID project not become a large IT infrastructure that runs over time, runs over budget and undermines public trust?
“The broken promises are strewn across the country's memory.” — Tony Blair, writing in the 1997 New Labour general election manifesto (link).
The lag is real. Though the Covid-19 pandemic started around five years ago, its aftershocks will still be felt for years to come, impacting economics, politics and how we choose to live our lives.
You don’t have to look further than the 2008 financial crisis to see how these things play out.
Here in the UK it wasn’t until the middle of 2011 when the unemployment rate peaked at 8.4% (link), with youth joblessness (16 to 24-year-olds) rising to more than 22% as a generation of graduates questioned why they put themselves into debt.
Source: The ONS
Today, unemployment is back on the rise for our future workers. As it stands, the rate has climbed to 16%, up from 10.9% around the same period in 2022 (link).
Without substantial economic growth, another youth unemployment crisis surely awaits. This time there’s more debt, higher rents and a generative AI revolution to deal with.
Understandably, hundreds of thousands of Britons are voting with their feet and leaving the country, many for good (link).
For everyone else, those pandemic habits have institutionalised themselves into our daily lives. Less eating out, more frugalness and a pickier perspective when it comes to consumption.
Here’s what Ken Murphy, the boss of Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain, is noticing (link):
Moving on to that, the customer sentiment and how they’re feeling. I think the best way to describe it is mixed.
I think that the shopping habits they’ve built in over the last three or four years following the initial cost of living crisis have stuck. And in some ways, some of them have been accentuated. So, you are seeing an increase in fresh food purchases.
Which I think is a good thing for the health of the nation. But also, an indication of a trend of more scratch cooking, more cooking from first principles.
We’re also seeing though a trend of more dining in, in weekend and evening occasions, as evidenced by the strong growth in Finest of over 16% which is now lapping three years of consecutive strong, double-digit growth.
The rich, meanwhile, who have benefited from an asset price surge (link), keep getting richer (link), in what has been dubbed a ‘K-Shaped economy’.
These trends aren’t going anywhere, at least for now, and they will decide who wields political power going forward.
Source: House of Commons Library
Trump benefitted from the situation when he took on Joe Biden and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was able to kick the Conservatives out of government last year because the economy was performing so badly (Rishi Sunak seemed relatively competent in Number 10, but he was cursed by his predecessors).
Heading into office, Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised not to raise taxes on workers and prioritise economic growth. On both counts the pair have failed, the media has turned on them (link) and there is endless speculation about the Prime Minister’s future.
Increasingly, D-Day looks like the 7th of May. That’s when elections will be held for the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments as well as local authorities across the rest of the UK.
Once again, the government has decided to delay some of the crucial votes (link), but a bad result at the ballot box could still trigger the beginning of the end for Starmer.
Left-wing rivals, including the Health Secretary Wes Streeting (link), are already setting their stalls out should the ‘ball come loose at the back of the scrum’, as Boris Johnson once quipped.
It’s all looking quite precarious as a general sense of economic doom and gloom permeates throughout the country (link) like a nasty case of mould.
But politics being politics, Labour’s rivals have been able to seize upon the dire situation.
Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has picked apart the government’s record on immigration and crime, while the Conservative Party, under the now semi-stable leadership of Kemi Badenoch, has put the economy at the heart of their campaigning.
Elsewhere, The Green Party and its new leader, Zack Polanski, a former hypnotherapist (link), has attacked Starmer over the Israel-Gaza conflict and his administration’s renewable credentials.
Labour has subsequently leaked votes left, right and centre, ending the year in joint third place:
As for the Prime Minister himself, just one in six Britons (18%) have a favourable opinion of Starmer, according to YouGov.
You would expect another restart from Number 10 in the New Year. This would be Starmer’s second, having already attempted a post-election rejuvenation in the winter of last year (link).
But, as it stands, data across social media transparency portals reveal that Labour is heavily prioritising the campaign of Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.
He’s pushing bread and butter Labour messages across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube against the SNP. Labour would cut energy bills and improve the NHS north of the border if the party was in charge, Sarwar has claimed across various video formats.
Meanwhile, Rosie Wrighting, the Labour MP for Kettering, is increasingly being promoted by the party on social media alongside a cost of living-focused message (link).
Fellow East Midlander, Natalie Fleet MP, is also featured heavily across Labour’s channels as well as anti-Farage videos, contrasting Starmer’s upbringing to the private school boy (link)
Reform, meanwhile, heads into 2026 pushing a ‘Broken Britain’ message (link) and backing what it calls ‘alarm clock Britain’, whilst urging its supporters to ‘never trust a Tory’. As for the Conservative Party, it has almost been purely focused on piling the pressure on Rachel Reeves, as outlined below.
For Polanski’s part, The Green Party has done very little on the paid-for social media front, but the leader has appeared on popular YouTube shows and has even launched his own podcast, Bold Politics. The move aligns with where voters are at — YouTube is universally popular in the UK (link).
Finally, the Liberal Democrat party seems to be running out of steam as we approach 2026. Even though Ed Davey’s stunts during the 2024 general election saw the party hit above its weight in the media, mostly because it was all a bit mad (link), the party has failed to capitalise on the attention.
It has most recently ran a series of attack ads, focusing on the Tory seats of East Hampshire, South Shropshire and Salisbury, all constituencies the Liberal Democrats will heavily contest at the next general election.
Returning to Number 10, its looks like the penny had dropped, via new(ish) comms chief Tim Allen, that social media is the present and the future.
For the Lobby, the assorted groups of political correspondents, that means they will get less briefings as content creators are asked to join press conferences.
The Spectator’s James Heale has dubbed it a ‘war on the Lobby’ (link), but the move could well spawn the next generation of political media stars, as we saw during the televised briefings during the pandemic.
There will also likely be a re-concentration on the media in Wales and Scotland, with nationalist parties Plaid Cymru and the SNP leading in the polls.
But, alas, the air-war can only get you so far in politics. You need a good ground game too, something which Labour has been adept at (so far).
