Comfortable with failure

On remembering that the audience in front of you isn't the only audience

There are many reasons why Rishi Sunak’s decision to interview Elon Musk at the end of this week’s AI Summit was ill-judged. One is that Musk is not just a player in the world of AI: he is a highly controversial figure who has said and done a whole host of contentious, and deeply political, things, which are implicitly endorsed when they are not challenged or even mentioned in a public conversation with the Prime Minister. And another is that Rishi Sunak can’t be trusted not to say silly things in public.

One of the most interesting things about Sunak is how unpolitical he is. This is in many ways a positive character trait: politics is a bit weird, and constantly thinking about how things can be cast by opponents in an unflattering light does have a risk of making politicians look like the kind of robots who you wouldn’t want as your best friend. But Sunak’s failure to play the game and be weird in the same way most politicians are weird means that he is weird in a way most politicians aren’t weird. A lot of this is about his wealth, but the most interesting out-of-touchness Sunak’s wealth has created is less about not understanding how contactless payments work¹ and more about him thinking in ways that are completely alien to people who haven’t worked for a hedge fund.

See for example his explanation to Nick Robinson on Political Thinking in 2019 that he backed Brexit after analysing it “from an investment perspective”:

“I’ve spent some time working and living in California, obviously I have a slightly more international perspective around these things from my business experience, and you talk about investing, so when I was investing we were investing for the long term, right, this was not about the next quarter, the next year, I was trying to find businesses to invest in that you could be with and support for years and years to come and I looked at this as a once in a generation opportunity, this decision was a once in a generation decision whether to support Brexit or not, and it was with that mindset, step back from the individual policy reasons, I thought, as I see it the pace of change is just accelerating around the world, and that is what my experience told me, being in California, being in Silicon Valley, seeing what was happening in India from a business side, from a technology side, just to give you one stat on that which always stays with me when I heard it, literally in the last two and a half years we’ve created more data than the entirety of human history before us, right, now that just gives you a sense of the pace of what’s happening, and my general broad view was, just given the pace of change that I see going on around me, being independent, having the flexibility and the kind of nimbleness to react and adapt to that changing environment, would be of enormous value to us, and I came at it from an investment perspective of that long-term view, was something that quite coloured my view of it.”²

This is not really how anyone else argues for Brexit, and when you say that deciding whether or not to leave the EU is a bit like deciding which businesses to invest in on behalf of a hedge fund, you are not using a relatable analogy calculated to appeal to most voters. It’s a long way from Margaret Thatcher talking about household budgets. But it might well appeal to Elon Musk.

Which brings us to the most important political line in the Sunak-Musk interview, in response to a question about how to make the UK a breeding-ground for unicorn companies (startups with a value of $1 billion or more):

“The thing that is tougher is the thing that Elon talked about, which is culture, right, it’s how do you transpose that culture from places like Silicon Valley, across the world, where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something, and be comfortable with failure, you talk about that a lot.”

Now, I know what he’s trying to say here. I have worked - I do work - for companies set up from scratch by people who were taking the risk of failure, and I admire them for doing it. But there is both a bad-faith reading of this, and a good-faith reading of it which recognises that even if we really do want more risk-takers in our economy, we also have millions of people who have every right to want the security of a regular paycheck and who simply cannot afford to be comfortable with failure.

Under Keir Starmer, Labour has focused heavily on “security” as a defining frame for their political message and policy agenda, repeating the word again and again, from Rachel Reeves’ “securonomics” to the theme in Starmer’s conference speech of the “age of insecurity” facing working people. It’s a good frame, but to be fair to the Conservatives they’re not against security. Except that now the Prime Minister says more people should give it up.

That’s the kind of line that opposition attack teams dream about. It gives wings to the security theme and turns it into a proper political dividing line. Here’s Labour’s video highlighting the quote (you can’t embed Twitter videos into Substack posts - thanks Elon! - but if you click the picture you should be taken to it).

I fully expect Labour to use this line again and again. You’re going to be bored of hearing it. Labour shouldn’t be able to use it, because it shouldn’t exist. And the reason it exists is that the Prime Minister went on stage with a tech billionaire, and was more interested in finding ways to agree with him than in making sure he sounded like someone who understands how people who aren’t tech billionaires think.

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1. Incidentally, that story contains the absolutely brilliant subhead, in its summary of Sunak’s day: “This morning he appeared to claw back dignity by getting the cost of bread right”.

2. This is a very long quote. I could have edited it down, but I had to transcribe and read the whole thing so I’m going to make you read the whole thing too.