AI is already changing work in London, but for most people it still feels like something being done to them rather than something they have any say over. Trust in technology is fragile. Confidence in institutions is under pressure. Too often, AI arrives in workplaces without enough discussion about its purpose, who benefits and what it means for the people whose jobs are changing.

The taskforce started from a simple premise. AI is inevitable, but how work changes because of it is not. Technology opens up new possibilities; people, organisations and governments decide what those possibilities become. The choices we make about job design, careers, productivity and opportunity will shape whether AI strengthens London’s economy or widens the gaps already there.

Spend any time in AI debates and it is easy to conclude the future is already written. One story promises extraordinary prosperity. Another predicts widespread job losses. Both leave surprisingly little room for human agency. Our work reached a different place. The future of work will be shaped through millions of decisions made by employers, workers, educators, investors and governments. Technology changes what is possible. People decide what happens next.

London does not have the luxury of waiting. GLA analysis suggests around 2.4 million Londoners work in occupations where generative AI could automate a meaningful share of existing tasks, with more than one million in roles facing particularly high levels of exposure. None of this means mass unemployment is around the corner.

The bigger risk is unlikely to arrive as a dramatic shock. It is more likely to emerge quietly, fewer entry-level opportunities, weaker career ladders, widening inequality and a growing sense that change is happening to people rather than with them. Left unmanaged, those trends would damage London’s economy and public confidence in technological progress.

The good news is that London begins from a position of real strength. It is one of the world’s leading AI cities, home to outstanding universities, frontier AI companies, innovative businesses and one of the deepest concentrations of knowledge-intensive industries anywhere. We are likely to experience both the opportunities and the disruption earlier than most places. Leadership brings responsibility as well as opportunity.

We believe London needs new civic capabilities and we recommended three.

The first is the London AI Early Action System. It is an early-warning and early-opportunity capability bringing together labour-market data, employer intelligence and evidence from boroughs, colleges, unions, universities and Londoners themselves. Its purpose is not to produce reports but to trigger earlier action. By the time conventional statistics show graduate recruitment has fallen, apprenticeships have declined or new skills shortages have emerged, employers may already have redesigned work. London should be able to see those shifts while there is still time to respond.

The second is the London AI at Work Partnership. The Mayor will convene employers, workers, educators, trade unions and City Hall to redesign work, not simply deploy technology. AI will reshape jobs through countless organisational decisions: which tasks are automated, which remain human-led, how expertise is developed and how productivity gains are shared. Those choices should be deliberate rather than accidental. London should also use the levers it already has including procurement, skills funding, business support and convening power to back organisations investing in people as well as technology.

The third is the London Future Ready Guarantee. AI is changing not just the kind of work people do, but how young people get a start in work at all. If routine entry-level roles become harder to find, we need new ways for young Londoners to show what they can do, build confidence and get a foothold. The Guarantee will recognise the human strengths that will matter even more in an AI economy — judgement, communication, creativity, collaboration, adaptability and problem-solving. It should be shaped with young people, employers, educators and trade unions, and it should open real doors through employer recognition, project-based learning, apprenticeships and new civic routes into work. The aim is not to save every old pathway. It is to make sure new, fairer ones are created quickly enough to keep pace with change.

Together, these recommendations create a simple sequence: see change early, shape change together and create new opportunities. Each can begin within London’s existing powers. Others we discussed, including greater flexibility over skills funding, stronger incentives for workforce transition and retaining public savings from successful employment outcomes, would require national government. London should press for those changes while getting on with the work it can already do.

The Mayor has accepted all of the taskforce’s recommendations, so now we move from diagnosis to delivery. Reports are easy to publish. Implementation is where ideas prove their worth. I have been particularly encouraged by the willingness of organisations including TfL, London’s universities and BusinessLDN to help shape the next phase.

If London succeeds, it can show that a global city does not have to choose between technological progress and public trust. Cities that help people navigate technological change successfully are likely to innovate most successfully too.

On a more personal note, working on the taskforce also changed my own relationship with AI. Early in the process I used it constantly. I was structuring drafts and producing presentations. It was useful, but Eventually I realised I was going round in circles. Clarity only came when I stepped away from AI and wrote the report myself. The process was probably slower, but the thinking became sharper. I was the perfect example of our central thesis.

London will not be the only city grappling with these questions. Every major economy is trying to capture the productivity gains of AI without leaving people behind. My hope is that London can show those goals are not in conflict. Acting early, involving people in shaping change and investing in new opportunities is not a brake on innovation but is one of its greatest enablers.

Here is the excellent data from The institute for future of work that we used :

https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/business-and-economy/business-and-economy-publications/ai-taskforce-evidence-summary

And here is the main report :

https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/business-and-economy/mayors-priorities-londons-economy-and-business/london-ai-and-jobs-taskforce

Artificial intelligence is becoming a bit like alcohol.

The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

Not my line. Homer Simpson’s. But it may be the most accurate description of this entire AI moment.

Public debate about AI swings constantly between two extremes. On one side: the evangelists. Productivity boom. Unlimited growth. A new industrial revolution. On the other: the alarmists. Mass unemployment. Social collapse. Machines replacing humans.

Most people are not living at either extreme. Neither am I.

But one thing feels increasingly clear: the next challenge in AI is not simply capability. It is legitimacy.

Partly because of this, I am chairing a new taskforce for the Mayor of London looking at AI, jobs and the future of work across the capital. We are intentionally keeping it practical, evidence-led and short-term. No mission creep. No speculative AGI debates.

The focus is on what is already changing inside organisations before it fully appears in unemployment statistics: hiring, training, progression, management and job design.

Because the labour market is already shifting.

Recent research from King’s College London found that nearly seven in ten workers are worried about the economic impacts of generative AI on jobs. More than half believe it will eliminate more jobs than it creates. Around one in five think it could contribute to social unrest.

Meanwhile, recent Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis and broader labour-market data point to a weakening entry-level jobs market, with graduate recruitment cooling sharply and younger workers increasingly squeezed between economic uncertainty and changing employer expectations.

I do not read this as anti-technology sentiment.

I think it reflects something deeper: a growing suspicion that the gains from this next technological wave will once again flow disproportionately to a relatively small number of people, firms and places.

After all, we have seen versions of this story before.

Broadband transformed economies. Smartphones changed behaviour. Social media reshaped culture. Platforms created extraordinary convenience and wealth. But the benefits did not spread evenly. Power, capital and influence concentrated in familiar places and among familiar groups.

It is valuable to understand the history because AI is arriving into societies where trust in institutions is already fragile.

One of the most striking features of the current AI race is how uneven public confidence is globally. In China and parts of Asia, optimism about AI remains relatively high. In Europe and the US, public attitudes are noticeably more anxious and sceptical.

The countries that deploy AI fastest may not simply be those with the best models. They may be the ones where citizens still broadly trust institutions to manage technological change.

Western democracies are trying to build transformative technologies at precisely the moment public trust in governments, media and large corporations is fraying.

That tension sits underneath many of the current arguments around AI.

Take the growing legal battles involving OpenAI and other frontier labs. The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI may ultimately become one of the defining cases of this era — not simply because of copyright law, but because it asks a deeper question: can the internet’s collective knowledge, journalism and creativity simply be absorbed into AI systems without meaningful consent, attribution or compensation?

Even if courts ultimately permit much of it, the public may not automatically experience it as fair.

Societies can absorb astonishing amounts of technological disruption when people believe the rules are legitimate and the gains are shared. They become far less tolerant when change feels extractive, opaque or designed somewhere else by people they neither know nor trust.

And change is now happening extraordinarily quickly.

London is probably more exposed to this shift than any other part of the UK. City Hall analysis suggests around 46 percent of London workers — roughly 2.4 million people — are in jobs where generative AI could automate at least some tasks.

This is not some separate “tech sector” story. A whole-economy transition is unfolding across offices, hospitals, classrooms, studios and public services.

At the same time, the barriers to experimentation have collapsed.

I have never written a line of code in my life. Yet with the latest AI tools, I now find myself building small apps late at night much to the amusement of my family.

When the cost of trying something falls dramatically, the number of attempts rises dramatically too.

Many organisations are now living through a period of “shadow AI” — employees adopting tools informally long before governance, training or management structures have caught up.

Junior staff are quietly using ChatGPT before formal policies exist. Teachers are generating lesson plans late at night. Civil servants are using NotebookLM to analyse draft policy papers before meetings even begin. Small firms are automating work that previously required much larger teams or expensive outside agencies.

A junior consultant can now produce in twenty minutes what used to take half a day.

So, the question is no longer simply whether something can be built, it is who realises it already can.

One consequence of this shift is that where power sits inside organisations and labour markets is in flux.

Employers are beginning to redesign work around AI capability before the headline employment numbers fully show up. Many professions are quietly losing exactly the kinds of repetitive junior tasks through which people traditionally learned judgement and experience.

Labour markets rarely break all at once. They soften first around the edges.

Hundreds of applications. Automated responses. Or increasingly, no response at all.

Much of the anxiety around AI is really anxiety about disappearing stepping stones.

How does somebody become a lawyer without junior drafting work? Or an architect without early design work? Or a producer without assistant roles where judgement develops over time?

Those are not abstract questions. They are economic questions. Social mobility questions. Political questions.

London does, however, have real advantages here.

This city has repeatedly reinvented itself through creativity, openness and adaptability. It absorbed the decline of manufacturing. It built world-class strengths in finance, media, science, technology and the creative industries. Entire categories of work emerged that barely existed a generation earlier.

London is unusually exposed to this next transition — but also unusually capable of shaping it.

The goal should not simply be to host successful AI companies. London should aim to become a city where far more people feel capable of participating in the upside of technological change.

That means protecting entry routes into work. Rethinking training. Piloting AI-augmented apprenticeships. Helping smaller firms adopt these tools responsibly. Moving faster inside universities and public institutions.

Most importantly, it means taking public trust seriously.

Not fear. Not anti-innovation. Seriousness.

Because ultimately, the societies that succeed in AI may not simply be the ones with the smartest models. They may be the ones where people feel they still have agency inside the transition itself.

Otherwise, much as I enjoy taking life advice from Homer Simpson, artificial intelligence risks becoming less like a tool we shape — and more like a force that simply happens to us.

At some unholy hour on a recent Sunday morning, I found myself in an enormous sports hall watching both my sons compete in a jujitsu tournament.

This meant all the things most parents will recognise: bad coffee, damp floors, low-level nerves, and me trying to work out the scoring system in real time. On one mat, two boys were circling each other for what felt like forever: lots of gripping, edging, not much else. Then a parent behind me started shouting at the referee.

“Penalty. That is boring.”

It was a good line, but not quite the rule.

Colloquially, everyone seemed to call it a penalty for being boring - an appealing idea to anyone who has sat in a meeting wondering why twenty minutes have passed and nothing has actually happened.

However, the actual offence was closer to inaction. Non-engagement. Stalling. You do not get penalised for lacking flair. You get penalised for refusing to get on with it.

That distinction feels useful well beyond a sports hall.

We spend too much time asking whether leaders are exciting enough, and not enough asking whether they are actually doing the job. Being boring and being passive are not the same thing. One can be steady, diligent, even rather grey, and still fully engaged with the thing in front of you. There is, plainly, a version of boring that is just steadiness. The more dangerous version is the one we flatter with words like prudence, balance or process when what we really mean is drift. The kind where institutions look busy, hold meetings, issue strategies, produce new language — and still fail on execution.

Climate policy is full of this. The Climate Change Committee says the UK’s 2030 target is still within reach, but also makes clear that the easier gains have largely already been banked and that the much harder work now lies elsewhere in the economy. Its latest progress reports are blunt: too little progress, too much delay, too much reliance on future good intentions. The problem is not that nobody knows what to say. The problem is that we keep mistaking setting targets for progress .

Water is a filthier, more literal version of the same story.

What is so maddening about the current sewage scandal is not just the pollution itself, though there is plenty of that. It is the hovering. For years, self-monitoring was allowed to pass for regulation. Companies were, in effect, allowed to mark their own homework, and everyone acted surprised when this turned out badly. The government now says that system is going to be changed. Good. It should never have been allowed to stand for so long.

Only recently have I realised that the size of this issue is grotesque. Hundreds of thousands of sewage discharges are still being recorded. Vast stretches of time in which storm overflows are spilling. This is not some old scandal that has since been tidied away in a committee room. It is still happening, at scale, now.

What I find striking is how many people still do not really know much about what they are drinking, washing or swimming in - or know it only in that vague, abstract way that allows you to carry on as normal.

I would encourage anyone to watch Dirty Business on C4. Not because one television drama is going to fix the sewerage system, but because it makes the whole mess harder to file away as one more scandal. And then, after that, look at the maps. Look at SewageWatch. Look at the Surfers Against Sewage app. Look at the Rivers Trust map. Once you can see discharges in real time, or near real time, the issue stops feeling historical and starts feeling live.

Arguably, this is where the story stops being only about ministers, regulators and water bosses. We have agency too.

Not infinite agency, obviously. I am not pretending households can personally rebuild old fashioned sewerage systems. But we are not just spectators either. We choose what to notice. More to the point, we choose whether to leave something in the category of grim background noise or drag it into the foreground and insist on looking at it properly. One reason these scandals endure is that they become repetitive enough to stop feeling shocking. The first sewage story is revolting. The fiftieth risks becoming wallpaper. The maps help because they make vagueness impossible.

Tech has used much the same script. Water might be the most viscerally dirty version of it, but it is not the only one. Platforms have hidden behind the language of self-regulation for years: trust us, let us manage this ourselves, anything stronger will kill innovation. Then eventually the whistle blows. A court case. A regulator. A scandal. A fine. Last month, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties in a case about platform safety and child sexual exploitation. The details will be argued over. The broader pattern is familiar. If organisations do not engage seriously with harms early, they usually get engaged by courts, regulators or events later. Different sector, same instinct. Circle the problem for long enough and eventually someone forces contact.

Perhaps this is why the jujitsu rule stuck with me.

Calling it a penalty for being boring is funny. But it misses the sharper point. The problem is not the absence of performance. The problem is the absence of action.

You can be quiet and effective. You can be unflashy and brave. You can be the least theatrical person in the room and still be fully engaged with the contest. However, you cannot keep circling forever and expect there to be no cost. At some point, not engaging becomes a decision.

That is the rule my sons were competing under that morning. It is not a bad rule for the rest of us either.

Not seen ‘Dirty Business’? Watch it here on Channel 4:

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/dirty-business?cntsrc=social_share_ios_dirty_business

And check out your local water :

https://www.sewagemap.co.uk/

It feels relevant now. Britain began 2026 with an economy barely moving. The Office for National Statistics reported no monthly GDP growth in January, and output up only 0.2% over the previous three months. The energy price cap is expected to rise again in July, after wholesale gas prices jumped during the latest escalation in the Middle East and the war with Iran. Conflict abroad has a way of showing up here disguised as a household bill.

What interests me is how we respond to conditions like these. Somewhere along the way, depth got mistaken for gloom. Public life began to treat melancholy as a marker of intelligence — as if the bleakest person in the room must also be the clearest‑eyed. “Everything is terrible” acquired a strange prestige.

I do not want that for my children, two ten‑year‑olds growing up inside an information system that can make dread feel like the only respectable adult emotion.

Part of the problem is structural. A large analysis of roughly 105,000 headline experiments — covering hundreds of millions of impressions — found that each additional negative word increased click‑through rates, while positive language reduced engagement. Alarm travels fast. Anxiety performs. Bleakness is often not just a reaction to events; it is a business model.

The stakes rise when younger people already look so anxious. In England, about one in five 8‑to‑25‑year‑olds had a probable mental disorder in 2023. Endlessly treating dread as the default tone in public life starts to look less like depth and more like carelessness.

None of this means everything is getting worse. Over the past few decades, more children have survived, more years of education have been completed and global life expectancy has risen dramatically. Yet the machinery through which we perceive the world is skewed. Despair is lazy. It asks little beyond posture. It can sound knowing while leaving no room for agency, imagination or effort.

After my accident, one lesson arrived with unusual force. When circumstances are genuinely bad, survival does not come from pretending everything is fine. It comes from noticing what still works and building from there — the people who love you, the routines that remain, the small evidence that movement is still possible. I did not know the phrase cheerfulness in adversity then, but the idea fits what I learned. Not as a personality trait, and certainly not as a performance, more as a tactic.

Research supports that instinct. Studies link higher optimism to lower cardiovascular risk and better odds of exceptional longevity. The behavioural truth matters most - people who think improvement is possible plan further ahead, persist longer and stay in the arena. Confidence breeds action; action breeds confidence.

I saw that pattern often during my tenure as President of the British Chambers of Commerce. Travelling around the country, I met business leaders who were more upbeat about their own company, town or region than about Britain in the abstract. In one place, a new contract. In another, a college doing something smart on skills, or a manufacturer quietly winning export business. Up close there was realism mixed with energy. Step back to the national picture, and the tone changed completely. Local confidence; national pessimism.

The contrast stays with me because the numbers are mixed, not empty. Britain remains a formidable exporter of services, with a substantial surplus widened by stronger exports.

The creative industries tell a similar story. They contributed around £145.8 billion to the economy in 2024, equivalent to about 5.5% of UK gross value added, and are significantly larger than before the pandemic and than in 2010 — hardly the profile of a country with nothing left to make, sell or imagine.

AI is another example. Britain still sits in the global front rank. UK private AI investment, at about $4.5 billion, is behind the United States and China but still third worldwide. It means Britain is not merely discussing the future from the sidelines, it is still helping to build it.

Of course, many SMEs will roll their eyes at any rosy account of Britain — with reason. Recent business surveys show tax as a constant anxiety, with many also reporting falling cashflow. Weak demand, higher costs, hiring worries and vanishing margins are not abstractions. They are daily arithmetic.

However, hard is not the same as hopeless. A difficult quarter is not a national verdict. Flat growth does not make Britain a write‑off. It is better to hold a fuller picture in view: a country under strain, yes — but also one with serious services exports, creative industries of real scale, meaningful AI capability and thousands of firms still adapting, exporting, hiring and building despite the weather.

Enterprise Britain speaks to that spirit. Started by my old friend Brent Hoberman and launched only a couple of weeks ago, it gathers entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders determined to reject the narrative of decline and recover some ambition about building and scaling companies here. We need this, but we also need more consistent political leadership and confidence alongside the corporate messages.

Cheerfulness in adversity is not a mood. It is a discipline. It is confidence without fantasy. After all, it is the people, firms and countries that believe improvement is possible who are the ones that make it happen.

I hope that whatever your week brings, you are not in fact, wading through an Arctic loch with a heavy backpack.

The Morgan is a hymn to the book — to reading as a form of agency. It reminds you that civilisation is, in part, a long chain of people trying to pass ideas forward without mangling them. It also makes you briefly understand the appeal of being a robber baron — not for the monocles or moral flexibility, but for the means to build something that says books mattered enough to deserve architecture.

As you leave, you turn and meet the Gutenberg Bible. The Morgan is the only institution on earth that holds three copies — which, by any measure, is a flex.

We tend to tell the story of printing as if the press arrived and — boom — knowledge spread. That’s true but incomplete. What struck me most standing there wasn’t just the leap forward; it was the bottleneck that remained. Printing made books. It didn’t make readers.

Even if you could get your hands on a printed Bible, you still needed literacy — and not literacy as we know it: with public schools, clear fonts, and the assumption that the words were for you. You needed the language, the time, and the permission to learn. The technology was astonishing. The interface, for most people, was not.

The future had arrived — and then it queued.

It’s that queue that followed me out of the building. Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1455. England did not even begin legislating for a national system of elementary education until 1870 — four centuries later, after long arguments over who should learn and what they should be allowed to read. The machine was fast. Everything else — institutions, access, the will to distribute — was slow. Those who could read surged ahead; those who could not were quietly kept in place.

Time is the thread I keep returning to, because it’s what makes today harder. We do not have four centuries to close the gap between technology and society. We may not even have four years. New releases from Anthropic, OpenAI and newcomer Openclaw have blown apart what’s possible in the last 3 weeks.

Whenever someone says, “AI is changing everything,” people’s eyes glaze over — and they’re right to let them. Most commentary is either breathless or moralising. Neither helps. It’s all either: “It’s the end of work!” or “It’s just autocomplete!” — and both miss the real question: what has become cheap, fast, and widely available that wasn’t before?

You only really notice the shift when you give these systems a job you’d normally hand to a competent colleague. Not party tricks, not poems — real work with consequences. The change isn’t that the machines have become mystical; it’s that they’ve crossed the threshold of usefulness. They can now hold context long enough to complete messy, multi-step work — coherent, continuous, close enough to done.

I tested that in a small way. In thirty minutes with my iPad, I went from “I want an app that does seating plans for parties” to a working version — guest names stored, tables generated, usable interface. I am not a developer. The AI did the building. I did the thinking and the deciding.

My main lesson? The price of initiative is collapsing.

When the cost of trying falls, the number of attempts rises. More prototypes, more internal tools, more strange little experiments that used to die in the “too hard / too expensive / not worth it” stage. The optimistic version of the future is a broadening of agency: more people able to act on their ideas, not just talk about them.

The less comfortable version is that advantage flows to those who adapt fastest — not because they’re smarter or better, but because they compound earlier. They redesign workflows first. They learn what to trust and what to check. They shrink the time between insight and execution. The laggards don’t get a soft landing; they wake up to find the baseline has moved beneath their feet.

The impact won’t arrive as one big shock. It will seep in through a thousand local compressions: a team of ten becoming a team of seven; the “first draft” role evaporating; the entry-level rung thinning out; the work that trained people being automated before new ways to learn exist. Think of the analyst who spent two days building a first draft from messy notes and spreadsheets — that task still exists, but it now takes an hour and a check rather than a career apprenticeship.

Time is warping. There are now multiple clocks running at once — none synchronised.

There is the technology clock, which moves in lurches — step changes every few weeks.

There is the economic clock, which lags and then moves all at once. A large organisation can look at all this and shrug — not yet material, not yet embedded. Meanwhile a startup is being built right now that assumes these capabilities as the default: cheap synthesis, rapid prototyping, workflows stitched together because the bottleneck isn’t implementation anymore — it is only deciding what to build. Even if big companies do not feel it this quarter, the competitor is being assembled anyway.

There is a corporate clock, running inside a small number of companies that own the data centres, the GPUs, and the foundation models. They decide which capabilities are released, on what terms, and in which languages — and their incentives do not automatically match the interests of everyone who will have to live with the consequences.

There is the political clock, which runs on headlines. It struggles to sustain attention on anything structural when the next crisis arrives before lunch.

And there is the human clock — the one that matters most — which is the time it takes an actual person to learn, to change their working life, to feel secure enough to take a risk.

We need a government that can hold two truths at once: the immediate, visible urgencies (cost of living, housing, NHS waits) and the structural shifts already transforming what “work” and “opportunity” mean. These aren’t competing priorities — they’re the same priority seen from two distances.

If I were designing AI policy, I’d make one practical promise: not to “reskill Britain” in the abstract, but to help people stay effective as the baseline moves. Policy has one real job here — to expand agency and buy time.

Here are four starting moves.

First, access. Put secure, supervised AI tools in people’s hands — in JobCentres, libraries, and community hubs — with guardrails and trained support. If a 50‑year‑old logistics coordinator in Sunderland can’t safely use these tools to rebuild her CV or test a business idea, we’ve already decided who this technology is for.

Second, visibility. Build a public dashboard tracking which tasks are being automated, in which sectors, and how quickly. A transition you can’t see can’t be governed.

Third, shared upside. When public contracts become cheaper because AI did the middle, the public should share the benefit — through better services, lower costs, or reinvestment in skills. Write it into procurement.

Fourth, agency in schools. Not lectures about AI, but making with it: build something, present it locally, reflect on what was human and what was machine. That changes how young people see both the tools and themselves.

Gutenberg’s revolution wasn’t just speed; it changed what was scarce. The bottleneck moved from copying to comprehension. Society had to reorganise around a new constraint.

It’s happening again. The question is no longer “Can this be built?” but “Who realises it already can?”

Capability is moving faster than comprehension, and when the bottleneck moves, power moves with it — towards the people and firms who see it first and have the resources to act on it.

So the task now is not to restrain the technology, but to widen the circle of people who can see it clearly enough to use it — and to shape it — on their own terms, in workplaces, in communities, and in the public sector

.

For a long time, defence felt like a subject I could keep at a distance.

It seemed soaked in macho posturing, nationalism and a style of politics I instinctively resisted. When I thought about what mattered, my mind went to underfunded public services, education, climate, digital exclusion — almost anything before the armed forces. Defence was something other people worried about.

Until recently, my understanding of what our armed forces actually do was also embarrassingly shallow. I couldn’t have told you what we ask a submariner to endure on a nuclear deterrent patrol, or what it really means for a Royal Marine to operate in the High North, where a minor mistake can become life-threatening.

That has changed through the Parliamentary Armed Forces Scheme and the time I am spending with the Royal Navy. It has put faces and human cost behind phrases I once skimmed over. “Undersea deterrence” now means weeks inside a steel tube, cut off from daylight. “High-latitude operations” means commandos skiing across ice with punishing loads in conditions most of us would barely tolerate for an hour.

Part of my earlier complacency is generational. I grew up assuming Europe was broadly at peace. The defining questions were about globalisation and digital transformation, not territorial aggression, nuclear deterrence, or whether we could keep the lights on under sustained attack.

Russia’s aggression, a more assertive China, instability in the Middle East and fragile supply chains have snapped the frame back to one our parents would recognise. Public opinion has moved with it. In 1990, fewer than one in ten people in the UK wanted more spent on defence. Today, roughly two in five support increasing spending to 2.5% of GDP.

But support is fragile. Introduce the trade-offs such as cuts to the NHS, education or welfare, and it evaporates. Ask people to choose between tanks and hospitals and enthusiasm fades quickly.

Last year’s Strategic Defence Review reflects this shift and introduces a phrase I keep coming back to: a “whole-of-society” approach to defence.

This is where my thinking has changed most. Defence is no longer something you outsource to the armed forces while the rest of us carry on as normal. National security now runs through the systems that keep everyday life functioning: energy, logistics, finance, food, health — and the technology that underpins them.

Seen this way, defence is less about hardware and more about continuity. Can the country still function under pressure? Can people heat their homes, access healthcare, buy food, move money, trust information?

Technology sits centre stage. Take a whole-of-society view seriously and the tech stack stops being a procurement issue and becomes a sovereignty issue. Who owns the cloud we rely on? Where are the data centres? Who designs the chips that power AI models and weapons systems? Digital transformation looks very different once you imagine those systems under stress or attack.

I used to assume we could always buy the best kit on the global market and rely on contracts and alliances to keep us safe. That belief now feels optimistic. Export controls change. Supply chains seize up. Allies get distracted. Deterrence depends on our ability to absorb shocks and keep functioning — not on the assumption that foreign-owned platforms will always be available on the same terms.

This is why “whole-of-society” is not abstract theory. Civilian infrastructure and commercial decisions now sit on the front line. Cyber has rightly moved up the agenda, but it is not a niche risk. Roughly 99% of international data traffic travels through undersea cables. Around 90% of global trade by volume moves by sea. About half of all globally traded food depends on maritime supply chains. These are the central nervous system of modern life.

I try not to be an alarmist. However, if you care about hospitals, supermarkets, payments, energy or democratic stability, resilience in these systems is not optional.

Business already knows this. I was recently speaking to a company in long term difficulty because a critical input to its manufacturing process is sourced from Ukraine. What once looked like an efficient supply-chain decision has become a strategic vulnerability. Multiply that story across energy, food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, data and logistics, and resilience quickly becomes a board-level issue.

Other countries have understood this concept more clearly than we have. Finland’s “comprehensive security” model assumes every citizen, business and institution has a role in national resilience. Norway’s “total defence” approach treats civilian infrastructure and cyber systems as integral to security. Poland has decided peace cannot be taken for granted and is dramatically increasing military and industrial capacity.

All of these themes have felt particularly real this week. In Parliament, we had a briefing from the Royal Marine commandos on what is happening in the High North. Melting ice is opening new routes. Undersea infrastructure is more exposed. Military, economic and technological interests are colliding in places we once thought peripheral. It sharpens the question: are we organised, as a society, for the pressure this implies?

Against that backdrop, the UK’s posture looks split. We acknowledge that digital is central to defence, yet much of our approach still feels incremental. Defence Digital estimates it needs £11.7bn over a decade just to replace legacy systems. Thousands of AI contracts have been signed across government. And yet a small number of suppliers still dominate, and much of the infrastructure we rely on is controlled elsewhere.

There is also a quieter story: a boom in defence-adjacent and dual-use innovation. The UK is home to serious capability in AI, cyber, autonomy and space. But without long-term procurement and demand, even strategically important companies can drift out of domestic control.

If the people working at the sharp end are planning seriously for resilience, the rest of us need to do the same. This will cost money and attention. It will also require political bravery — the courage to make long-term choices that may be unpopular now, and a level of civic engagement that treats security as something we all own.

Defence is not in competition with everything else we care about. It is the insurance policy that allows those things to exist at all.

This week began with a shiver. Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s Defence Secretary, announced that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot would be rolled out across Pentagon systems and trained on “enormous amounts” of US military data to help “fight wars” free from “ideological constraints.”

This is the same system that has already generated antisemitic content praising Hitler, described itself as “MechaHitler,” and produced sexualised deepfakes of women and girls. The decision is being sold as modernisation, but it feels more like an experiment on the nervous system of the world’s most powerful military — using a tool that has already shown its capacity for harm.

Hegseth’s pitch is both simple and alarming: the Pentagon must give Grok access to “all appropriate data,” rejecting any AI that “won’t allow you to fight wars.” He boasts that America’s “wartime AI” will “not be woke,” recasting safeguards against hate, harassment or manipulation as ideological contamination and will unleash “a new age of unprecedented US military dominance”.

Critics across the security community note the obvious: this is no battle‑tested decision system but a chatbot notorious for racist conspiracy theories and pornography deepfakes. Senators warn that weaving such a tool into classified workflows threatens operational integrity and public trust alike. If anything defines the worst version of an “AI arms race,” it is this mix of hurry, swagger and indifference to failure modes.

Across the Atlantic, our reflex was strikingly different. After a surge of reports about Grok generating sexualised deepfakes of women and minors, the UK government moved to criminalise not only the sharing, but also the creation of intimate AI images without consent. Ministers called it a “priority offence” under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom opened a formal investigation into X. The Prime Minister warned the platform could lose its “right to self‑regulate.” AI‑generated intimate images were described as “weapons of abuse,” with responsibility placed on platforms as well as perpetrators. Other countries — from Malaysia to Indonesia — have restricted Grok’s image tools after similar scandals.

It is not a perfect response; law will always lag technology. But it reveals a different instinct from Washington’s: to confront AI that enables abuse as a societal problem before embracing it as a security asset.

That contrast was still in my mind when I travelled to Cambridge for AI policy expert, Verity Harding’s event on reframing the “AI arms race.” The historian Lawrence Freedman and I dissected the metaphors that shape our thinking in moments of insecurity. We discussed how AI is not a contest of supremacy but a series of choices about how systems are built, deployed and trusted. The best antidote to the swagger of “wartime AI” is to study how AI already operates under the harshest conditions.

I spoke about Dropla’s work in Ukraine — a company that shows what careful design and disciplined deployment mean when lives depend on it. V’yacheslav Shvaydak, a former Ukrainian officer with a PhD in economics, co‑founded the Danish‑Ukrainian start‑up Dropla Tech in 2023 to use AI to detect mines, drones and explosive threats along supply routes. Their Blue Eyes system, trained on more than 170 explosive types, now scans the forward edge of battlefields so logistics convoys can move with fewer casualties.

Shvaydak’s approach could not be further from Hegseth’s culture‑war theatrics. “Respect is your currency in defence tech — protect it ruthlessly,” he says. “Never bring half‑baked products to warfighters. You know it will not work; you’re just doing that to call it ‘battle‑proven’ and go brag about it.” That isn’t softness; it’s frontline realism. Bad systems waste time, trust and lives. This is AI as survival, not ideology.

The contrast between Grok’s trajectory and Dropla’s philosophy goes to the heart of why the “AI arms race” metaphor is so misleading. The phrase implies the only rational move is to keep up — to match every prototype with a bigger, faster one — as if acceleration were safety. History tells a more complicated story. Earlier arms races, from pre‑1914 naval build‑ups to Cold War nuclear rivalries, were driven as much by prestige, lobbying and misperception as by genuine capability gaps. Worst‑case assumptions about an adversary’s strength produced spirals of overspending and risk, not stability. Today’s AI competition risks the same trap. Talk of “AGI by 2030” and “inevitable” superintelligence races does not describe reality; it manufactures it.

Once governments and boards accept that narrative, they treat speed and opacity as the price of staying in the game — even as these systems seep into critical infrastructure where failures can cascade. A wiser course, now emerging among some defence planners and companies, is to treat AI safety as operational readiness rather than a brake on progress. The vital question is not what happens on a model’s best day, but what happens when it fails, is spoofed by an adversary, or erodes trust. By that standard, resilience to disinformation and system breakdown is not a limitation on capability; it is capability. A system that hallucinates, amplifies abuse or can be trivially manipulated isn’t “cutting‑edge” — it is a liability.

At the end of the week, I stood on the parade square at HMS Raleigh in Plymouth, after two days watching how the Royal Navy trains its newest recruits. Almost a thousand pass through this base each year. There is nothing high‑tech about the ten‑week course: ropes, drills, firefighting, icy water, inspections — and a surprising amount of ironing. It is focused on learning to live and work in tight quarters with people you may not like but must still trust with your safety.

On one side of the base, new arrivals stumbled through the basics. On the other, soon‑to‑graduate recruits moved in their drill with uncanny precision — steps aligned, uniforms sharp, weapons steady. That transformation comes from repetition, feedback and a culture where errors are corrected, not ignored.

Across the armed forces, roughly 10,000 young people start this training each year. They learn that capability isn’t just equipment. It is trust — the confidence that the person beside you will check the valve, hold the line, and catch your mistake before it becomes catastrophe. Watching them, it was hard not to feel the jolt: the world they are entering will be shaped by AI in ways unimagined a decade ago. I hope it will not be in the theatrical way Hegseth describes.

The choice ahead is not between embracing AI or retreating from the future. It is between two cultures: one that treats AI as a performative shortcut to dominance, and one that insists on respect, readiness and reliability before lives or stability are put on the line. The first will keep generating headlines. The second — slower, quieter — is the one that might still give soldiers and citizens technology they can trust.

Heart of the dorm blocks where the recruits live and learn.

Later today I will speak in Parliament about the collapse of modern languages. As I was preparing my remarks, an uncomfortable truth dawned: my own Duolingo habit is less a virtuous routine than a cleverly engineered addiction. Despite a fiercely defended streak and countless virtual crowns, I still cannot really speak Spanish — not in any way that matters. I could not negotiate a contract, comfort a friend or navigate a sensitive conversation where tone, timing and cultural cues matter as much as vocabulary.

On the flight to my Christmas break, looking down over India — a country with 22 officially recognised languages and more than 2,000 recorded across census and linguistic surveys — the gap between my gamified “learning” and real linguistic capability felt huge. It also felt symbolic. For all the noise about AI translation tools, there is a widening gulf between what technology promises and the kind of human understanding modern geopolitics actually demands.

The volatility of the moment — war in Europe, crisis in the Middle East, sharpening US–China rivalry — makes one thing painfully clear: bridging language barriers is no longer a cultural nicety; it is a matter of national security. When we mishear or misread in this environment, the cost is not just lost business. It is escalation, mistrust and, at worst, conflict.

And this raises an awkward but important question. We have a Prime Minister who, I think, only speaks English. The head of our foreign intelligence service could not get away with this lack of skill. Senior intelligence roles increasingly demand deep regional knowledge and language skills as core competencies. Prime ministers, by contrast, still lean on interpreters and the global reach of English. In an era where nuance shapes markets, alliances and security decisions, that asymmetry should prompt a harder conversation about the linguistic capacity we expect from political leadership, not only from those who serve behind the scenes.

This matters even more because AI-powered translation is arriving at precisely the moment global politics is becoming more fragmented, multipolar and combustible. Tools promising effortless comprehension sit alongside wars, disinformation campaigns and sensitive negotiations over territory, trade and technology. It is a disorienting mix.

Machine translation and large language models are extraordinary, but they remain pattern machines, not judgment engines. They do not reliably read intent. They do not naturally handle ambiguity. They miss humour, irony, face-saving formulations and veiled threats — the tiny signals on which diplomacy often turns. And in a world where a mistranslated statement can ricochet across social media in minutes, the danger is not just error; it is the rapid amplification of misinterpretation.

Security communities are beginning to say this out loud. A British Academy report warns that language skills are “a critical tool” for deepening knowledge and building the trust needed to protect UK interests, and that the continued decline in national capability risks leaving Britain “lost for words”. In the United States, the Government Accountability Office has described foreign language skills as “an increasingly key element” of diplomatic, military and counterterrorism missions, noting that shortfalls have caused intelligence backlogs and hindered operations. As escalation risks are now being modelled in simulations of AI-mediated military decision-making, the argument that language skills form part of national security infrastructure looks less like metaphor and more like basic risk management.

Amid this high-stakes landscape, there is also a quieter story about what languages do to individuals — and why that matters. Neuroscience shows that learning and using a second language changes the brain: increasing grey matter density, strengthening neural connectivity and enhancing executive functions like attention, inhibition and task-switching. Bilingualism is associated with greater cognitive reserve and slower age-related decline. These are not abstract benefits. The ability to shift perspectives, navigate ambiguity and still make a sound judgment is exactly what complex diplomacy, crisis management and intelligence work demand. In a world where AI can generate plausible nonsense at scale, human cognitive discipline becomes a security asset.

Economically, the picture is just as clear. SMEs make up 99.9% of UK firms, and evidence suggests those with language capability are significantly more competitive. Research from Cambridge indicates that SMEs using languages are around 30% more successful in exporting and can increase export growth potential by a similar margin. At a macro level, modelling for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages suggests that the UK’s poor language skills cost the economy tens of billions of pounds each year in lost export opportunities.

Meanwhile, our competitors are not standing still. In China, estimates over the past decade put the number of people learning English at 300–400 million — close to one in three citizens. This is not casual interest; it is a strategic investment in prosperity, soft power and global reach. The United States funds initiatives such as the National Security Language Initiative and the Language Flagship, explicitly linking linguistic capability to national security. English gives the UK a head start, but when others are adding English on top of their own languages, relying on being “the world’s lingua franca” is not a strategy. It is complacency.

Against all this, the UK’s language pipeline is weakening. Recruitment to modern foreign language teacher training routinely misses targets, with some years reaching only 40–50% of planned numbers. Modern Foreign Languages rely heavily on international trainees — in some cohorts around 40% — yet these trainees face costly and complex visa routes, including an Immigration Health Surcharge of over £1,000 per person per year. Post-16 language study has shrunk dramatically, with fewer than one in ten A-Level entries in many areas and deep regional inequalities. Some parts of England have seen 30–50% drops in GCSE entries over the past decade, entrenching a two-tier system where international fluency is concentrated among the already advantaged.

This is strategically shortsighted. By narrowing the pipeline, the UK is effectively rationing who can participate fully in diplomacy, trade, intelligence and international civil society.

The hopeful part is that this is fixable. The Open University’s School of Languages and Applied Linguistics is now the largest provider of university-level language education in the UK, reaching learners in higher-education “cold spots” and providing open-entry routes for adults who want to restart or deepen their learning. With the right incentives, the Lifelong Learning Entitlement could make language study a normal part of adult upskilling, not a niche pursuit.

If we frame this correctly, language policy stops looking like a cultural side issue and starts looking like resilience planning: treat language teachers as a strategic shortage profession; reduce visa barriers; align school, university and security-community needs so that learners can see clear pathways into international careers; and encourage businesses to value — and pay for — language skills.

The countries that will thrive in the AI age will be those that combine technological power with human linguistic intelligence. Translation tools will take more of the routine work, but the non-routine work — building trust, reading the room, knowing when a “yes” is really a polite “no” — still belongs to humans.

Investing in languages is not a sentimental project; it is a strategic one. It strengthens our minds, our competitiveness and our national resilience. And in the age of AI, it is one of the shrewdest investments the UK can make.

As for me, I suspect it is time to graduate from the fun of the cartoon owl — and finally find myself a real life Spanish teacher.

Two weeks ago I was in Hong Kong for the Yidan Prize Summit, convened by the Yidan Prize Foundation — the global education initiative founded by Dr Charles Chen Yidan, co-founder of Tencent. The Yidan Prize is the world’s largest education award. It recognises work that has measurably improved learning and access — and the summit brings together the people actually doing that work: teachers, researchers, ministers, NGOs and youth leaders from around the world.

Last week, back in London, I chaired my final British Business Council meeting as President of the British Chambers of Commerce. The distance between those two rooms — geographically and philosophically — sharpened something for me about how differently we still choose to think about education, work and economic success.

One of the main lessons I learnt from the summit was how many countries treat education as societal infrastructure. Not as a social good to be defended when budgets allow, but as the foundation of economic capacity. When AI came up, the next question was teacher training. Teachers were not framed as a cost, but as the system on which everything else rests.

Spending time in Hong Kong, it is hard to ignore China’s choices. In the latest Global Sustainable Competitiveness Index, China sits in the top tier on “intellectual capital”, alongside South Korea, Japan and Singapore. That category covers education, R&D and business dynamism — essentially a country’s ability to generate wealth and jobs through innovation and value-added industries. Decades of investment in schooling, skills and innovation systems underpin that position. The conversations at Yidan about teacher quality, curriculum and the labour-market as one connected system filled in the story behind those numbers.

Step back and the global picture is unforgiving. Around 250 million children remain out of school. In low- and middle-income countries, roughly 70 per cent of ten-year-olds cannot read a simple text. By 2030, around half of the global workforce — and by some estimates closer to 60 per cent — will need reskilling or upskilling as technology and the green transition accelerate. Education now sets the ceiling on growth.

The Yidan Prize has shown, with evidence, that systems can move. CAMFED, a Yidan honouree, has supported millions of marginalised girls in sub-Saharan Africa to complete school and transition into work, while building powerful networks of teachers, mentors and local leaders. It works because it treats education as a pipeline rather than a moment focused on outcomes, long-term support and local capacity.

The contributions from African educators and ministers were particularly clear-eyed. Africa already has the youngest and fastest-growing population in the world. Lucy Lake, a Yidan honouree and now part of their team, said it best. By 2040, Africa will hold the majority of the world’s young people. Whether they become the largest uneducated and restless population on Earth, or the most educated and potentially productive one is an issue that every country should treat as a priority.

Her framing stripped sentimentality out of the room. Charity language fell away. Demography, education systems and labour markets were discussed together. One phrase surfaced that I particularly liked - education as a route to dignity at work. Not employment as survival, but meaningful, fairly paid work in sectors with a future. With the right systems, this demographic shift could unlock extraordinary growth. Without them, the risks are destabilising — and global.

Back in London, at my final BCC Council meeting, the agenda was familiar: the dreaded budget, low productivity, labour shortages, investment and confidence. Survival in difficult trading conditions sat alongside ambition for growth.

What struck me after HK was how rarely teachers, apprenticeships and employment rules appeared in the same conversation. Education is still treated as social policy, skills as business policy, and employment rights as political risk. In practice, they form one continuous journey — from school into work and through working life.

The UK data should force that connection. Apprenticeship starts in England hover around 340,000 a year, well below pre-pandemic levels. Higher-level apprenticeships continue to grow, strengthening management pipelines and productivity. At the same time, Level 2 routes — the traditional entry point for many school-leavers and career-changers — have shrunk sharply. Sophistication at the top has increased, while the base of the system has thinned dangerously.

Alongside this, around one in eight young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training. That figure has barely shifted for years. Behind it sit young people who have lost momentum, or never found a viable route in. From conversations with employers across the country, two truths coexist: many firms urgently need people, and many still find it too risky, complex or costly to bring young people into work and training.

All of this sits against a difficult business backdrop. While headline inflation has eased and some input costs have stabilised, pressure on payrolls remains intense. Wage growth has slowed, but still outpaces productivity in many sectors, and nearly three-quarters of businesses cite labour costs as their biggest pressure. There is only so much additional cost firms can absorb before investment, hiring and innovation are pulled back. Rising unemployment in this context is not healthy “rebalancing”; it is a warning sign, especially when so many young people and career-changers remain stuck at the margins.

Recent government changes — a move towards a Growth and Skills Levy, funded apprenticeships for under-25s in smaller firms, expanded access to free training — are steps in the right direction. But they remain incremental within a system that is still too complex for many SMEs, too uneven across regions, and too weakly linked to sustained employment outcomes.

This is why the Employment Rights Bill currently going through Parliament really matters. Employment rights shape hiring behaviour, particularly in small firms operating on tight margins. Uncertainty over cost, compliance and risk constrains decisions far more than policy debates often acknowledge. At the same time, insecure and low-quality work damages individuals, families and long-term productivity. Neither reality cancels out the other.

“Dignity at work” is therefore an idea to return to because it refuses false choices. Fair treatment, voice and decent pay matter. So does a labour market that allows employers to take chances on young people, career-changers and those with imperfect CVs. Policy that freezes hiring entrenches exclusion. Policy that tolerates insecurity corrodes growth.

What the last two weeks sharpened for me is how often the UK still treats human capital as something to discuss sympathetically rather than design strategically. Funding pots get debated. Mechanisms get tweaked. Small uplifts get announced. Long-term outcomes rarely receive the same discipline.

A credible education-for-growth settlement would track how qualifications, apprenticeships and adult learning translate into wages, productivity and regional prosperity. Apprenticeships would once again function as a universal bridge from school into work — with renewed focus on under-25s and Levels 2 and 3, simpler participation for small employers, and success judged by sustained employment rather than starts alone.

It would also mean being honest about trade-offs. If we want dignity at work, rights must protect without freezing hiring. If we want productivity, we must invest in teachers with the seriousness we bring to physical infrastructure. If we want social mobility, routes into work must be clearer, earlier and less brittle.

There is a choice here. We can manage decline neatly, or engineer growth deliberately. Right now, the UK is still wired far better for the first than the second. Education cannot be reduced to economic output — but pretending it is disconnected from how most people earn a living, build security and find dignity at work is a luxury we can no longer afford.

I participated on a panel about AI with Christie Pang from Lirvana labs and Dr. Miao from UNESCO who has developed an AI competency framework.

You see, I really was in the future….

Outside the building, the picture is even grimmer: trust scores have slipped below 40, a historic low for an organisation once treated as Britain’s gold standard of impartiality.

However, the deeper problem here isn’t editorial misjudgement. It’s what this moment signals about public life in Britain right now. If the BBC — the closest thing we have to civic glue — can see its leadership decapitated in a single week, what on earth does that tell the next generation of people we desperately need to persuade into public service? Who looks at this landscape and thinks: yes, I’ll apply?

To me, the BBC crisis is flashing one message in giant neon letters: we have created a public sphere that deters exactly the kind of thoughtful, capable, values-driven people we need to lead it.

And that should worry us far more than one documentary gone wrong.

We are living in a culture where accountability has morphed into instant annihilation. Yes, leaders must answer for their mistakes. But the speed at which scrutiny now turns into spectacle is breathtaking. Westminster is the most extreme example: five prime ministers in six years, 16 housing ministers in a decade, entire departments resetting their leadership teams almost annually. The Institute for Government has been warning for years that this level of churn “hinders effective government” by stripping out institutional memory and breaking long-term planning. No high-performing business would survive this kind of turnover; yet somehow, this is how we run the country.

Layer onto that the psychological machinery of the internet. Studies of digital outrage show that moral condemnation spreads faster and embeds deeper than factual correction. Once a leader is branded incompetent or corrupt — sometimes fairly, often not — the narrative calcifies instantly. There is no room for learning. No room for context. No room for humanity. Leaders become avatars for national anger rather than people doing difficult, pressured, high-stakes jobs.

The result is as predictable as it is dangerous: the individuals who might make brilliant public leaders watch all this and quietly choose something else. Who can blame them?

And when capable people step back, society pays. This isn’t a philosophical problem; it’s a practical one. Trust is now at structurally low levels. The Edelman Trust Barometer puts trust in UK government at 37. Only 26 percent of people believe political leaders tell the truth. The Hansard Society reports that 77 percent of the public believe the political system needs major reform. Trust in news media has plummeted since 2016. The BBC’s slump below 40 is just one block in a much larger wall of public scepticism.

In that environment, even good policy struggles to work. Too few people believe in institutions strongly enough to give them the benefit of the doubt. Every decision becomes fraught. Every reform gets bogged down. Cynicism quietly becomes the national operating system.

Nowhere is the talent crisis more visible — and more worrying — than in elected politics. We need brilliant people to stand for Parliament: engineers, economists, teachers, technologists, founders, community leaders, creatives, operators. People with experience and expertise. People who can legislate for a world shaped by AI, climate transition and global instability.

And yet the environment we’ve created can be genuinely frightening. Abuse directed at MPs has skyrocketed, especially for women and minority candidates. Amnesty International’s analysis of the 2017 general election found that female MPs received 45 percent more abusive tweets than men; Black and Asian women received the most. Subsequent studies show the situation worsening. A recent BBC report revealed that 69 percent of female MPs now experience regular online abuse and one in three has considered quitting because of safety concerns. The Jo Cox Foundation has documented an alarming rise in threats, stalking and coordinated harassment targeting female candidates.

How many talented women look at this landscape and decide they’d rather stay far away? How many brilliant candidates from under-represented backgrounds walk away before they even begin? How many people with the skills we need — especially younger leaders fluent in technology, delivery, communication and coalition-building — look at the current incentives and conclude that standing for office is simply too risky?

If we want better leaders, we need more people to step forward. And if we want people to step forward, we can’t keep making the environment so toxic that only the thickest-skinned survive.

The same applies beyond Parliament. The public sphere needs people with modern skills and diverse experience. Operators who know how to deliver complex systems. Entrepreneurs who bring energy and creativity. Technologists who understand AI, cyber and data. Community organisers with local knowledge. Creative leaders who can communicate persuasively. People who’ve built businesses, run hospitals, scaled charities, or managed crises.

I think the membrane between public life and the rest of society is far too rigid. We treat public leadership as a closed loop rather than a national project. Poppy Gustafsson stepping into government from Darktrace was exactly the kind of appointment we should be making more often. The fact she left within a year isn’t a personal failing — it’s a system design failure. Roles weren’t built for modern careers, modern families or modern expectations. The structures are opaque. The culture can be unforgiving, the media climate allows no room for learning curves.

Other countries are far more intentional. Estonia rotates technologists into government. Singapore builds leadership pipelines that cross between sectors. The Nordics deliberately mix civil society, business and public service. Britain should be leading in this space. Instead, we cling to a model that makes public life feel like a punishing, precarious calling that only a few can endure.

Leadership in public life should be serious. It should involve pressure, scrutiny and consequence. But it should not feel like stepping into a blast furnace. If we want healthier politics — if we want institutions that function, services that improve, reforms that last — then we need a culture that attracts, protects and sustains good people.

The BBC meltdown is not just about impartiality tests or editorial standards. It is a vivid, painful reminder of how fragile our leadership culture has become — and how urgently we need to rebuild it. Because if we don’t, the people who walk away will not be the ones who should never have been there. They will be the ones we need most.

When I first put on the Chancellor’s beautiful, real gold robe at the Barbican in 2013, I didn’t expect it to become a reliable trigger for tears. But twelve years on, I have cried at almost every Open University graduation I have presided over. There’s something profoundly moving about watching people cross the stage who have fought for their education inch by inch—between night shifts, caring duties and family dinners. As I am about to step down as Chancellor, I feel very lucky that I had an opportunity to work for this remarkable institution. More importantly, I leave with a deep conviction that the OU’s founding mission—to make world-class education open to all—has never mattered more.

The Open University remains one of Britain’s great inventions: born from optimism, powered by innovation, and rooted in social purpose. In the late 1960s, Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee dreamt of a “university of the air,” harnessing the reach of television and radio to deliver learning to anyone, anywhere. It was an audacious idea some dismissed as utopian. But from the first BBC broadcasts in 1971 to today’s digital classrooms, the OU has proved that ambition right. Over 2.8 million people have studied with it since those early days, making it the UK’s largest university—and, arguably, its most democratic.

Its students are extraordinary. In my opinion, they should not be characterised as “part-time”; they are double-time. More than 60 per cent work alongside their studies, many while also raising families or caring for relatives. Others are serving in the armed forces, running small businesses, or retraining after redundancy. At graduations I have met a paramedic who studied psychology between emergency calls, a carer who completed her degree after midnight each night, and a grandfather finally fulfilling a promise he made to himself 40 years earlier. The OU does not just provide education; it gives people back their sense of agency.

That principle—learning as a lifelong right—is under strain. Higher education across the UK is facing one of the most difficult periods in its modern history. University finances are being squeezed hard: the £9,250 tuition fee cap in England hasn’t risen since 2017, meaning that in real terms, per-student funding has fallen by about 25 per cent. Inflation and pay pressures are biting deeply, and some universities are reporting deficits for the first time in decades. Applications from mature students have dropped by more than 40 per cent since 2010. Staff morale is low, and the international student market is wildly uncertain, particularly since Brexit. Even the most established universities are rethinking what sustainability means.

Yet the world needs access to education more than ever. Artificial intelligence, automation, demographic change and the green transition are rewriting the rules of work and citizenship. The average person is likely to have five or six distinct careers across their lifetime, many in jobs that don’t yet exist. Only one in three UK adults takes part in any formal learning after 25. That is a national weakness we can no longer afford. The ability to keep learning—to adapt, reskill, and think critically—will define the difference between countries that thrive and those that tread water.

The OU offers a model for what lifelong learning could look like. Last year, over 200,000 students enrolled, and millions more took free courses through its OpenLearn platform. It has become a national engine for reskilling and opportunity—offering everything from introductory digital skills to advanced degrees in data science and health. During the pandemic, it provided vital upskilling for NHS workers; today, it partners with employers from IBM to Network Rail to develop new talent. Its blend of flexibility and rigour shows that mass lifelong learning is not just possible but practical.

Academic rigour is key. The OU’s research and teaching are world-class. Its scientists helped design instruments that travelled to Mars and Titan, and when the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe landed on a comet, OU technology was on board. Its academics contribute to ocean-mapping projects using satellite data to protect biodiversity, to social policy research shaping the care system, and to cutting-edge work on AI ethics. Openness has never meant compromise on quality. It means extending excellence to everyone who has the determination to pursue it.

The OU also embodies something distinctively British: the power of institutions built for the public good. Alongside the BBC, the British Council and the NHS, it represents a tradition of combining social purpose with innovation. It contributes over £1 billion a year to the UK economy, operates in all four nations, and teaches in 190 countries. Its graduates tend to stay and work in their communities, spreading skills and confidence into every corner of the country. At a time when trust in public life feels brittle, we should value and invest in the institutions that still work—quietly, effectively, inclusively.

My years as Chancellor have been filled with so many moments that capture a remarkable spirit. I can recall a 92-year-old graduate who finally collected her degree, a single mother who studied while her four children slept, and a refugee who found in the OU a pathway to rebuild his career. I have shaken thousands of hands, shed countless tears, and even enticed David Attenborough into singing Happy Birthday at the University’s fiftieth anniversary. Each encounter has reinforced my belief that education can be rigorous, compassionate and transformative.

Before I hang up the gold robe, I want to thank the remarkable people who make the OU what it is. The Pro-Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors I have worked alongside have shown vision and integrity through some of the toughest years higher education has faced. The academic and professional staff, tutors and researchers, and the vast team behind the scenes—those who design courses, build digital platforms, answer late-night queries and organise graduations—are the beating heart of the university. Their work often goes unseen, but without them our students would not achieve all they do.

The OU is not a relic of a more idealistic past; it is a model for the future. It shows how technology and academic excellence can work together for the public good. In all the daily talk about productivity, growth and national renewal, we sometimes forget a simple truth: progress begins with a person deciding to learn something new.

For more than half a century, The Open University has made education possible for millions. It deserves our continued trust and support—not just as an educational institution, but as a symbol of what Britain can be - ambitious, inclusive and determined.

I think I may have slightly forced David Attenborough to sing Happy Birthday with me at the university’s 50th celebrations…

One of the greatest pleasures was presiding over ceremonies when Honorary degrees were given. Gordon Brown received one at the Barbican and spoke about the importance of universal access to education.

World leaders struggle with that discipline. When President Trump declared “everlasting peace” before a fragile Middle East ceasefire had even begun, it was a perfect symbol of our collective rush to closure — history rewritten before the ink is dry.

Taking the long view is a rare skill now. Few founders, boards, or governments are incentivised to think in decades rather than quarters. Yet excellence almost always takes time. It takes craft. It takes a belief that good things are worth building slowly.

In a world of 15-second videos and algorithmic virality, we risk forgetting that truth. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 61% of young adults believe “success happens quickly” if you’re talented enough. Yet the data tells another story: the average time to profitability for a UK tech scale-up is 7.3 years, according to Beauhurst. For deep-tech firms, it’s often well over a decade. And the median time for a venture-backed start-up to reach an exit has stretched from six years in 2013 to almost ten in 2025. The myth of instant success is everywhere — but the reality is found in the long, invisible effort underneath.

Our systems don’t help. Quarterly reporting cycles, short-term funding horizons, and the dopamine drip of social media have made impatience a structural feature of modern life. Microsoft research shows the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds today — shorter than a goldfish’s. RescueTime data suggests most professionals now manage only about an hour of deep, uninterrupted focus a day before switching tasks. And a Harvard Business Review study found that 80% of employees feel under pressure to demonstrate results in under 90 days, even when working on multi-year projects. No wonder the slow, steady work of mastery feels endangered.

Meanwhile, perception hasn’t kept up with reality. The Kauffman Foundation found that the average age of a successful founder at IPO is 45 — proof that breakthroughs reward experience and endurance, not speed. And an Ipsos Global Attitudes survey last year found that more than half of under-35s think technology will make hard work less important, while 80% of senior leaders say the opposite: in the AI age, persistence and attention to detail are more valuable than ever.

That point has come home to me recently in three very different worlds.

The first was a weekend with some impressive tech founders. In different conversations, one with someone building robotic systems for manufacturing and another with someone re-engineering pharmaceuticals with AI, both told me the same thing. “Our ideas are taking decades of slog to make happen.”

They weren’t exaggerating. The average time from scientific discovery to an approved drug is still about twelve years, even with AI-driven reforms shaving months from the process. Investors may be more impatient than ever, but true breakthroughs still belong to the patient.

The second was fashion. I was lucky enough to be at Matthieu Blazy’s recent debut Chanel show. Years of honing his powers at Bottega Veneta, now fused with Chanel’s century-long heritage, produced something timeless. But behind the breathtaking spectacle lies discipline: hundreds of artisans, machinists, pattern-cutters, and engineers. A single haute couture piece can take anywhere from 700 to 2,500 hours to create. Every stitch is a lesson in what hard work and persistence looks like when it’s beautiful.

The third came from another world entirely — the Royal Navy. Through the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme — which embeds Parliamentarians into military environments — I’ve seen what excellence under pressure truly means. The standards are constant because the cost of not meeting them can be catastrophic. For example, even at war, full fire and emergency drills are repeated every seventy-two hours at sea until each movement becomes muscle memory. Precision isn’t a flourish; it’s a form of duty. The quiet insistence on mastering the smallest things — again and again — is what ultimately saves lives.

And this pursuit of excellence doesn’t just shape the forces; it transforms people. The Armed Forces remain one of the most socially mobile institutions in the UK. Over 90% of new recruits start with accredited apprenticeships at Levels 2–4, gaining qualifications from day one. There are around 21,000 active apprentices across the Ministry of Defence. 18.6% of new recruits identify as ethnic minorities, and nearly half come from below-median-income households. Few other institutions so systematically translate potential into performance. Social mobility in the military proves that excellence lifts as it transforms — and like everything that matters, it takes time and effort.

Finally, as no opinion piece can escape her right now, I also include Taylor Swift. Her Eras Tour — the highest-grossing concert tour in history, with $1.93 billion in revenue and more than 11 million tickets sold — wasn’t built overnight. Reflecting on it in an interview this week, she said: “People use the word phenomenon as if everything just clicked into place. That’s not true. This tour was not that. It was when every one of us who had done so much work were pushing inch by inch until we clicked together.”

I do not like her new album very much, but I do like that sentiment. Inch by inch: the rhythm of every founder, designer, sailor — or songwriter — who refuses to rush and sacrifice excellence.

The business mantra that “good enough is good enough” makes sense when you’re prototyping, but not when you’re building something meant to last — a business, a career, a country. The World Economic Forum estimates the half-life of a learned skill is now five years, meaning we each have to rebuild half our knowledge twice a decade. In turbulence like that, achieving excellence is a constant work in progress.

When students ask me for career advice, I always say two things: keep reading, because it expands your curiosity and your world, and do things astonishingly well. Be the person others trust to deliver quality without being asked twice.

Luck matters. Timing matters. But the true differentiator — across tech, couture, popular culture and the Navy — is the same: the unglamorous, disciplined art of doing the work, inch by inch, until it’s unequivocally excellent.

The numbers announced today are staggering. Microsoft pledges £30 billion through 2028. OpenAI brings its “Stargate” infrastructure program to Britain. Nvidia promises quantum computing investments and AI robotics training. These aren’t just trade deals—they’re the architecture of digital sovereignty being negotiated over state banquets and carriage rides.

While many will understandably squirm at ever-closer ties with Trump’s America, I take a pragmatic view. Britain’s tech sector, fizzing with energy, gains from proximity to the global power base—a gravitational center that still pulls harder in Palo Alto than Paddington. For a small nation with vast ambitions, courting such investment isn’t optional; it’s existential.

Yet amid today’s pageantry, two caveats demand urgent attention.

The first is sovereignty. The infrastructure underpinning AI—energy systems, data centers, cloud pipelines—will be as strategic tomorrow as railways and telephone lines once were. The bitter irony would be stark: having fought to untangle Chinese kit from our networks, we risk being trussed up in another superpower’s embrace. The same principle applies to our homegrown AI startups, who deserve government backing to scale and build genuine national strength rather than become acquisition targets.

The second is AI guardrails. The myth persists—encouraged by the lobbying machine now descending on Windsor—that regulation throttles innovation. This is demonstrably false. Clear, targeted oversight builds trust, accelerates adoption, and anchors sustainable growth. Smart rules boost market confidence and draw in investors who might otherwise stay away. Without them, technology serves only those already at the table.

We don’t need to theorize about this—we have living proof. Baroness Beeban Kidron has spent the past decade proving that regulation and innovation can coexist and thrive together. Her work creating the Age Appropriate Design Code—the world’s first legislation demanding digital services treat children differently from adults—set a global precedent, influencing rules from California to Brussels. Through her 5Rights Foundation, she has maintained the drumbeat for children’s digital rights, proving Britain can shape humane, world-leading standards.

This work matters because the harms are accelerating. A conversation with Laura Bates today brought fresh horrors home. Her latest book, *The New Age of Sexism*, is unflinching in documenting the rise of deepfake abuse, AI-generated pornography, and sex-tech designed to erase consent entirely. In schools, boys now generate explicit images of classmates using apps downloaded at lunchtime. The fallout—shame, trauma, withdrawal from education—pushes girls to the margins. These aren’t isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of a larger societal shift.

The numbers Bates cites are devastating: one in three girls aged 11-16 report receiving unwanted sexual images. Nearly 80% of young women say online abuse has affected their mental health. Deepfake porn now accounts for 96% of all deepfake content online, with the majority featuring non-consensual images of women. What was once niche has become mainstream playground currency, hardwiring misogyny into digital culture.

The gender gap runs deeper still. Just 12% of global AI researchers are women. Fewer still shape, test, or decide how AI is deployed. The result? Bias and blind spots hard-coded into the systems being sold as our future. AI isn’t neutral—it reflects the values of those who build it and the perspectives of those absent from the room.

Hours later, Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant Guardian piece carried the same warning from another angle: the explosion of AI-generated violent pornography flourishing in legal grey zones. She describes developers casually demonstrating AI scenes of sexual assault, claiming “no actors are harmed, I’m actually helping content creators.” While government polices mainstream pornography ever more tightly, AI versions skate through legislative cracks. The Wild West is alive and well—just automated.

Both accounts speak to the same collective shrug at technology’s pace and priorities. The implicit story is that tech is too vital, too lucrative, too complicated to interrupt. But this isn’t just lazy—it’s economically wrong. Research consistently shows that economies grow when consumers are protected, that confidence fuels adoption, and that when women and marginalized groups feel safe and included, sectors become more competitive and innovative.

Yet I suspect the posse of tech executives who flew in today are keen to keep screws tight on UK officials, ensuring less regulation, not more. What will Sam Altman whisper over the starter at tonight’s state banquet? What suggestions will flow as the pudding is served? The rumored quid pro quo is a change to digital sales tax—I hope that’s where it ends.

Technology that includes, protects, and respects all users—especially those most at risk—won’t just be fairer; it will be stronger. Progress designed for everyone is more resilient, more legitimate, and ultimately more lucrative.

But let’s be specific about what protection means. We’re finally criminalizing non-fatal strangulation in domestic violence cases, yet it remains unclear whether AI-generated abuse—which can destroy lives just as effectively—fits within existing frameworks. When technology enables new forms of violence against women faster than law can respond, we need proactive governance, not reactive scrambling. The £42 billion on the table today should come with explicit commitments: that AI systems will be tested for gender bias, that platforms will be held liable for enabling abuse, and that women’s safety will be designed in, not bolted on as an afterthought.

So if the royals can grin through a night of entertaining our US guest, if Laura, Amelia, and Beeban can shine lights in the darkest places, then surely we can find the backbone to shape technology on our own terms? Today’s £42 billion proves Britain still matters in the global tech race. The investment is welcome. The conditions—particularly for women’s protection—should be non-negotiable.

They say you should never meet your heroes. What a load of rubbish. I was lucky enough to meet one of mine and, miraculously, she even became my friend. Dame Stephanie Shirley, who died last month, was a person who should be widely celebrated across the UK for her extraordinary life.

She arrived here on the Kindertransport with her sister and, having been settled with a new family just outside London, embarked on a life of meaning in this country.

I respected and admired Stevie, as she was affectionately known, for many reasons—but there are three that I return to again and again.

Firstly, she built a company from scratch, in the IT industry, in the 1960s. When I think of the barriers women face now when founding companies, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for her all those decades ago.

She started a company in an era when banks wouldn’t give women business loans without a male guarantor, when programming was seen as clerical work beneath “serious” male engineers, and when the very idea of flexible work was considered absurd. Yet, at just 29, Stevie founded Freelance Programmers with just £6 as capital and her kitchen table as her office.

What Stevie built was revolutionary. She recognised that programming was intellectual work that could be done anywhere, and she structured her company to prove it. By the 1980s, F International employed over 300 people—nearly all women, many working part-time or from home, long before “hybrid” became a buzzword. Her programmers worked on everything from Concorde’s black box flight recorder to stock exchange systems.

The company’s valuation eventually reached £3 billion, making Stevie one of the wealthiest self-made women in Britain.

But beyond her commitment to women at work, Stevie was a truly exceptional technologist: she understood the technology business at a fundamental level that many of her contemporaries missed. While others were focused on hardware and systems, she grasped that software was where the real value lay.

She also saw that talent was being systematically wasted—brilliant women sidelined by corporate structures that couldn’t accommodate anything beyond the traditional male career model. Her solution wasn’t to work within those constraints; it was to build something entirely different.

The programming work her company delivered was technically excellent and commercially successful precisely because Stevie had created the conditions for women to do their best work. She often quipped that it was only the introduction of the Equalities Act, and her need to employ men, that meant men “finally screwed me.”

I defy anyone not to find some inspiration in her commercial success.

Secondly, she made a significant pivot in her life after her son Giles died. He was born extremely autistic. Not satisfied with the enormous dent she made on the commercial world, she set out to do the same in the world of services provided to autistic children. Her pioneering work was done most notably through the Shirley Foundation, which distributed over £67 million in grants.

Motivated by her personal experiences of caring for an autistic child, she also established several vital charities, including Autism at Kingwood, Priors Court School, and Autistica—the UK’s first national autism research charity.

I made a programme for the BBC in 2010 about how arts and science are too often treated as separate domains. In one episode, I visited Priors Court with Stevie and filmed a segment on her commitment to building a school. I was interested that she used science and art as a basis for understanding and developing the needs of highly challenging autistic children. It was so moving to see her in this setting, in her characteristically vibrant jewellery and clothes, revelling in the classes and the environment offered to pupils. There was art and sculpture all over the grounds, and I immediately felt that yet again, Stevie had created an environment intended to help everyone thrive.

(At Priors court filming together)

It will always have a lasting impact on me to see a woman of such business success have no hesitation in devoting her life to the philanthropy she cared about. Stephanie also supported other innovation-focused organisations, such as the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. She was always committed to using her wealth and expertise for broad social impact.

Examples of these kinds of multi-faceted leaders are still too rare, and I know that her refusal to be pigeonholed will have had a long-lasting impact on many others, not just me.

Finally, Stevie was a constant reminder of the importance of empathy and kindness. I don’t want to write only about my own experiences because I know she had so many friends, but they are an indication of her character. Picture this: I have newborn identical twins of three months old, and I am due on stage to do a double act with Stevie in the Methodist Hall in Westminster. Ten minutes before I am due to leave home, my somewhat erratic new nanny walks out. I panic. I cannot possibly let down Stevie or the several thousand people who have come to see her. I call her. Quick as a flash, and with no complexity at all, she simply says: “Bring them, we will make it work.” In that instant, she made everything seem manageable.

Similarly, during Covid, she pinged me several times to have a chat on the good old-fashioned telephone. No agenda, no need for preparation—just to check in. I was so struck by the kindness of the question: “I just wanted to see if you and your family are doing OK.” When I was lucky enough to give the Dimbleby lecture on BBC1, I devoted a chunk of the time to her story. The next day, a huge bunch of flowers turned up.

She always showed up. Even as she approached 90, she was still talking to groups of women about the importance of technology or to groups of entrepreneurs, giving them courage to continue building their businesses. While many in Silicon Valley are obsessively trying to find the key to longevity, she was a lesson in how being active, present, and generous is one of the best answers to this aged old question.

I will miss the colour of her jackets, the elegance of her jewellery, but mainly the sparkle of her conversation. She truly was the best—not only of business and of tech, but of the UK.

At this time, as our rhetoric about those who seek refuge in our country reaches new and scary heights, we would all do well to remember people like Stevie, who came here as a child facing war, and have enriched our society so deeply.

First came the appointment of Alexandra Depledge as the Chancellor’s new Entrepreneurship Advisor — a brilliant move. Alexandra co-founded Hassle.com, sold it, then launched Resi to tackle the opaque world of home renovation. She’s been outspoken about the challenges facing founders in Britain: the red tape, the funding gaps, the invisible ceilings. And she’s done what too few do — built, exited, and gone again.

Her appointment comes at a crucial moment. While entrepreneurial energy in the UK is high, it’s not translating into long-term success at the scale necessary to drive real economic value. Business creation is strong, but too many promising ventures struggle to grow or stall entirely due to lack of funding, skills shortages, or outdated regulation. This matters because entrepreneurship isn’t just about the latest crazy company valuation. It is one of the most powerful engines for economic growth, productivity, and social mobility.

The environment she’ll be tackling remains deeply uneven. The UK still invests less in R&D than many of its peers — just 2.9% of GDP, compared to 3.6% in the US and nearly 5% in South Korea. Only 1% of venture funding goes to all-female teams. Start-ups led by Black founders receive an even smaller slice. The ideas are out there. The talent is out there. But the allocation of support is still far too narrow.

Mid week brought the British Chambers of Commerce Global Annual Conference — 600 members of the Chamber network in one room, representing everything from zero-carbon logistics to digital skills training. Not all start-ups, but the same mindset: solving problems, building teams, taking risks. The buzz was real — not just because of the Prime Minister’s trade announcements, but because there was a genuine sense that enterprise is back on the national agenda.

Not all of our Chamber members are start-up founders — but they are united by the same desire to grow. The majority are SMEs, which reflects the makeup of the wider UK landscape. They account for more than half of private sector turnover and employ over 16 million people. These businesses — from reinvented family firms to high-growth manufacturers — succeed by spotting opportunities, adapting fast, and solving problems creatively. They rely on entrepreneurial thinking. And it shows as they have driven nearly half of UK productivity growth over the past decade.

That same mindset is just as essential in the public sector. The systems we all rely on such as healthcare, local services, transport face rising pressure and limited resources. Productivity in UK public services has stagnated or declined since 2019, in large part due to rigid processes and outdated models. But where entrepreneurial thinking is applied — whether that’s reimagining care pathways, trialling new delivery methods, or harnessing AI to target resources — the potential for impact is huge. The NHS alone could reclaim 165,000 staff hours a week. Local authorities could save hundreds of millions. We often talk about innovation in government with a dose of scepticism. In truth, it’s a necessity, vital to making the state more effective, responsive, and sustainable.

Then, on Saturday, I dislocated my hip. I’ll spare you the full and somewhat surprising Lego-related details.

After five hours on the floor, waiting for an ambulance that could get me to the right hospital, two paramedics arrived. Calm, kind, and inventive. I asked what qualities mattered most in their jobs. Quick as a flash one said:

“We have to assess unknown situations fast and find creative solutions under pressure. You could say we’re quite entrepreneurial.”

It wasn’t what I expected to hear — but it made perfect sense. They improvised a makeshift IV stand out of a bookcase, strategised how to move me from an awkward patch of floor, and worked with compassion and precision to get me safely into the ambulance. Real-world problem-solving under real pressure. A daily act of entrepreneurship — just without the job title or the unicorn status.

Which is why the headlines from Venice that same day felt so jarring. Jeff Bezos got married. Ninety private jets. Yachts with their own support yachts. Multiple outfit changes. A level of theatre that veered into parody.

Wealth is not the enemy and I love a fabulous party. However, it’s hard to ignore the contrast when the man at the centre of it all has famously benefited from public infrastructure while skillfully avoiding many of the taxes that fund it. Yet this is still the version of entrepreneurship that dominates the spotlight.

Real entrepreneurial impact comes in many forms. From the biotech founder chasing a vaccine breakthrough to the community enterprise rebuilding livelihoods in a post-industrial town. From the AI engineer designing a new model to the baker training apprentices. Not all are chasing unicorn valuations. Some are trying to make the systems around them work better, faster, fairer.

And then there are the paramedics — applying the same mindset, just in an entirely different setting.

Innovation is everywhere, if you’re willing to look. But what gets airtime — and investment, and support — tends to be far narrower. The future won’t be built by one type of founder alone. It will take many people, in many sectors, applying entrepreneurial thinking to real-world problems — whether in a high-growth company, a planning department, or a hospital corridor.

The UK doesn’t have a deficit of ingenuity. But we do have a decision to make about who we back, who we reward, and whose stories we elevate.

We can keep fetishising a narrow version of success. Or we can broaden the lens.

Because whether it’s a fast-scaling climate tech firm, a social enterprise in Salford, or an NHS team navigating a crisis — this is the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that moves us forward.

The ingenuity required to get into a gondola in haute couture? Marginally less so.

It’s a question I’ve been answering for over two decades. I’ve run out of fresh ways to say the same thing. So at one point this year, I turned to my fellow panellists—all men—and said: “Why are you asking me? Surely it’s my male colleagues who should be answering that question.” Because the burden of explaining inequality shouldn’t always fall to those who experience it.

And yet—this year something shifted for me. In the midst of the tech world’s razzle-dazzle, I found something much more compelling: a group of remarkable women who are quietly, powerfully redefining leadership. Not by emulating the traditional models of status and swagger, but with empathy and inclusion. Their careers are ones that inspire and that will carve out new spaces for others to enter.

These are the people who reminded me that while progress can feel glacial, there are brilliant examples of what’s possible. And in a world where every business, every organisation and every piece of activism is in some way, digital, these varied stories have influence.

Take Poppy Gustafsson. At the opening of London Tech Week, she joined the Prime Minister and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s boisterous founder, on stage. Poppy recently swapped the helm of Darktrace, the global cybersecurity firm she co-founded, for public service as the UK’s Minister for Investment. I’ve watched her work up close. She brings with her not just a sharp commercial brain, but a clarity of purpose that’s often missing in government. What I admire most about Poppy, though, is how she talks about kindness—not as a soft afterthought, but as a strategic advantage. She leads with empathy, not ego. And in doing so, she’s quietly reshaping what credible leadership in both business and public service can look like.

Another stand-out was Dr. Toyin Ajayi, CEO and co-founder of Cityblock Health in the U.S. I had the joy of interviewing her at Firstminute Capital’s investor day. Toyin’s mission is to fix what’s broken in American healthcare—no small task. Her company delivers community-based, tech-enabled care for people who have been left out of the system: low-income, often marginalised communities. Since 2017, they’ve scaled to serve over 100,000 people and generated over $1 billion in revenue. But what’s most striking is how Toyin talks about listening—not just to data, but to people. It’s through patient stories, she says, that her team finds the clues to drive better outcomes. That’s leadership built on attention, not assumption.

Then there’s Clemency Burton-Hill, who I ran into at a very glitzy Founders Forum dinner. Clemency is a broadcaster, writer, and musician—and also one of the most resilient people I know. We share a strange and unwanted bond: I survived a car crash that changed my life; she survived a devastating brain haemorrhage that changed hers. She’s channelled that experience into action. Clemency now speaks powerfully about the role of the arts in recovery and connection. Her work is rooted in the belief that stories—especially the ones we try to hide—can be transformative.

At the same dinner, I was introduced to Blaise Metreweli, who, though she didn’t announce it that evening, had just taken up the post as the head of MI6—the first woman ever to do so. While she was understandably discreet about her work, there was no mistaking her presence. Blaise is a quiet but powerful signal that the structures of authority are shifting. In an institution defined by tradition and secrecy, her appointment is a small act of progress. I write this against a backdrop of news about Iran, Israel and the US, I am glad she has a vital role in evolving our national security for this complex world.

At the main Founders Forum event, I moderated a conversation with Jane Jie Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group. She joined the company in 2005 as CFO and has since turned it into a $26 billion global travel giant. But Jane doesn’t just focus on shareholder value—she’s deeply committed to gender equality. Under her leadership, the company has implemented everything from free taxis for pregnant women to education funds for employees’ children. More than half of Trip.com’s workforce are women, and nearly a third of senior leadership roles are held by women—figures that far exceed industry norms. Jane uses her platform to spotlight the work of others, creating a virtuous cycle of visibility and aspiration.

And then there’s Lesley Sackey. A long-time friend, Lesley’s journey from boxing champion to tech entrepreneur is one of resilience and reinvention. Through her ventures Fight Forward and her new tech platform, Pillow, she helps survivors of domestic abuse rebuild their lives, through digital tools and community-led storytelling. Lesley doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff. She talks about pain, survival, and shame—but also about how to thrive with clarity, and agency. Her leadership is raw and real. It was a treat to have the chance to interview her on stage and she held the audience captive as she spoke.

But the moment that perhaps left the deepest mark came when I heard Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny. She has been thrust into the global spotlight by tragedy. And yet, she carries her husband’s legacy with such poise, such quiet determination, that it’s impossible not to be moved. Yulia is now an advocate for justice, for democracy, and for hope. In a world flooded with content, her story cuts through—because it is told with integrity, conviction, and love. She is using social media to build a movement that helps her ensure pressure on Putin does not let up for the crimes he has committed. She is a reminder that courage and vulnerability are not opposites; they are often the same thing.

What links all these women is not a job title or a funding round. It’s not where they studied or how many followers they have. What links them is how they lead—with purpose, with clarity, and with a strong story. They are challenging the tired stereotype of tech leadership, not by arguing with it, but by offering something better.

And here’s why that matters. Because tech is no longer a sector tucked away in Shoreditch or Silicon Valley. Tech is everywhere. It’s in our schools, our hospitals, our banks, our courts. Every organisation is now, in some form, a tech organisation. And so the question of who gets to shape that world and with what values, is one that should matter to all of us.

The careers of Poppy, Toyin, Clemency, Blaise, Jane, Lesley, and Yulia are not just inspiring anecdotes—they are blueprints for a more inclusive future. They remind us that leadership does not have to be loud or linear. It can be quiet, complex, and grounded in empathy.

So the next time someone asks why there is still so little diversity, I will just point to these remarkable examples and say: look again. They’re not the exception. They’re the vanguard.

One final thought: Founders Forum turned 20 this year. It was founded by Brent Hoberman who asked me to c-found lastminute.com with him. Brent has spent the last three decades championing entrepreneurship, and only he could curate such an extraordinary mix of people, perspectives, and ideas at such a range of events.

I’ve challenged him more than most on the issues of diversity and representation over the years, but this year, I want to thank him. Through Founders Forum and EQL:HER, his team, particularly Carolyn Dawson and Laura Stebbing have made a real difference. There is still a long way to go, but change won’t happen unless powerful men are part of the solution.

And as YOU CANNOT BE WHAT YOU CANNOT SEE, here is some photo evidence of these amazing women.

Clemency, me, Toyin and Blaise at the FF dinner at Tate Modern.

Me and Lesley at Olympia about to go on stage.

Yulia at BAFTA talking to a group of CEOs.

Jane and me at FF global.

And here is Poppy, when she became a member of the House of Lords.

I was in the audience and couldn’t help smiling as I watched, because the PM’s autocue broke. So while he was doing his best to paint a picture of a country powered by innovation, he had to contend with the most low key tech barrier. He did pretty well and was helped by Jensen Huang, the rockstar founder of Nvidia who joined him on stage. But beneath the razzle-dazzle, a deeper question lingered in my mind: why should any of this matter if you don’t run a startup, work in tech, or dabble in VC deals?

I think there is one simple reason - because tech policy is now national policy. It is shaping how your NHS appointment is booked, how your local authority approves planning permission, how your child’s homework might be marked. It determines how we spend public money, how we compete with global economies, and how safe or exposed we are as a nation. This isn’t just about apps and gadgets, it’s about power, sovereignty, and the future of public life.

When the government pledges billions for AI in public services, that’s money being spent on the systems you use every day. The NHS booking system that crashes when you need an urgent appointment? The council planning portal that takes months to process applications? The benefits system that seems designed to frustrate? These are the frontlines where technology policy meets real life— and we have so much to improve.

The AI Opportunities Action Plan is full of practical measures: expanding public compute capacity, piloting AI for NHS diagnostics to cut waiting times from weeks to hours, and using AI to tackle benefits fraud—potentially freeing up billions for genuine claimants. This work is bolts of how the government could serve you better.

Why the sudden flurry? Because Britain knows it can’t outspend the US or China, but it can be smarter. While America throws hundreds of billions at semiconductors and China deploys AI at vast scale, the UK is betting on its moderate regulatory frameworks, nurturing talent, and positioning ourselves as a responsible home for breakthrough tech.

We urgently need strong domestic tech companies - these aren’t just good for shareholders—they’re essential for national resilience. Britain’s track record is mixed: we’re brilliant at invention, but struggle with scale. Take Wayve, the British company pioneering AI for self-driving cars. It’s a fantastic example of homegrown innovation with global potential. But too often, our brightest companies either get snapped up by foreign giants or fail to reach the scale needed to compete worldwide. DeepMind, for instance, made world-changing breakthroughs in AI, but its acquisition by Google means much of the strategic value now flows to the US.

When we let our best companies get acquired or collapse, we’re outsourcing our future prosperity. We’re choosing to be consumers of technology, not creators—and that’s a fast track to economic irrelevance. The real test isn’t whether we can attract a few hundred AI researchers to London—it’s whether we can build and keep companies that compete with Google, Microsoft, and Tencent. It’s whether a brilliant algorithm developed in Cambridge stays here and grows into a world-beating business, rather than being snapped up before it scales. Without that, even the best AI infrastructure becomes an expensive monument to missed opportunity.

There’s another challenge too : trust. While the government champions “pro-innovation” regulation, 72% of the public want clear legal guardrails for AI. This isn’t abstract anxiety—it’s practical concern. When AI helps decide benefit eligibility, university admissions, or medical diagnoses, people want to know the rules and who’s accountable when things go wrong. The government has made some adjustments—like rebranding the AI Safety Institute as the AI Security Institute—but tough questions remain about how public data will be used, who’s liable for mistakes, and how we protect people’s rights in a digital age.

And what about skills? The government’s investment in training is welcome, but 84% of British Chambers of Commerce members say they don’t know how to use AI. These aren’t tech startups—they’re logistics companies, care providers, regional manufacturers. If we don’t help everyone adapt, we risk creating a two-tier system: technological benefits flowing to the already-advantaged, while everyone else gets left behind.

The countries that disseminate these innovative technologies will dominate the global economy for the next fifty years. AI isn’t just changing how we book doctor’s appointments—it’s reshaping entire industries, creating new jobs, and deciding which nations will be economically sovereign. The jobs of the future, the companies that will employ your children, the industries that will drive prosperity—they’re all being shaped by choices made now.

The next few years will determine whether Britain’s tech ambitions translate into better public services, higher productivity, and real economic growth—or whether billions disappear into projects that never scale. The ambition is real, the investment substantial, but the gap between policy and delivery remains the danger.

You might not have noticed London Tech Week or care about compute clusters, but this is your money, your data, your public services, and your job prospects. The question isn’t whether you’re interested in technology policy—it’s whether you’re prepared to engage with decisions that will shape how you interact with government, access services, and navigate an increasingly digital economy.

The stakes are too high for this to remain a conversation among insiders. Whether these investments deliver stronger businesses and better public services will depend on whether citizens hold the government accountable for turning ambition into tangible improvements in daily life. Accountability has never been more necessary.

Mary Meeker doesn’t publish often—but when she does, the tech world listens. She has been analysing the sector for decades, including in the late 90s when she even turned her attention to a small business in the UK, last minute.com :-)

Her 2025 Trends in AI report, released by her firm BOND Capital this week, runs to a dizzying 340 slides and captures the scale, ambition, and velocity of the AI revolution. It’s full of astonishing numbers, compelling insights and bold projections.

What its not trying to address—at least not head-on—is whether this transformation will work for everyone and what the wider implications might be for society. Not just the companies building models at the frontier, but the public servants, SMEs, teachers, nurses, and care workers who will need to use them. Acceleration alone cannot be the goal. Widespread, meaningful usage must be.

The report is crystal clear that the speed of adoption is like nothing we’ve seen before.

ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users in just 17 months. Google took over a decade to hit the same milestone for search. In the U.S., generative AI tools have hit 50% consumer adoption in just three years—faster than mobile phones, the internet or social media. And this isn’t just a consumer story. More than 60% of Fortune 500 companies are already embedding AI into core functions—from logistics and legal to customer support and design.

The technology is also improving at pace. Models like GPT-4, Claude 3, and Gemini are approaching human-level capabilities in specific tasks. One benchmark, MMLU, which tests performance across dozens of academic and professional subjects, shows Claude 3 hitting 89%—double what GPT-3 achieved just five years ago. Evaluators mistook nearly three-quarters of GPT-4.5’s outputs for human writing.

And while the cost of training the largest models remains eye-watering—up to $1 billion for the most advanced—the cost of using them has plummeted. The price of inference (running a trained model) has fallen by 99% in just two years, unlocking new products, pricing models and market entrants.

That cost compression is driving another shift: a new era of infrastructure investment. In 2024, the “Big Six” U.S. tech companies—Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—spent $212 billion. That’s up 63% year-on-year, with most of it directed toward AI chips, data centres and cloud systems.

The landscape is far more competitive than many anticipated. Open-source models are gaining serious traction—Meta’s Llama 3 was downloaded 1.2 billion times in just 10 weeks. Developers across the globe are adapting and fine-tuning these models for local needs and new sectors. Chinese firms are gaining ground. Feature parity across systems is narrowing. Innovation is increasingly collaborative, not just proprietary.

All of this is reminded me that the AI moment isn’t coming. It’s already here. The pace is breathtaking. But here’s the risk - the benefits remain concentrated.

In the UK, just 30% of SMEs report using any form of AI—compared to over 50% in the U.S. Even in large organisations, use is often limited to isolated pilots or productivity experiments. Too many frontline services such as healthcare, education, and justice are miles behind.

Meanwhile, only a handful of firms have the resources to operate at the frontier. Training a frontier model still requires access to thousands of high-end GPUs and vast energy resources. Most organisations—private and public—are left using what’s built elsewhere, on someone else’s terms.

And trust, in the West at least, lags behind. The report notes bias, hallucination and misinformation risks, but this remains one of the most under-addressed areas of AI deployment. The public sector—where high-stakes decisions get made—needs tools that are not just powerful, but explainable, auditable, and aligned with public values.

Finally, there’s a geographic imbalance. The report is almost entirely focused on the U.S., with some attention to China. Europe barely registers. That’s not just a presentational gap—it reflects a genuine strategic risk.

But it’s not inevitable.

Europe—and the UK in particular—have strengths that are easy to underestimate: deep research institutions, high-trust public services, strong civic institutions and a legal tradition grounded in rights and accountability.

Too often the narrative in Europe is one of massive and complex legal frameworks that stifle start ups. But Europe’s regulatory instincts could be a strength, not a weakness. Done well and without being overly burdensome, they could offer an alternative model for AI governance.

It shouldn’t be impossible to design more laws that prioritise safety, rights, and democratic oversight without stifling innovation. However, if the legal vision is purely reactive—always responding to moves in the US—we will fall behind not just commercially, but socially and politically.

One area where the UK has a real shot at global leadership is workforce transformation. Over the last few months, estimates about the scale of changes to jobs range from the fairly discreet to the catastrophic. I do not think we hear our PM talk enough about the urgency of re-skilling the workforce. We need to get ahead of the tsunami and not ignore it. In the next decade, there will be huge differences in what jobs we need and who does them, but we cannot put our heads in the sand and ignore the direction of travel.

AI isn’t just a technology shift—it’s a work shift. It changes how jobs are structured, how tasks are performed, and what skills are required. If we treat this purely as a productivity play and ignore the people who need to use these tools, we’ll fail.

In a funny twist, the BOND report dropped while I was in a Multiverse board meeting—Mary Meeker, its author, sits on the board too. Multiverse shows the positive business impact when employers take workforce development seriously. It began as a modern apprenticeship platform but is now one of the fastest-growing tech-ed businesses in the UK. It is helping UK employers re -skill thousands of people in data, AI and software development.

If the UK can get workforce strategy right—if we equip SMEs, public institutions, and entire industries to use AI confidently and ethically—we unlock a national advantage. This is not just an economic output. It will help build societal resilience.

The opportunity is there, but it won’t be realised through innovation alone. We need:

• Investment in public infrastructure: open datasets, shared compute, and safe model testing environments. This will allow transparent and open source applications to flourish.

• A massive increase in green energy supply to power the next wave of adoption. China is investing billions in solar energy - adding more than any other country in just the first quarter of 2025 (Europe is investing in AI infrastructure, but faces challenges: it holds just 4% of global AI computing power, compared to the US’s 70%, and suffers from higher industrial energy costs)
  

• Reform of public procurement: so the NHS, local councils and schools can adopt AI tools built for their needs—not just enterprise platforms retrofitted for public service.

• A shift in capital flows: towards startups building for education, care, community health—not just another enterprise customer service application.
  

In 2025, the most important question isn’t whether AI can write a poem or summarise a contract. It is whether it helps build a fairer, smarter, more inclusive society.

The Bond Report shows us that Europe—and the UK—wont win the AI arms race. So we need to focus on the huge challenge of dissemination. The clock is ticking.

https://www.bondcap.com/report/tai - if you can’t face wading through the whole thing, ask a gen ai app to help you summarise it….

One of the questions I’ve been asked most often over the last thirty years is: where does your confidence come from? It’s not an easy thing to analyse in yourself. But I’ve always believed mine has been shaped by three things: a loving family, the freedom to take risks, and a life of relative privilege.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking less about the confidence of individuals—and more about the confidence of places.

What makes a city, region or country project belief in its future? It’s a question that’s been on my mind after a whirlwind eight-day journey from Bradford to Los Angeles and back to the City of London. Three places, three very different moods—and three very different stories of confidence.

Let’s start in West Yorkshire.

Bradford’s story is well known: once a titan of the Industrial Revolution, its booming mill industry attracted generations of migrants from Pakistan and India, adding layers of cultural richness and economic dynamism. But the last few decades have been far tougher—economic decline, social tension, unrest. For too long, the city has been seen by some as problematic.

And yet, walking through the centre on a bright spring day and meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, I didn’t find a place in retreat. I found a city busy reinventing itself.

Bradford is currently the UK’s City of Culture. It’s reshaping its public realm—pedestrianised streets, new cultural spaces—and it has the youngest population of any UK city. Its university produces more AI graduates than any other. That matters. AI is not a niche concern anymore—it’s going to transform everything from logistics to law. Bradford’s combination of technical capability and youth could be rocket fuel for renewal.

But what struck me most wasn’t a single policy or building project. It was the tone of the local leadership. Despite significant financial pressures and patchy infrastructure, the people I met projected steady, grounded optimism. They weren’t sugar-coating the challenges. But they believed in Bradford’s future—and that belief was infectious.

It reminded me of something I’ve come to believe deeply: leaders set the emotional temperature of a place. When they speak with ambition, others follow. When they model resilience, others dig in. Confidence, it turns out, can be contagious.

Then—whiplash. Twenty-four hours later, I landed in Los Angeles to speak at the Milken Conference. It’s corporate America at full tilt, with a healthy (or maybe unhealthy) splash of political swagger. I joined a dinner featuring Scott Bessent, was at a tech leaders roundtable, took part in a session on Europe, and heard more pronouncements about the future than a Black Mirror writer’s room.

The dominant mood? Triumph.

One speaker opened a session by declaring, “The US won the internet. Now we’re winning AI.” I couldn’t resist: “If winning means hoarding data, consolidating power in the hands of a few, and unleashing tools we barely understand—then sure, you’ve won.”

There’s a fine line between confidence and hubris. And while I admire America’s energy and boldness, I was struck—frankly, a bit alarmed—by how uncritical the overarching narrative had become. The top topics? Tariffs, war, trade, tech. Climate change barely got a look in. No one questioned whether AI might be reinforcing inequality, or whether geopolitical posturing might backfire. Other countries, when they were mentioned at all, were presented as either investment vehicles or competitors to be neutralised.

Europe, if it came up, was met with curiosity but also scepticism. The old adage “Live in Europe, invest in the US” summed up the mood. Three people even asked me “Why is your government so determined to make it hard to run a business?”

At a couple of talks, it was the UAE, Saudi and Qatar that were the countries attracting the most attention. Something had definitely shifted.

So: back home. To Mansion House. Speaking at the City of London’s International Trade Dinner was its own test of confidence for me. Surrounded by hundreds of business leaders, with chandeliers twinkling and centuries of British commerce gazing down from the paintings, it would have been easy to be overwhelmed. But I was still thinking about Bradford’s optimism and LA’s bravado—and wondering: where does Britain sit on this spectrum? I made three points.

First: values matter. We must be clear about what kind of economy we want to build—future-facing, diverse, sustainable. These aren’t PR slogans; they are business imperatives. Right now, AI adoption among UK small and medium-sized businesses is dangerously low. We can’t afford that gap. We need more digital ambition, everywhere.

We also need to move beyond tick-box diversity. That means backing people from all walks of life with the finance and support to build things—because innovation doesn’t just come from the same places or people. And we can’t let climate commitments slide off the agenda. Building for long-term value—social, environmental, and financial—has to be the goal.

Second: collaboration. No country thrives in isolation. The UK has remarkable strengths—our universities, our creative industries, our legal system—but we will squander them if we turn inward. The fallout from Brexit cannot be underestimated but we still have plenty of ways to make new partnerhips.

Third: we need to rediscover our sales instinct. British business culture tends to underplay, to self-deprecate, to say “well, it’s quite good really” when it’s actually world-class. That might be charming, but it won’t cut it in a global market. Confidence isn’t about swagger—it’s about being ready to make the case for yourself, again and again and again. Every founder knows: belief is part of the product. No one is waiting for Britain to knock on their door. We must create our own opportunities and that requires relentless effort and a willingness to sell our story to the world.

Bradford taught me that local pride, rooted in action, is powerful. LA reminded me that confidence can tip into delusion—but that scale needs a story. And London? London, for all its heritage, has always had a capacity to reinvent.

Confidence isn’t just a personal trait. It’s an economic force. A community asset. A national advantage. And right now, it might be one the most under-rated levers we have for growth.

Twenty-one years ago this weekend, I was involved in a car accident that changed my life forever.

It’s a strange kind of anniversary. Not a celebration—far from it. Most years, it’s just another day that I wish had never happened. But even on a low day like this one, I return to a few reflections.

First: human beings are extraordinary.

The people who saved my life are, for the most part, strangers I’ll never meet. They include the blood donors whose generosity meant I could receive 17 pints of blood in the first week alone. The medics who flew me from Morocco to Oxford in a specially adapted aircraft, flying low to prevent brain damage. The trauma team at the John Radcliffe Hospital, who operated on me for 27 hours. The intensive care nurses, anaesthetists, orthopaedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, many of whom I never got the chance to thank properly. It still blows my mind that we have organised ourselves in so many complex systems to be able to save people like me.

Second: resilience is not a secret power, it’s a decision.

It’s become one of the most overused words of our time, but in my experience, resilience just means choosing to keep going—sometimes in increments as small as 30 seconds at a time. I’ve managed because I’ve had an absurd amount of love around me. From my family, from my partner, Chris Gorell Barnes, from my friends, and from the patient, generous people I’ve worked with over the past two decades. They’ve helped me feel purposeful when I wasn’t sure I could.

However, I have also found that beyond human support, strength comes from less expected places—poetry, music, walking in all weathers, reading a new novel, seeing a painting you love, visiting a place you’ve never been. These are the things that can inspire and motivate.

Third: perspective matters.

However low you feel, there’s always something bigger than you going on and to which you can connect. I’ve found that thought surprisingly comforting. Last year, I climbed the Three Peaks to raise money for four brilliant charities. On top of Scafell Pike, I met a young man named Arthur. He was climbing far more mountains than I was—literally and figuratively—to raise money in the face of an incurable brain tumour. He was remarkable.

I’m a proud patron of Day One Trauma Support and have seen firsthand how vital early care and psychological support can be for patients and families. I was lucky—I had access to extraordinary medical help and a network of people advocating for me. Many others aren’t so fortunate. Without that scaffolding, my life might have been far more limited.

Fourth: identity isn’t fixed.

Having a new identity thrust upon me—suddenly, uninvited—was one of the hardest parts of the aftermath. It’s taken years to feel even slightly at peace with a very different career than the one I had imagined. I still say no to about 75% of the things I’m lucky enough to be asked to do, because my body won’t always let me commit to as much as I would like. I’m not saying this to ask for sympathy. I’m saying it to reassure anyone who feels inadequate or insecure.

You can still build a meaningful working life—even if it doesn’t fit neatly into other people’s notions of success.

I stuck this quote from Tennyson’s Ulysses to my desk when I could finally sit at it again. I think you will see why.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.