The Edition: AI will bring down Keir Starmer – if Peter Mandelson doesn’t first
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Is Britain ready for Artificial Intelligence? Well, bluntly, 'no'; that's the verdict if you read several pieces in this week's Spectator – from Tim Shipman, Ross Clark and Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley – focused on how Britain is uniquely ill-placed to take advantage of the next industrial revolution. Tim Shipman's cover piece focuses on how the Labour government is approaching AI – there are some positives but, overall, Britain's creaky bureaucracy is blocking progress.
To discuss this week's Edition, features editor William Moore is joined by political editor Tim Shipman, commissioning editor Lara Brown and the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine. Are you a tech-optimist or part of the 'analogue resistance' that Sarah professes to head?
Also on the episode: why is Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel obsessed with the antichrist – and is he the Isaac Newton of the 21st century; what does the Peter Mandelson scandal reveal about politics – and has Sarah Ferguson fallen further than the Prince of Darkness; is the new documentary Melania a genius PR move or a vain symptom of Trump's love of classic Hollywood; and finally, have you experienced 'elder-speak'?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:35.7 | Hello and welcome to the edition from The Spectator. I'm William Moore, the |
| 0:39.7 | Spectator. |
| 0:38.3 | I'm William Moore, the Spectator's Features Editor. |
| 0:41.3 | And the latest issue of the magazine has just gone to print. |
| 0:44.0 | To talk about what's in it, I'm delighted to be joined by Tim Shipman, our political editor, |
| 0:48.6 | Laura Brown, our commissioning editor, and the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine. |
| 1:01.4 | Our cover this week is AI Apocalypse Now. |
| 1:03.7 | Is Stormer ready for what's coming? |
| 1:04.9 | asks Tim Schittman. |
| 1:07.2 | So Tim, is he? |
| 1:08.2 | No. |
| 1:09.9 | Next. |
| 1:16.4 | Look, if you ask people what the government has actually done well, it's a vanishingly small list, |
| 1:18.6 | but lots of people say, actually, they've done all right on AI. |
| 1:22.9 | They didn't just junk everything the Tories did, like they did in a whole range of other areas. |
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