I used to think Morgan McSweeney filled his evenings browbeating backbenchers or Sharpie-ing constituency boundaries. It is therefore pleasing to learn that the man of action is also a man of letters – and ideas. In his Spectator cover story this week, Tim Shipman reported that McSweeney currently has Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic on his bedside table.
Alright, it’s not Sun Tzu. It’s not even Harold Macmillan paging through Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (so dedicated was Macmillan to finding moments for literary reflection that in No 10 he would hang a do-not-disturb on his reading room door saying “Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot”). But we can read something of Macmillan’s methods from his favourite writers, himself a conniving patrician straight out of the Palliser novels. And, having quite recently finished Karp’s Republic myself, I think I can spy something about McSweeney’s direction in his reading matter: an unstable work of techno-political theory by a Silicon Valley defence contractor.
Alexander Karp is the CEO of Palantir Technologies, a tech and defence company that he co-founded with Peter Thiel, greatest and creepiest of the Maga oligarchs. And The Technological Republic is the clearest statement of Karp’s belief system. The book spans anti-woke polemic, business strategy guide and Kulturkritik, but Karp is, in short, a nostalgic futurist. He believes America was made great by a partnership between entrepreneurs and government in the decades after the postwar. In those years, America shot for the stars, landed on the moon, and became the most militarised imperial power on the planet.
But after that, Karp’s tech-brethren got distracted by social media scrollers and grocery delivery apps. They simultaneously forsook their nation and their society, beginning to see America as a place of nightmares, not dreams. Karp believes that a new generation of patriotic industrialists is needed to revitalise the American economy but also the American mission. And it seems he’s already found them. Upon Trump’s re-election, Palantir stock soared. The company has been one of the great beneficiaries of his administration, signing various deals with the federal government to produce a new generation of AI weaponry and data-driven homeland security.
Though he remains a mostly opaque personality, McSweeney is generally believed to hail from his party’s “Blue Labour” faction. But Karp is a long way from the talk of “covenants” and “respect” which fills their seminar rooms. What are we to make of this alignment between No 10 strategy and Silicon Valley plutocrat?
Palantir has long been a bogeyman of Whitehall, supposedly waiting to slurp up our NHS data for nefarious purposes. However, I don’t think that’s what has drawn McSweeney to Karp. Instead, this seems another instance of a political apparatchik who, desperate for a stubborn government to simply move faster, has turned for inspiration to the engineers and developers who have changed the world quicker than anyone else this century.
McSweeney is frequently compared to Dominic Cummings. There appears to even be a respect between the two self-styled electioneering pros – in Cummings’ recent round of interviews, McSweeney was one of the few members of this Labour government to have been spared his usual scattergun-swearing. And Cummings’ own writings, and now this insight about McSweeney, reveal that both men increasingly view politics as operational, about the arrangement and direction of institutions.
Cummings was obsessed with turning No 10 into an operational hub modelled on Silicon Valley. “Start-up” is, in his vocabulary, a rare term of approbation. It seems McSweeney agrees, or is curious to find out. If, as Keir Starmer himself recently conceded, the traditional left-right divide in politics is dead, perhaps this is what will replace it: competing theories of bureaucracy, with the object of hyper-efficient collaboration between the private and public sectors. Let no one say this is a government without a story or ideas.
[See also: Morgan McSweeney’s moment of truth]
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