Jonathan Powell rejects overtures to replace McSweeney as Starmer’s chief of staff
Jonathan Powell, Keir Starmer’s national security adviser (NSA), has rejected overtures to become the prime minister’s chief of staff after the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, the Guardian has been told,Powell’s allies say his decision not to take forward discussions about the job – the same role he undertook under Tony Blair’s premiership from 1997 to 2007 – was largely motivated by an intention to return to the mediation consultancy that he set up in 2011, with little interest in returning to a job he has already done,He is said to be weighing a departure from Downing Street at the end of the year, in what would represent another significant departure from the prime minister’s senior team,Downing Street sources firmly denied that Jonathan Powell had any plans to step down from his role, adding that he was not leaving Downing Street and would continue as NSA,They said any suggestion Powell had been offered the role of chief of staff was untrue.
Powell is credited with playing a key role in shaping Starmer’s policies on the world stage.The prime minister’s efforts to build a relationship with Donald Trump and act as a self-styled bridge between the US and Europe are seen as one of the more successful elements of his tenure at No 10.In a continued Downing Street clear-out after the controversy over the decision to make Peter Mandelson the ambassador to Washington, it was announced on Thursday that Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, was stepping down “by mutual consent” after just more than a year in the job.It is also understood that Powell very strongly advised Starmer not to appoint Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington, an opinion that could emerge in the publication of internal government memos due to be published after a Commons vote earlier this month.Downing Street sources said they would not comment on advice given to the prime minister.
The mass of documentation, which ministers agreed to release after the controversy over Mandelson’s long-term links to the child sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, will be released after sensitive items are filtered by parliament’s intelligence and security committee,Powell’s recommendation was not owing to any special knowledge of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein, but because he felt from his personal experience during the Blair government that Mandelson courted controversy and would represent trouble for the prime minister,As Blair’s chief of staff, Powell had to handle two cabinet resignations by Mandelson and on both occasions felt Mandelson did not handle the controversy as well as he could have,His opposition to Mandelson underlines the extent to which Starmer and McSweeney ignored top-level foreign policy advice from inside No 10 and the Foreign Office over the appointment,David Lammy, who was foreign secretary at the time of the appointment, has also let it be known that he opposed the plan, but he may have been reflecting a Foreign Office view that such a high-level diplomatic appointment should go to a professional diplomat and not a former Labour minister.
Powell has been regarded as a highly effective national security adviser, acting as a key liaison between No 10 and the European “coalition of the willing” built to support Ukraine,He has also been at the centre of the controversy over the decision to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius,His consultancy, Inter-Mediate, specialises in working behind the scenes to bring together parties in a conflict,Powell always regarded the highly demanding national security job as a fixed-term appointment,At Inter-Mediate, Powell – considered to have been one of the key architects of the 1999 Good Friday agreement – played a role in supporting negotiations to end the Basque conflict and demobilise the Eta separatist group.
In addition, he served as a peace adviser to the former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos on his Nobel prize-winning settlement with the Farc rebels.Powell also worked alongside Mozambique’s former president Filipe Nyusi to end the country’s long civil war through a landmark agreement signed in summer 2019.
Elon Musk’s xAI faces second lawsuit over toxic pollutants from datacenter
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is facing a second lawsuit alleging it is illegally emitting toxic pollutants from its enormous datacenters, which house its supercomputers and run the chatbot Grok.The new pending suit alleges xAI is violating the Clean Air Act and was filed Friday by the storied civil rights group the NAACP. The group’s 40-page notice of intent to sue alleges xAI has been polluting Black communities near its facility in Southaven, Mississippi. The pollution comes from more than a dozen portable methane gas generators that xAI set up without permits, the notice alleges.The NAACP’s first notice of intent to sue was filed last June and involves similar allegations regarding the company’s datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee
AI is indeed coming – but there is also evidence to allay investor fears
The message from investors to the software, wealth management, legal services and logistics industries this month has been clear: AI is coming for your business.The release of new, ever more powerful AI tools has coincided with a stock market slide, which has swept up sectors as diverse as drug distribution, commercial property and price comparison sites. Advances in the technology are giving increasing credibility to predictions that it could render millions of white-collar jobs obsolete – or, at least, eat into the profits of established companies.Carl Benedikt Frey, the author of How Progress Ends and an associate professor of AI and work at the University of Oxford, says investors are reassessing the value of companies that rely heavily on selling software or specialist knowledge.“AI turns once-scarce expertise into output that’s cheaper, faster, and increasingly comparable, which compresses margins long before whole jobs disappear
Anthropic raises $30bn in latest round, valuing Claude bot maker at $380bn
Anthropic, the US AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, has raised $30bn (£22bn) in a funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $380bn.The company’s previous funding round in September achieved a value of $183bn, with further improvements in the technology since then spurring even greater investor interest.The fundraising was announced amid a series of stock market moves against industries that face disruption from the latest models, including software, trucking and logistics, wealth management and commercial property services.The funding round, led by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the hedge fund Coatue Management, is among the largest private fundraising deals on record.“Anthropic is the clear category leader in enterprise AI,” said Choo Yong Cheen, the chief investment officer of private equity at GIC
How to deal with the “Claude crash”: Relx should keep buying back shares, then buy more | Nils Pratley
As the FTSE 100 index bobs along close to all-time highs, it is easy to miss the quiet share price crash in one corner of the market. It’s got a name – the “Claude crash”, referencing the plug-in legal products added by the AI firm Anthropic to its Claude Cowork office assistant.This launch, or so you would think from the panicked stock market reaction in the past few weeks, marks the moment when the AI revolution rips chunks out of some of the UK’s biggest public companies – those in the dull but successful “data” game, including Relx, the London Stock Exchange Group, Experian, Sage and Informa.Relx, the former Reed Elsevier, whose brands include the Lancet and LexisNexis, is the most intriguing in that list. The company’s description of itself contains at least five words to provoke a yawn – “a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers” – but the pre-Claude share price was a thing of wonder
Share values of property services firms tumble over fears of AI disruption
Shares in commercial property services companies have tumbled, in the latest sell-off driven by fears over disruption from artificial intelligence.After steep declines on Wall Street, European stocks in the sector were hit on Thursday.The estate agent Savills’ shares fell 7.5% in London, while the serviced office provider International Workplace Group, which owns the Regus brand, lost 9%.The UK’s two biggest property developers, British Land and Landsec, dropped 2
Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January
Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority
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