Lord Ed Vaizey

Member @UKHouseofLords & Business Adviser. MP for Wantage & Didcot (2005-19) Tech & Culture Minister (2010-16) | Trustee @Tate | @timesradio Friday mornings

[Lord Ed Vaizey @edvaizey]

My piece in @ftweekend on how the Tories need to modernise - again

https://t.co/UI3pnCoffA

[Anna Mikhailova @AVMikhailova]

A big loss to @TimesRadio but an exciting move, and @HFalconerMP’s gain! Good luck Ali!

[Peter Wilson 魏磊 @PeterWilson]

Here’s a clip from an interview on CCTV4 with 鲁健 访谈 (Talk with Lu Jian) that went out Friday

Good to discuss 🇬🇧 🇨🇳 investment, cultural interaction, my previous experiences working in China, and importance for diplomats of understanding how your host country sees its history

[Felix Unger 🇮🇱 @Husker_Ju]

Fantastic interview: legendary producer Chris Kimsey by @edvaizey .. he of the Stones, Marillion etc.

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

Hate to say it, but Ted nails it here.

He just leaves out his own role. He enabled it, nurtured it, and helped build a politics where hate was a winning strategy.

Now he wants credit for diagnosing what he helped create.

Enjoy this term, Ted. I intend to help make it your last.

[Emily @TigerTownDream]

Relevant tonight.

Liz Cheney: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

This is an interesting and actually pretty bold move by Vance. Don’t know any VP (since Henry Wallace?) has tried to do something like this. We’re in uncharted waters in so many ways over the next two years…

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

The same can be said of everyone who licked Trump’s boots for power and profit while knowing better.

“I believe in repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. But none of those things requires me to pretend that deliberate cruelty is anything less than a grave moral failure.

“Your political allegiance does not absolve you of moral responsibility. You do not get to set aside your conscience during an election and retrieve it afterward.”

[Kirstie Allsopp @KirstieMAllsopp]

Does anyone in Government realise how damaging the weight of regulation is for our economy? I’m waiting for a certificate from our plumber, but he can’t provide it without going on a course & that means taking days off paid work, and paying for the course. Local young farmers 🧵

[Rt Hon Sir Grant Shapps @grantshapps]

Two weeks ago I wrote that the next attack on Britain might not look like the start of a war. It might look like an ordinary Monday morning when everything suddenly stops working.

Yesterday it looked like a fridge.

Supermarket refrigeration was attacked across seven European countries. Freezers were switched to defrost. In some shops the temperature reached 50C. One Belgian store threw away €100,000 of food. Last month the same method hit hundreds of French supermarkets and millions of euros of stock went in the bin. Britain was hit too, in a small way, according to our own National Cyber Security Centre.

The damage this time was spoiled food. That is about as cheap a warning as we are ever going to get.

Today the NCSC says artificial intelligence is helping to industrialise these attacks, and that it is highly likely AI will be used against Britain’s critical national infrastructure by 2028. Its chief executive put the cause plainly: Britain has done “tech on the cheap” for decades, and weaknesses we tolerated for far too long can now be found and exploited at a scale that was once unimaginable.

We keep a list of what counts as critical national infrastructure. Energy, water, transport, health. Nobody ever wrote down the refrigeration unit at the back of a supermarket. But attackers do not work from our list. They work from whatever is connected, unpatched and forgotten.

That is the real warning this week, and it is not really about AI. AI only makes the forgotten things faster to find. The job is to stop leaving them there.

Cheap technology is only cheap until it stops working.

So let us have a national rethink of what counts as critical national infrastructure. Not a longer list. Just a more intelligent one.

[Rt. Hon Ben Wallace @BenWallace70]

Despite a direction from me when Defence Secretary that the Skynet 6A , £2bn contract was too important to the UK space industry to offshore to Lockheed Martin it looks as if Wes is preparing to place the contract overseas. The damage it would do to Stevenage and the UK satellite industry would be irreversible and it was always assessed it could mean the end of the sector. Lockheed’s promises of factories in Newcastle were skin deep. The differences between types on offer were marginal. No.10 could, and should stop this. @AirbusDefence @wesstreeting @larisamlbrown @kevinbonavia @haynesdeborah

[Radosław Sikorski 🇵🇱🇪🇺 @sikorskiradek]

The stand off around Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal is about restoring rule of law to an institution which had been politicised by the populist government which lost power in the election of 2023. Its president repeatedly broke the law by steering politically sensitive cases to hand-picked judges. It failed to pass its own budget,

[Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist]

Mindblowing chart from OBR. In 2029 real household disposable income per person expected to be just 1% higher than in 2019. What an unbelievably awful decade. It used to grow by 2%+ every year, not 1% in 10 years.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I'm seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points.

I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days.

Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.

However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.

When you've known people since they were ten years old it's hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn't managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I've repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn't want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma's 'all witches' speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through' (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.

Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is. She'll never need a homeless shelter. She's never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her 'public bathroom' is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison?

I wasn't a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.

The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she's adopted because she's noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest.

Adults can't expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend's assassination, then assert their right to the former friend's love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I've finally decided to exercise it.

[Professor John Tregoning @DrTregoning]

I do challenge the advice about stockpiling Sauvignon blanc.
Surely better to stockpile a red - because if the power goes down, the white would be room temperature, which would be simply ghastly.

[Jason D. Clinton 🔸 @JasonDClinton]

as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)

[Patrick Maguire @patrickkmaguire]

Honoured to have won Political Journalist of the Year — and my very own bust of Lord Salisbury — at the London Press Club Awards today. Congrats too to victorious colleagues @Gabriel_Pogrund and @larisamlbrown

[Times Radio @TimesRadio]

William Hague declares Trump the worst president of his lifetime, and struggles to see how anyone could have a different opinion.

“This mishandling of world affairs … is the most serious development and negative development in the world since the Second World War.“

@StigAbell | @WilliamJHague

[Richard Williams @williams_rje]

Read this powerful article by @thetimes , and reflect on what has been shared..

This is not just “persecution by (extremely clumsy) process” imposed upon active-duty SAS operators fighting to detain vicious ISIS thugs in an active war zone, but also an example of performative self-immolation initiated by the most senior UK Special Forces officer at the time (G Jenkins) as self-serving exercise in what HE calls ‘transparency’……

So, if someone, anyone (quite possibly an enemy) within an active war zone says the SAS killed an unarmed man, then the so-called ‘senior leaders’ (some, as in this case, with near-zero combat experience) within the Whitehall-based ‘UK system’ desperate to demonstrate something that they call ‘transparency’ (or whatever else floats the MOD’s boat), will automatically launch an aggressive RMP operation to detain the SAS men involved….

Not on the basis of any hard evidence (there is no crime scene, no bodies, no bullets etc), but purely on distant, uncorroborated hearsay and remote, delayed analysis of operational reports; all supported by desk-bound, chinless leaders that seemingly care more about how they will (personally) look in an MOD promotion board than trying to properly understand the circumstances faced by the SAS men and defend them accordingly.

What a gift this utterly pathetic weakness, low threshold investigative process and twisted self-defeating system gives to our many enemies….and what an awful message it sends to those that still volunteer to fight on our all of our behalves….

[Michael Bociurkiw @WorldAffairsPro]

On a day of fast moving headlines - when the integrity of the supposed leader of the free world is being questioned - smart analysis by @emilysheffield on @TimesRadio. “We are at an incredibly dangerous, geopolitical situation right now.” And we can no longer count on America stepping in.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Pour ceux d’entre nous qui aiment la France, cette nuit a été tragique, surtout après l’effroyable vandalisme culturel survenu à Limoges. Les barbares ont gagné. Et le président Macron brille par son absence. Si l’establishment français, parfaitement inutile, continue sur cette lancée, il ne sera même pas nécessaire de procéder à un second tour lors de l’élection présidentielle du printemps prochain : Mme Le Pen obtiendra 50 % des voix dès le premier tour. Une tragédie est en train de se jouer.