Kemi From IT – A Digital Leader In A Gladiatorial World – Guido Fawkes

As Kemi’s supporters say, performance at the despatch box did nothing for William Hague, and Mrs Thatcher took a year or two to find her feet, and there must be four years to the next election. Let’s be patient and give the lass the time she needs to finish her PhD in politics. She’s bright, she’s accomplished, she’ll get the hang of it.

Loyalty’s such a dangerous quality. 

The problem with Kemi is more fundamental than inexperience. It lies in the gulf that exists between people, politics and software engineers. 

If Kemi’s background in IT support has given her anything, it is the tools and techniques to ignore the weeping humanity of her dependants. Her backbenchers sit there pleading with her, “You’re not working! I promise you, I don’t know why, all I know is you don’t work! Yes, we have definitely plugged you in. And yes! More than once we’ve turned you off and on again. Nothing’s happening!’ 

It’s nothing as simple or fixable as debugging her operating system. 

Kemi is a digital product in an animal world. She is a hologram performing in the Colosseum. She is an animé avatar competing against sweating, bleeding, hairy-backed gladiators. 

That is, she is affectless. She has no purchase on the parliamentary process. 

It’s why the Prime Minister comes in brimming with confidence, nodding and smiling at the Tory benches. He rejoices in the freedom he has to say things which are not just untrue but as wildly impossible as an Arabic fairy tale. 

When confronted with adverse statistics, he waves them away as “fantasy figures as much use as Liz Truss!” 

He knows he can say anything he wants and there’s nothing Tories can do about it. 

When Kemi mentions, as she occasionally does, that the last Government left the fastest-growing economy in the G7, he is able to laugh, “She must be the only person in Britain who believes they did well with the economy!” and then – this is so daring as to be reckless – “she is obsessed with talking down the economy”. 

He can go even further. He can say, with sublime confidence that Labour has “stabilised the economy”. 

We’ve all heard him say it. He says it every week. Labour. Has stabilised. The economy.

He can stand in the rubble and say without fear of retribution that the Conservatives “crashed the economy”.

He says these things because he can. And the reason he can is that Kemi from IT is as useful as Rachel from Complaints. 

It’s the text-to-speech phenomenon. IT consultants understand it as the efficient way of communicating. Type it up. Read it out. Once it’s in the record, these people believe, it exists as political fact. 

Actual politicians understand the life and death nature of debate. Of diagnosing their opponents’ weakness and using that to destroy their credibility. Thus, to engage the PM’s moral vanity, intellectual dishonesty and rhetorical clumsiness, and bearing in on those defects with such guile and deadliness as to lift him off his feet and pin him, wriggling on the wall.

Our digital heroine swishes her cyber-sword and it passes through the PM without him feeling a thing. 

Whatever her opponents hope, it is very unlikely that our heroine will sink to the necessary depths to achieve what is needed. 

Is it possible that AI sees things that we, with our limited human vision, cannot? When today’s PMQs was transcribed by a speech-to-text program it came out with interesting curiosities. 

“And steam the gross U.S. trade deal with the Soviet Union” may yet be revealed to contain a deeper truth than we see at the moment. 

Certainly, the “national living wage” rendered as “the colony wage” implies a class of worker subjugated by imperial overlords.

“The warm homes discount” written as the “war worn sick camp” has more to it than meets the eye. 

And, “Normally, in a state of emergency, the maximum amount is not minimum” was no less memorable or meaningful than the original, now lost to us in Hansard. 

“You don’t grow the economy by abstaining,” was registered as a publishable concrete poem: “Well, you don’t go to the Coal Mill to account as by attempts”. 

And, “When he has so obviously failed” came out as “Why is he so ugly and fake?” That was no different in any meaningful way than Kemi’s normal exit lines.