Let me be brutally frank: if Westminster were a hedge fund, it would be bankrupt. And if it were a rocket company, it would never make it off the launchpad.
The truth—unvarnished, unapologetic, and staring us squarely in the face—is this: most of our political class, especially those on the Labour benches, are simply not clever enough.
I don’t say this to be cruel. I say it because I care. I say it because I recently found myself at dinner with eleven dazzlingly high-IQ traders in one of London’s most resplendent culinary cathedrals. These are men who breathe complexity like oxygen, whose daily spreadsheets could melt the average MP’s frontal cortex. They make hundreds of millions, and it’s not by accident. It’s by synaptic supremacy—intellects forged in fire, like Vulcan crafting algorithms instead of swords.
One of them—an absolute lightning bolt of a mind—spoke of bitcoin mining at wind turbine sites. You see, when the wind blows too much, we actually pay energy producers to shut the turbines down. We can’t store the energy. So we send crisp millions fluttering into the void. But why not do something smart instead? Why not use that excess juice to mint digital gold… bitcoin. We could immediately turn air into assets. Pow. Pow. Pow. That was the sound of ideas ricocheting off the steak knives.
This is the sort of thinking we’re missing in Parliament. Strategic. Lateral. Lion-hearted.
Meanwhile, what do we get from the current Labour cabinet? A passion for spreadsheets, perhaps—but not the kind that balance an economy. Not one of them has ever even run a business. And I’d be shocked—shocked—if Rachel Reeves could navigate the Laffer Curve without sat nav and a team of Treasury interns whispering in her ear. And even then, she gets it wrong—time and time again.
It’s not personal. It’s mathematical. Like most sensible people, I want her to succeed. I don’t want my country to suffer.
Now, imagine a Parliament stacked with polymaths. People who understand second-order consequences. Who can read a balance sheet and also a climate model. People with moonshot ambition, not just careerist calculation. Would they be perfect? Probably not. But would they ask smarter questions? Launch bolder missions? Save us billions? Absolutely, yes.
We don’t need more PPE degrees and parliamentary pabulum. We need physicists, coders, entrepreneurs, and, yes, even traders who’ve weathered the stormy chaos of global markets. People who’ve stared risk in the face and said, “Hold my neural net.”
Remember: if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. That evening in London, I was very much in the right room. It was like dining with the Avengers of finance and innovation. We need to bring some of that energy—some of that brainpower—into the political cockpit before the UK ship stalls completely.
Because, let’s be honest: Britain cannot afford dumb decisions made by decent but dim people. It’s time to raise the IQ of our democracy.
Pow.
By Claire Bullivant.
