In recent years, a trend for a particular kind of career move has begun to crop up in British public life. A small but revealing cluster of senior political figures has reappeared not just on the after-dinner circuit or in the House of Lords, but inside America’s most powerful technology companies. Rishi Sunak now advises Microsoft and Anthropic. George Osborne has joined OpenAI. Even seasoned political operators like the former No. 10 advisors Liam Booth-Smith and Cass Horowitz have swapped British electioneering for American Big Tech.
It is tempting to see this as just another spin of the revolving door. Politics drains into money, Silicon Valley has deep pockets, and British politicians have always travelled well. But this trend is different. When Nick Clegg quit frontline politics to become Meta’s global affairs chief in 2018, it was widely seen as a curiosity. Eight years on, the Clegg model has turned out to be the prototype for a distinctly British export.
This shift reflects a change not in Britain, but in Big Tech’s relationship with politics. For the world’s largest technology firms, government is no longer a background irritant to be managed but a serious and growing constraint. Antitrust, platform liability and AI regulation threaten not just their profits but the industry’s own autonomy. For frontier AI, increasingly the greatest threat is national security, where export controls and supply chains can prove more decisive than any regulator. As Silicon Valley’s libertarian optimism hardens into something more cautious – or even nationalist – the true value of having strong political intermediaries has risen sharply.
Britain has supplied competent managers for someone else’s empire
At the same time, America’s tech giants have moved beyond industry into something closer to state-building. They construct systems and infrastructure that stretch far beyond borders, shaping labour markets, mediating speech and increasingly becoming substitutes for public, state-run infrastructure. For this reason, traditional government lobbying – designed to influence decisions, not to absorb risk – begins to look oddly inadequate. The answer, increasingly, has been to embed political credibility within the organisations themselves.
Britain happens to produce exactly the kind of people you would want for that job. Silicon Valley’s latest recruits all share common traits: they are globalist, technocratic, internationally legible and, crucially, rather untheatrical. They offer gravitas without the partisan volatility of Washington and pragmatism without the reflexive hostility of Brussels. They are, of course, not exclusively a British export, but hires from Britain sit neatly between America’s culture wars and Europe’s natural regulatory instincts.
Yet Britain’s usefulness here is often misunderstood, not least by the country itself. The UK still has real assets in the new technology arms race: deep capital markets, world-class legal services and privileged access to Western security and intelligence networks. Yet none of this confers control over the technologies that now matter most. On the whole, Britain does not design the platforms, own the computers or set the direction of foundational AI models. It does not build or command the digital infrastructure on which the next economy will run.
Big Tech is not hiring British politicians to unlock capital or access intelligence. What it increasingly lacks, and increasingly needs, is legitimacy: the ability to operate across jurisdictions without appearing too ungovernable. Britain has not captured the commanding heights of the digital economy; it has supplied competent managers for someone else’s empire. What is being bought is not political muscle, but political manners.
That need explains a feature of these recent appointments that might otherwise seem strange to Westminster outsiders. In nearly every case, those hired have been explicitly forbidden from lobbying. When Microsoft and Anthropic sought clearance for Sunak’s new positions, they went out of their way to assure Acoba, the government’s watchdog on post-ministerial jobs, that his role would be ‘internally focused’ and detached from UK policy.
These appointments are less about persuading governments to do anything than about ensuring that the organisation is legible, credible and governable in the eyes of the state. All this comes at a time of mounting suspicion that technology companies have grown too powerful, too fast, and too detached from democratic constraint. In that sense, Big Tech’s newest courtiers operate less as influence than as insurance.
Strip away the rhetoric and the trade-off is clear. America exports platforms, infrastructure and scale. Britain exports reassurance, political fluency and institutional credibility. At home, these appointments are often read as evidence of lingering relevance, as proof that Westminster still matters in a technological world increasingly shaped far from London. The awkward truth is that Britain’s comparative advantage is increasingly procedural. What is emerging is a class of political professionals schooled in process and institutional etiquette, hired to give tech behemoths the look and feel of trustworthiness and accountability. The reward is a comforting sense of proximity to power.
Britain is supplying political insurance and credibility for technologies being built elsewhere. The real question is whether it is content to remain a broker of legitimacy – or whether it still intends to shape the systems it is helping to legitimise.
