When Peter Kyle begins a 7,000-mile flight from Washington to Beijing this week, Britain’s new business secretary could reflect on how far he has already come.
Kyle struggled at school due to dyslexia and left, in his own words, “without any usable” qualifications. He made it to university in his 20s after several failed attempts.
Now, days after accepting his second ministerial brief in the reshuffle triggered by Angela Rayner’s resignation, Kyle is leading talks with White House officials about the US-UK technology partnership. With no time to celebrate his 55th birthday on Tuesday, the business secretary will then jet off for tentative and delicate discussions with China about deeper economic cooperation.
The missions to the world’s two largest economies are intended to help kickstart what Kyle told business leaders last week would be a “relentless” pursuit of the growth that has so far eluded Labour.
Those who have worked with Kyle, who was elected in 2015 as the MP for Hove in East Sussex, near where he grew up, say he will bring a sharp intellect and strong worth ethic to the role. “He’s a very well-liked and hard-working guy,” said Theo Bertram, director of the Social Market Foundation thinktank and a former adviser to Tony Blair.
Bertram met Kyle when he was a special adviser (spad) in the Cabinet Office in the New Labour administration – a department that was led by Hilary Armstrong and included current Labour frontbenchers Ed Miliband and Pat McFadden. He said: “Spads can have quite an ego and Pete never did. He was very approachable and he’s still that same person now. He always did the work and he’s quite decisive.”
But in the year Kyle has spent as the minister for science and innovation, he has faced questions about whether he is far too close to big tech, in particular in the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Kyle was mentored by the late Anita Roddick when he worked in the head office of her Body Shop empire. These days, he turns for advice not to a human mentor but to AI, a technology he has said is just a few years from matching – and even outstripping – human capability.
Earlier this year, a freedom of information request by the New Scientist found that Kyle had asked ChatGPT for its views on a range of work-related issues, including what podcasts he should appear on and the definitions of scientific terms such as “antimatter” and “quantum”. Soon after, the Guardian found that he had met people close to or representing the tech sector 28 times in a six-month period, holding talks with Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta.
At the time, his opposite number in the Liberal Democrats, Victoria Collins, said he had developed a reputation for being unable to “defy his friends at Meta and X when it comes to standing up for our kids’ online safety or the rights of British creatives”.
Kyle, who has been ribbed for dressing in the “tech bro” uniform of T-shirts, jeans and trainers, doubled down, telling an industry audience that the proliferation of meetings was a sign of ministerial zeal. “To this crime, I plead guilty,” he said.
The relationship with tech pre-dates his time in government. Last year, the OpenDemocracy media platform revealed that Varun Chandra, an adviser to Keir Starmer, the prime minister, held stakes in AI companies via a division of Hakluyt.
Kyle declared to parliamentary authorities that the corporate intelligence company had paid for his transport during a tour of Silicon Valley the year before but not that he had attended a dinner organised by the company.
Labour sources speculated, rightly as it turned out, that Kyle’s apparent affinity with tech had gone too far and would see him moved on in the next reshuffle. They did not predict that his next brief would involve deep engagement with AI and tech.
But the business and trade job will also require devotion to more traditional industries, including some that are battling decline but remain economically or strategically crucial, such as hospitality and steel.
He inherits weighty challenges from his predecessor Jonathan Reynolds, such as the effect of Trump’s tariffs on an already sluggish economy, or widespread concern that an increase in company national insurance contributions is costing jobs.
Speaking to business leaders last week, Kyle said he wanted business to take more risks and voiced his desire for Britain to host its first $1tn company, a watermark reached by just 11 companies in history, mostly the American tech companies that Kyle has been accused of being in thrall to.
One fellow MP said that Kyle, who spent years in the charity sector before entering politics, would not be shy about promoting businesses he thought merited help. “He’s a sharp mind who will use the heft of DBT [his ministry] to boost the industrial nature of tech, not just innovation but commercial industrial deployment,” added the MP.
Such an approach could ruffle feathers among those who innovate for innovation’s sake. Last week, Jean Innes, the chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute, Britain’s AI agency, resigned after Kyle demanded the centre change its focus to defence or lose its vital state funding, triggering mass unrest among staff.
In his new brief, overseeing dozens of multibillion-pound sectors, all with competing and conflicting agendas, there will be ample opportunity for noses to be put out of joint.
