Tory debate takeaways: a clash of styles, a tame format and a win for Badenoch

1 day ago

Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have faced off for what could be the only televised clash of the Conservative leadership contest.It was not actually a debate: the pair took it in turns to take questions from party members and GB News viewers.Below are some of the things we learned.Judging the winner of such events is an imprecise business, with the additional caveat that the impression gained by those inside the studio might not be the same as viewers watching on TV.But Badenoch definitely got a better reception.

Jenrick won regular and polite applause for his well-rehearsed, policy-heavy pitch.The response to Badenoch, however, seemed louder and more frequent.A show of hands at the end for who people thought did better looked like a roughly 75%-25% win for Badenoch.The two hopefuls took very different approaches.For Jenrick it was about specific policies – he wants to cap immigration to the tens of thousands, leave the European convention on human rights, build denser cities and cut taxes.

For Badenoch, the issue was to “fix the system that is broken” and renew the party and the country,This does not involve, she argued, “throwing out lots of policies” – a clear reference to Jenrick’s approach,While internal party leadership debates can often be more brutal than general elections, the format of the event kept things tame,The contenders were not on stage at the same time, except at the start, and the audience of Tory members – almost all of whom seemed to be from London – mainly asked broad, unchallenging questions, allowing Badenoch and Jenrick to slip into familiar pitches,The GB News host, Christopher Hope, did try to liven things up with a quickfire round of questions such as whether either of them had ever taken drugs – they had not – but this failed to raise the temperature.

The most notable element of the contest before the debate on Thursday was the comments by the veteran Tory MP Christopher Chope, who said he could not support Badenoch as she is “preoccupied with her own children”.Asked what she might say to Chope when she next sees him, Badenoch, who like Jenrick has three school-age children, replied only: “I might remind him that it isn’t always women who have parental responsibilities.”During his hour in the spotlight, Jenrick was studiously polite, declining when asked to name Badenoch’s biggest weakness.“I’m not going to say that – I really like Kemi,” he said.Jenrick attempted the same answer when asked to list his favourite Tory PM of the past 14 years, saying: “I’m a father of three daughters.

I know you don’t pick favourites.” But asked if it might be Liz Truss, he finally cracked: “It wouldn’t be Liz, I have to say.The others have good qualities.”

technologySee all

Meta fires staff for ‘using free meal vouchers to buy household goods’

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 (£19) meal credits to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent and wine glasses.The tech firm, which is worth £1.2tn and also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have dismissed workers last week after an investigation discovered staff had been abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office.That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.On the anonymous messaging platform Blind, they wrote: “On days where I would not be eating at the office, like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit

2 days ago

UK’s Alan Turing Institute launches redundancy consultation process

The UK’s national institute for artificial intelligence and data science has launched a consultation process that could lead to redundancies among its 440 staff.In a memo sent to staff this month the Alan Turing Institute gave an update on its new strategy, under which it will concentrate on fewer projects.It was addressed to “affected employees” and stated that the government-backed institute “may need to consider making redundancies”. According to informal calculations by staff, the memo could have been sent to as many as 140 people.The internal document said the institute – which carries out research with universities, the private sector and government entities – was working on 111 live projects and needed to “move away from engaging in large numbers of individual projects”

2 days ago

iPhone 16 review: more buttons and speed for Apple’s standard phone

Apple’s latest iPhone bucks the trend of buttons vanishing from phones, gaining not one but two new controls on the outside, plus a big jump in chip performance and two-day battery life on the inside.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.The standard iPhone 16 is Apple’s smallest and lowest-priced handset in the new 16 series, costing from £799 (€959/$799/A$1,399) sitting below the bigger and more expensive 16 Plus and 16 Pro models

2 days ago

‘It’s not me, it’s just my face’: the models who found their likenesses had been used in AI propaganda

The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso.“We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!” he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup.Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time.On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform

2 days ago

Google to buy nuclear power for AI datacentres in ‘world first’ deal

Google has signed a “world first” deal to buy energy from a fleet of mini nuclear reactors to generate the power needed for the rise in use of artificial intelligence.The US tech corporation has ordered six or seven small nuclear reactors (SMRs) from California’s Kairos Power, with the first due to be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.Google hopes the deal will provide a low-carbon solution to power datacentres, which require huge volumes of electricity. The company, owned by Alphabet, said nuclear provided “a clean, round-the-clock power source that can help us reliably meet electricity demands”.The explosive growth of generative AI, as well as cloud storage, has increased tech companies’ electricity demands

4 days ago

TechScape: Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at the Guardian US. Thank you for joining me.Average daily notifications: 270Apps with the most total notifications: – Messages: 391 – New York Post: 190 – Slack: 121Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump.The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has funded a pro-Trump political action committee with tens of millions of dollars and planned a packed campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania

4 days ago

politicsSee all

;