From Brexit to Bots, George Osborne Returns to Run OpenAI’s UK Pitch

After the Remain referendum failure in 2016 led by South African political strategist Ryan Coetzee, his old boss at the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg, decided to throw in the towel and flee to Silicon Valley. Clegg’s decision to take up a job at Facebook was met with fury: Facebook, left-wing establishment journalists growled, was responsible for the United Kingdom (UK) exiting the European Union (EU). “Disinformation” from Russia on its pages, you see – and suddenly Clegg, the moral globalist, was off to make the big bucks working for them.

Clegg arrived at Facebook in Menlo Park and immediately sought to placate his media critics back home by intervening in a moderation decision – under review at the time – to censor the UK activist Tommy Robinson. Having cancelled Robinson, Clegg then turned his attention to the real purpose for his recruitment – laundering Facebook’s image abroad, particularly among centre-left governments and within the EU, who would be especially appalled at revelations involving – in Hillary Clinton’s words – “Macedonian content farmers” working at the behest of Vladimir Putin by advertising against her 2016 Presidential campaign.

Clegg isn’t a particularly useful individual. That’s fine: there are plenty of those around, but he was also the least popular politician within a group of important people in London: its black cab drivers whose beats included the parliamentary precinct.

That should tell you something.

Politicians gorging

Twenty-sixteen’s referendum also dispensed with another politico of no discernible talent, George Osborne, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer. Osborne was easily the most unpopular Chancellor in living memory; appearing at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in 2012 with his family, he was booed by the spectators.

Following his resignation Osborne sprinted into the passage linking the public sector to the private. He became chairman of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a non-profit organisation promoting economic development in northern England. In 2017, he was appointed by the London Evening Standard’s Russian owners as editor, ensuring the newspaper sustained precisely the content needed to keep a tramp’s bum warm at night, at the same time scoring a part-time job at Blackrock – paying him three quarters of a million dollars a year for a few days’ work a month.

In 2021 he hit high finance: a partnership at the boutique investment bank Robey Warshaw, where he gorged at annual bonus pot, fluctuating between £30 and £31 million from 2022 to 2024 and shared between four partners. Also in 2021, he was made Chairman of the British Museum, which may explain why the institution has started sending artefacts to places like India to help the country “decolonise”. In 2023, he started his own podcast with another former Chancellor – Labour’s Ed Balls – and together they attempted to dignify efforts not to prosecute grooming gangs that had disembowelled parts of the UK under their respective administrations.

But no job – or non-job job – Osborne has been gifted with since his departure comes close to an announcement last week: he will now head “OpenAI for Countries”.

Musk vs Altman

Elon Musk frequently refers to OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman as “Scam” Altman. The animosity stems from their shared history with OpenAI, which they co-founded in 2015 as a non-profit dedicated to safe, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity's benefit. Musk, who invested around $100 million, left the board in 2018 amid conflicts, including his rejected proposal to merge OpenAI with Tesla or run it solo to rival Google. He accused Altman of betraying this mission by transforming OpenAI into a closed-source, for-profit entity heavily tied to Microsoft, which invested billions, creating what Musk called a "de facto subsidiary" and monopoly in generative AI. Musk's distrust deepened with allegations of deception: he claimed Altman misled him on OpenAI's direction, lied to Congress about forgoing compensation (later seeking billions in equity), and engaged in anticompetitive practices such as talent poaching.

The feud escalated through multiple 2024-2025 lawsuits, where Musk sought to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion and accused Altman of exploiting donations for personal gain. Musk launched rival xAI in 2023, viewing OpenAI's success – fuelled by ChatGPT – as a personal betrayal, while Altman countered that Musk reacts from insecurity. Personal spats, like a 2025 Tesla reservation dispute, and broader rivalries over AI policy (with Musk's Donald Trump ties) fuelled the rift with Musk slamming Altman as untrustworthy for prioritising profit over safety.

The same as everything else

What is “OpenAI for countries”? It is ChatGPT bled into the operating systems of government, from welfare to immigration to council services. Theoretically, it sounds like a boost in the fight against notorious inefficiencies, but for it to accumulate tenders, it would need integration into the UK’s regulatory framework.

Which is why Osborne has been tapped. To nudge.

Like all centrist dads, Osborne’s grasp of AI is limited to tips on how to avoid jetlag, or compare fasting routines, or to explain the genocide of black Africans in Darfur (which he thinks gets it wrong, because it’s unlikely that Muslim men could be capable of such beastliness).

At the very top, the line between business and the business of government is obscure and thus exclusive; here you find the likes of PwC and McKinsey drafting mind maps to explain vaccine rollouts to civil servants or counting the number of cell phone masts in the country – just in case the Chinese fancy controlling a feature of the UK’s communications infrastructure. Multinationals are especially eager to retain firms like Flint Global, a boutique advisory founded by former civil servants and recently acquired by Cinven private equity for £190m.

For all the hype generated about AI, how it – Musk’s words – represents the most disruptive force in history, it is strangely comforting to know that it will still be subject to the same clubbiness that prompts outrage from the far left. Parachuted into UK public life this way ensures that there will be endless cock-ups, leaks, expenditure overruns, and adjacent controversies, such as accusations of racism in the machine and revelations from the private life of the AI tsar – appointed, of course, with the nudging of George Osborne. Which means that it will be exactly like everything else.