Peter Kyle: ‘Lab grown meat could contribute to the health of the nation’

He has a reading age of eight, but rose to become Science Secretary – and insists technology will make the UK a richer, happier country

The doors to the orphanage opened and a wave of nausea swept over the British teenager as the stench hit his nostrils. It was the dead of the night and a 19-year-old Peter Kyle was getting his first experience of life as a volunteer aid worker in the war-torn Balkans. More than 500 children, including babies, were crammed into the building in Romania as the region teetered on the brink of a bloody civil war.
As we sit in a sun-kissed central London park 24 years later, the Science Secretary says the conditions he witnessed that night are still “indescribable”. But he also credits the trip with “changing my life” and giving him a sense of perspective that armoured him for the rough and tumble of life in Westminster.
Kyle, who in his aid worker days sported a long, shaggy hairstyle and wore baggy T-shirts, is today neatly clipped in jeans, a shirt and a blazer. But his casual style belies his importance after he was handed one of the most influential roles in Whitehall by the Prime Minister.
It is no coincidence that, at a time of great technological change, Sir Keir Starmer has handed the Science Secretary job to one of his most trusted lieutenants. Kyle will be responsible for shepherding in the Artificial Intelligence revolution, spearheading the battle against social media hate, and perhaps even introducing driverless cars to our roads and lab-grown meat to our supermarket shelves.
If some might be daunted and even frightened by the pace of the digital revolution, then Kyle is not one of them, though he is sympathetic to those with reservations. “I don’t accept that there’s a choice between optimism and pessimism,” he says when asked whether such technological change will be good or bad for Britain. “The last government fell into the trap of making a choice between safety and opportunity. I want to safely explore every opportunity and take the public with us on it.
“Because at the moment we’re not touching the sides of what we can do as a country. We’re underperforming economically, and that’s painful for me to say as somebody who loves our country as much as I do.”
A major part of his job will be negotiating with the tech companies and especially America’s big five of Amazon, Google owner Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram.
Each has a bigger annual research and development budget bigger than the entire UK Government’s, meaning these companies wield extraordinary economic and political power. They all also come with their own individual dose of controversy, whether it is the tiny amounts of tax they pay in Britain or their role in the spread of hate and misinformation.
Kyle is deeply resistant to the idea that the problems with the public finances can simply be solved by taxing them more, or that ever more burdensome regulation is the way to bring them to heel on important social issues. But he has also warned them that access to the UK market is “a privilege” that must be earned with significant investment, creating jobs and wealth that extend far beyond London and the South East. “These big five companies, they have foreign policies,” he explains. “They have the ability to re-headquarter in a heartbeat.
“My aim is for these companies to see Britain as a desirable place to invest, a great place to design and develop products and services, and the best country in the world to do business. I want it to be a relationship, but they are under no illusion that this Government has expectations of long-term investment into the future of our country in positive ways, in return for the access they have.”
Kyle, who was a vociferous and passionate advocate for staying in the EU, can also see how Brexit has benefited Britain in the race to develop new technology. Brussels was warned this week by Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister turned Meta executive, that it is falling behind on AI because of its “incoherent” red tape. The Science Secretary is reluctant to put the boot in, describing Brexit as a debate of the past, but does say that he thinks the EU has missed Britain’s guiding hand.
“We have outstanding AI potential and the EU has missed out on it in the way that they’re legislating,” he says. “We are legislating for things like AI and regulating in a very different way than the EU is.”
Kyle is irrepressibly upbeat as we meet against the backdrop of a Government in turmoil, riven from the inside with internal briefings and besieged from the outside by a cronyism scandal. Many of the headlines of the week have been dominated by questions surrounding Sue Gray, the Prime Minister’s divisive chief of staff, and her role in the fledgling administration’s rocky start. So fevered was the speculation around her that Sir Keir was even forced to intervene and insist that he is still the one running Downing Street.
Kyle is unimpressed by suggestions that she is too powerful and dismissive of the briefings against her. “Sue is an outstanding public servant and nobody is accusing her of breaking rules,” he says. “I’m not sure why it’s a surprise to anyone that the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister is powerful. I think it would be far more worrying for our country if the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister was weak.”
Kyle, 54, took one of the more unconventional routes into politics after leaving school with what he himself describes as “no usable qualifications”. Equipped with a single pass in theatre studies, he set his sights on a job at the Body Shop, whose Littlehampton headquarters were just down the Sussex coast from where he grew up. One day, aged 18, he hung around the entrance to the office until someone from human resources came down and spoke to him.
His persistence paid off with a job offer and he quickly became a protégé of the company’s founder, Anita Roddick, who recruited him to her charity work. A year later he arrived in Romania with a mission to close an overcrowded orphanage and rescue hundreds of children from the most miserable conditions.
“I was with a team of 20 to 25 people and 10 odd people threw up from walking into the building itself,” he recalls. “When we arrived in the middle of the night we hadn’t seen a single child, but the smell was making people vomit.”
Kyle spent five years working for the charity, Children on the Edge, making multiple trips to the region during the Balkans war. During that time he befriended Alan Rickman, the late actor, who was a key fundraiser and who once accompanied him on a trip to Romania. He also says that his time in the Balkans equipped him with much of the mental resilience that is required to succeed at the top of Government.
“I know that I’ve been tested to breaking point. I know what I’m like under extreme stress, I know how I react and I know what the signs are,” he says. “I have a sense of perspective that I think perhaps other people might benefit from.”
Kyle knows that he will need some of that resilience as he prepares to face down opponents to new technology, including AI, that he sees as key to delivering transformational change. And he insists that, accompanied by the right protections, AI can improve the care provided by the NHS, boost the economy, and give workers more free time.
The development of the technology is especially poignant for Kyle, who believes that it could have saved his mother by spotting her Stage 4 lung cancer earlier. She was scanned three times for chest pain but the disease went unspotted for 18 months before she collapsed and died 12 years ago.
“When you put digital technology into that kind of perspective it suddenly moves from being distant and digital to being human, because it’s about the bond between a mother and child and the sadness of an unnecessary loss.”
His remarks come as Sir Keir prepares to grant MPs a vote on legalising assisted dying, with speculation growing that one could even take place before Christmas. The last time the Commons had its say on this most divisive of issues, Kyle voted in favour. Would he do so again?
“If there was a free vote, I’d vote in favour,” he replies: “We have, for hundreds of years, striven to give rights to individuals. Yet at that crucial point, at the end of life, we have very, very few rights that we can exercise over our own self. For me, it became a human rights issue.”
Kyle was born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, in a terraced house near the town’s dump. His father was a door-to-door salesman and his mother a dental assistant. He has described his upbringing as “happy” and the family soon moved as his father got a job working for a glass company in Portsmouth, working his way up until he owned it.
But he faced challenges at school because of his dyslexia, which means that, even as an adult, he has been assessed as having a reading age of just eight. It was Anita Roddick who spotted his academic potential. While working at the Body Shop, Roddick noticed him working long hours and urged him to apply to university.
Kyle applied twice to Sussex University and was rejected each time, so, aged 25, he returned to secondary school for a year to get the required A-levels, only to be rejected all over again. Eventually, at the fourth time of asking he was accepted by Sussex, where he studied geography, international development, and environmental studies.
Kyle says his battle to gain a place was the single biggest thing that motivated him to run for Parliament, so he could help other young people in the same position.
“I never thought I’d go into politics,” he says. “If there’s one thing that did politicise me, it was the process of being rejected from university and having to fight so bitterly hard and persist to ridiculous levels. Once I got in I realised how extraordinary the experience was and that so few people like me were going to university.”
The repeated rejections left their mark, however and, when the university later approached him about doing a doctorate, he was sceptical. It was his old friend, Alan Rickman, who talked him into accepting the offer with a typically withering dressing down.
Kyle recalled: “I laughingly said, ‘Oh the university has suggested I do a doctorate’. He asked why I was laughing. When I said that people like me don’t do PhDs and, anyway, I’m not bright enough, he rounded on me. He literally tore strips from me for underestimating my own potential, for taking the easy way out by not taking something tough but achievable seriously.”
Three years later he graduated with a doctorate in community development. But for all the highs, Kyle’s life has also been tinged with tragedy.
Shortly after leaving university, and in his mid-30s, he got his first job in politics in 2006 as an adviser to Hilary Armstrong, the then Cabinet Office Secretary. It was at this time that Kyle, who is gay, met the man who was to become his long-term partner, Czech-born Vlas (Vlastimil Tiser), while he was out at a bar with friends.
The couple were together for eight years before, in 2012, he was woken by an early morning phone call from the police to tell him that Vlas was dead. A suspect was investigated by the police in connection with his death, but they did not take any action against them because of insufficient evidence. Kyle, who has never been able to discuss the circumstances for legal reasons, has said that the person was later caught for another offence.
The following day he received a phone call from the hospice in Exeter, where his mother was living, telling him that he needed to come and say goodbye. Throughout his adult life, his relationship with his mother had been complicated. When he was 18 he returned home one day to find that she had left a note and run off to Spain with his father’s best friend, splitting up his family.
Kyle has also spoken about how, while his father was instantly accepting, his mother struggled to come to terms with the fact that he is gay. He has credited Vlas, who lost his own mother to cancer when he was young, with helping to reconcile him with his mother in the later years of her life.
Although he was only a special adviser for a year before returning to the voluntary sector, Kyle had been picked out by senior Labour figures as a potential star. And when the selection came up for his home constituency of Hove in 2013, just six months after Vlas’s death, he had a decision to make.
The party had approached him about becoming an MP back in 2006 but he had turned down the offer, declaring himself not ready to enter Parliament. “I don’t think you should go into politics until you’ve thought deeply about who you are, have been tested in different ways and got a breadth of skills,” he explains. “And I didn’t feel equipped. Also, you really need to know who you are and I didn’t quite know who I was back then in some ways.”
This time it was not a lack of experience that held him back, but questions over whether it was “fair” for him to stand while still stricken with grief. The seat was eminently winnable, having been held by Labour throughout the Blair years before being narrowly snatched by the Tories in 2010. In the end he decided to go for it and at the 2015 election he entered Parliament for the first time after beating the Conservatives with a slender 1,200 majority.
His first five years in the Commons were spent on the backbenches as his fierce criticism of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership meant he was overlooked for the frontbench. But his rise since Sir Keir became leader in April 2020 has been meteoric. He was immediately made shadow victims minister, then shadow schools minister.
Promotion to Sir Keir’s top team was inevitable and swiftly followed in November 2021, when he was made the shadow Northern Ireland secretary. At the time the post was a significant one, as Labour attacked the Tory government over its handling of negotiations on the Northern Ireland Protocol. When that dispute was ended by the signing of the Windsor Framework, he was promoted again by Sir Keir to the shadow science secretary role.
With Labour now in power, he is approaching it with an optimistic tone which is at odds with some of the more pessimistic noises coming from his Cabinet colleagues. While Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, talks of the dire economic inheritance she took on, Kyle speaks of the opportunities for great technological breakthroughs.
He points out that Britons spend 10 days every year, on average, form filling and “bogged down in the red tape of dealing with government”.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to exponentially speed up government services, meaning people get more of that time back for leisure. Technology could change the way we work, we sleep, and even how we eat. This summer Britain became the first country in Europe to approve the use of laboratory-grown meat, which can now be sold in pet food.
Could we soon see such meat on our supermarket shelves for human consumption?
“Yeah, why not?” he replies with a smile. “I think it’s an exciting area of science. Britain is leading the way on its development. The market would tell – we’re not going to force anyone to eat it. But let’s see whether this can contribute to the health of our nation, and help with the challenges of climate change. And for those people who have concerns about animal rights, then they may well offer something for them as well.”
He adds with genuine enthusiasm: “Discovery in science is so amazing and it just goes in such extraordinary directions.”
Does that mean we will all soon be zooming around in driverless cars? He thinks so: “The first mobile phones, the clunky ones. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to be seen with that because people will think I’m an idiot’.
“I think with driverless cars we’ll see somebody pull up and get out, and you’ll think ‘urgh, God’ and then within a heartbeat it will be normalised.
“That’s how technology works – as long as the technology is intuitive, it contributes, it makes life better, it is demonstrably progress, then it will be normalised.”
He adds: “We will adopt it despite how many people are going to be against it in certain ways, whether it’s culturally or whether it’s technically.
“We can’t fight this tsunami of technology that is engulfing the globe. But we can shape and steer it and that’s what I’m in this business to do.”