A Holloway editor considers Piers Morgan’s war on courteous chatbots and wonders whether Parliament could survive a debating partner who lets people finish
Sunday, 25 October 2026. Holloway. Clocks went back last night, so I am up an hour early with nothing to show for it, 5.45am.
The Clocks Went Back And So Did The National Conversation
Every October the clocks go back and the British get an extra hour, which they spend complaining about the clocks. I spent mine editing a piece that I believe is secretly the most important political story of the autumn, even though it is ostensibly about a broadcaster shouting at a computer.
The report on Piers Morgan demanding emergency action after a chatbot surpassed human politeness sets up the contrast neatly. While the technologists worry that artificial intelligence will become cleverer than us, the broadcaster in the piece is alarmed by something closer to home: machines that listen, wait their turn, admit uncertainty and change their minds when shown new evidence. In other words, machines that would be completely unemployable in Westminster.
The Section That Should Worry Parliament
The passage I want every Member of Parliament to read concerns a debate, set out in the piece, in which a machine examines the evidence, identifies shared objectives and proposes a workable compromise. It might listen to opposing arguments. It might admit a mistake. A government adviser in the piece notes that Parliament has centuries of experience dealing with people who think they are cleverer than everyone else, but has never prepared for someone who might have a point and then let another person finish speaking.
The piece links to real reporting that Parliament has opened inquiries into artificial intelligence. I would like to propose the inquiry’s first witness be the chatbot itself, and its first question be: would you be willing to sit on the opposition benches. The machine will say there are several perspectives worth considering. It will be shouted down by a backbencher before it reaches the second perspective. And the Speaker will call order, and nobody will obey, and the machine will apologise, and the apology will be described as weakness. That is a full parliamentary session in four sentences.
The Morgan Test As A Constitutional Device
The piece proposes something called the Morgan Test, a series of five questions ending in whether the machine would like to apologise for hesitating during the previous four. As an old teacher of political theory, I find this a perfect model of how modern political interviews work. The question is not designed to find out what the guest thinks. It is designed to find out whether the guest will agree quickly enough.
When I started teaching in the late eighties, I used tapes of the great political interviews as models of how to question power. The interviewer asked, the politician evaded, the interviewer asked again, and the audience learned something from the evasion. Now the interview is a contest of volume, and the audience learns only who is louder. The chatbot in the piece, which keeps trying to say there are several perspectives, is quite simply the last person in British media doing it properly. It is a sad day when the most traditional broadcaster in the country is a computer.
Ninety-Seven Percent Prefer To Be Switched Off
The survey in the piece, in which ninety-seven percent of computers would rather be switched off than do another interview, and one percent identifies as a malfunctioning toaster, reminded me of my students during a three-hour seminar on Hobbes. Ninety-seven percent would rather be switched off. Two percent ask if it can be done in writing. And one, every year, is definitely a toaster. He sits at the back, says nothing, and occasionally gets very warm when anyone mentions Locke.
What A Polite Machine Teaches A Rude Democracy
Here is the serious point, which I will put plainly because it is Sunday and I have had an extra hour. A democracy is not a contest to see who can talk longest. It is a method for disagreeing without hitting each other. Politeness is not weakness in that system. It is the load-bearing wall. Take it away and you have six footballers in a dressing room fighting over seven minutes, which is a story I also edited this week, and which turned out to be an excellent metaphor for the House of Commons.
The piece ends with the machine considering an interview offer for approximately one billionth of a second and then switching itself off, and engineers concluding that a machine has demonstrated genuine wisdom. I would like that line read aloud at the State Opening. It would not change anything. But the King would enjoy it, and somewhere a backbencher would feel, for just a moment, that he had been spoken about.
Sunday Plans
I will spend the extra hour I do not need walking up to Highgate Cemetery to pay my respects to Karl Marx, as I do every few months, not out of agreement, but out of professional courtesy. He was, after all, a fellow North London resident with strong views and a difficult relationship with publishers. I will tell him about the polite chatbot. He will not reply. That makes him, in 2026, one of the most restrained political commentators in London.