Kanishka Narayan has travelled further than most Old Etonians to reach the Cabinet, and his childhood could scarcely be further from the stereotype.
Born in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, Narayan moved to Cardiff with his family when he was 12. The family shared a one-bedroom flat off City Road; Narayan and his younger brother slept on the floor.
Today he is the only Old Etonian in the cabinet, which is historically speaking a pretty low number. Six of the 21 ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet were educated at Eton and the ten Cabinets before Burnham’s contained 18 Old Etonian appointments between them.
Narayan, 36, is also the man the Prime Minister has entrusted with one of the most consequential briefs in government as Britain’s first dedicated artificial intelligence minister.
‘Night of the long eyelashes’ survivor
The last few months have been turbulent to say the least. He personally survived what became known as Burnham’s “night of the long eyelashes”, but his department didn’t.
In a move which caused considerable unease in the tech industry, Burnham collapsed the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) which had been created by Rishi Sunak in 2023 as part of his “science superpower” push, but promoted Narayan to Cabinet level.
It leaves him in an unusual position: a Cabinet-level minister without a department of his own. Formally he is jointly based in the Cabinet Office and the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
His official responsibilities run from AI strategy, semiconductors and robotics to the AI Security Institute, data infrastructure, Sovereign AI and the adoption of artificial intelligence throughout the public sector. But there is a catch.
Oversight on AI has not simply been handed to Narayan. Burnham’s new AI Taskforce reports to both him and Dame Antonia Romeo, the powerful Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, while its chairman, Lord Vallance, reports directly to the Prime Minister.
This sounds like a slightly tricky arrangement, and one that could ignite a territorial struggle.
If his remarkable backstory is anything to go by, it would be wise not to underestimate Narayan.
Arrived from India aged 12
His parents had both been lawyers in India but had to start again when they arrived in Wales, having made what Narayan has described as the “crazy, sacrificial” decision to move the family to Britain. His father took shifts in cake factories and at a Texaco garage.
His life changed when a teacher at his local comprehensive, Cathays High School, suggested he apply for scholarships to private schools. Narayan started researching options and within months had won a full bursary to Eton.
Arriving at the school, aged 13, was the first time in his life he had had a bedroom of his own. Narayan himself describes the bursary support that enabled him to go there as one of the “deepest privileges” of his education.
Money was so tight, Narayan recently told The Times, that “a guy at Sainsbury’s lent us money so I could buy decent uniforms” while the local priest gave the family money to make ends meet. They did not have a car, so when Narayan eventually left Cardiff for boarding school, a local estate agent drove them to Berkshire.
His expertise has largely been in policy, finance and investment, understanding which technologies and businesses might win rather than building them himself (Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)After Eton, Narayan studied PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, and worked as an economist and policy adviser in the civil service during the Cameron-Clegg years. He worked in the Cabinet Office, advised Liz Truss at Defra and worked with Rory Stewart.
He then left Whitehall for Lazard, advising large companies and technology start-ups on mergers, acquisitions and capital markets.
Wales’s first ethnic MP
Archie Norman, the former Conservative MP and current chairman of Marks & Spencer, was then chairman of Lazard UK and personally recruited Narayan to the firm.
“I worked with Kanishka in his previous career before political life,” Norman tells The i Paper. “He is obviously very bright and comes to political life with an external perspective and an intellectual curiosity that marks him out as different from the normal careerist class.”
After three years Narayan went to Stanford for an MBA, worked alongside it with European venture capital giant Atomico and subsequently joined California-based fintech investor Clocktower Ventures. Then he decided to stand as an MP.
Narayan says he joined Labour because of what he witnessed growing up in south Wales: the difference in opportunities available to children around him and, later, seeing his community unpicked by cuts in public spending.
Selected for the Vale of Glamorgan in 2023, he won the previously Conservative seat the following year, becoming Wales’s first ethnic-minority MP.
Those who know him are encouraging about his ability.
Alastair Campbell tells The i Paper he is “clearly very smart, very savvy” and someone who “knows the world of AI inside out”.
Labour MP Yuan Yang, who studied PPE at Balliol alongside Narayan and entered Parliament in the same 2024 intake, says: “Since our university days Kanishka has always thought big and done things boldly. He’s a real forward thinker.”
The scale of his new job became strikingly clear when Burnham and Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently signed a landmark agreement in Kyiv giving Britain access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs, whose database draws on millions of battlefield observations gathered through cameras, drones and sensors.
Narayan called the agreement “AI sovereignty in practice”, saying it could help British start-ups, researchers and engineers develop the next generation of defence technology.
@the.ai.minster
For all the ethical discussions around AI, Narayan’s own vision is decidedly industrial. He wants Britain not simply to design chips but to manufacture more of them here, arguing that hardware is where much of AI’s economic value and strategic leverage lies.
He also wants state investment, visas to attract the best engineers and planning reform to allow technology infrastructure to be built faster, an ambition likely to become more politically contentious as the enormous physical demands of the AI boom, from energy to data infrastructure, become more apparent.
He has argued that the government needs to become better at competing for people’s attention online rather than leaving the conversation to everyone else and has launched his own TikTok account, @the.ai.minister, answering questions such as why AI cannot tell the time and whether you should be friends with it.
Tabitha Goldstaub, the technology entrepreneur and former chair of the Government’s AI Council, says: “He’s an incredibly founder-friendly minister, he asks the right questions, listens intently and acts with speed.”
Kathryn Parsons, co-founder and chief executive of technology education company Decoded, met Narayan through GBx, the network of British entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley.
“It’s vital that the UK forges an identity within the global AI economy which is distinctive, high value and true to its own values too,” she says. “I am a strong believer that the UK has the raw talent to compete globally. But do we have the political leadership? I am hopeful.”
An uncomfortable question
Yet there is an uncomfortable question buried inside Narayan’s otherwise near-perfect CV for the job.
He has spent years around technology. He has advised technology companies, assessed them and invested in them. He presumably understands venture capital, finance, government and Silicon Valley exceptionally well.
What his career does not appear to contain is experience actually building artificial intelligence: training models, running an AI laboratory or overseeing an engineering organisation deploying complex AI systems at scale. His expertise has largely been in policy, finance and investment, understanding which technologies and businesses might win rather than building them himself.
That distinction matters because Britain faces a fundamental choice. Do we become a country exceptionally good at attracting American AI companies, buying their services and helping investors make money from them, or one that actually owns important parts of the technology itself?
Perhaps Narayan’s investor background is precisely the point. Britain has long been exceptionally good at producing brilliant scientists and promising start-ups, and considerably less good at turning them into globally dominant British companies. Someone who understands why capital flees, why founders relocate and why companies sell may be exactly what Whitehall has traditionally lacked.
His own life, after all, is an unlikely lesson in spotting potential.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. If Narayan gets it right, Britain could own part of the technology on which the next industrial revolution is built. If he gets it wrong, we may simply become powerless consumers of somebody else’s.
Hence then, the article about the only etonian in burnham s cabinet was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The only Etonian in Burnham’s cabinet )
Also on site :
- ‘I Play Rocky’ Premieres at TIFF: A Movie About a Best Picture Winner That’s a Best Picture Contender?
- Mahershala Ali Reveals He Was “Yearning” to Perform Action On-Screen Before Filming ‘Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother’
- ‘I’m a Rheumatologist—These Are the Symptoms I Ask About Before Suspecting Autoimmune Disease’