On a chill November Friday, Baron Drayson of Kensington can be found inside
what looks like a giant UFO deep in the Oxfordshire countryside. The
“doughnut”, as it is known to locals, is a huge laboratory full of sprawling
robots, radiation-proof hutches and a machine that produces beams of light
100 billion times brighter than ordinary x-rays.
As a foreign professor talks him through the mechanics, Britain’s first
cabinet minister for science is like Bond inspecting his latest car with Q.
“Wow, wow,” he says, prodding, jabbing, seeing how it works. “Amazing! What
does this bit do? Can I touch it?”
Luckily the machine is in shutdown or Paul Drayson would be glowing with more
than enthusiasm by now. As it is, he can poke it, clamber onto it and pick
at the dangly bits with unfeigned passion. He spent his twenties swotting
for a PhD in robotics and it shows. “What they’re doing here is incredible,”
he says. “This is the sort of thing I want school kids to see so they know
what being a scientist is really like.”
In the flesh he is older, greyer and smaller than expected: nothing like the
dare-devil figure that his rapidly accumulated fortune, estimated at £80m,
and his hobby, motor racing, might suggest. He may, at 48, be a self-made
plutocrat with an addiction to fast cars, plus a property portfolio that
Cherie Blair would kill for - houses in Kensington, Gloucestershire and the
south of France - but on first glance I fear he’s going to be like any other
politician now that he’s swapped his Aston Martin (numbered 007) for a
ministerial Honda Civic.
However, once we sit down there is clearly no danger that this one’s a
government robot. He wants to make his new job exciting, starting with a
review of Britain’s policy on sending humans into space. (We don’t. We
should.) What does he think is out there - aliens? “I’ve no idea - it’s
really interesting to speculate though, isn’t it?” he grins. Does he fancy a
trip in a rocket? “Yes!” So why hasn’t he signed up for Branson’s proposed
voyage into space? “How do you know I haven’t? I do think it’s something I’d
like to do.” His wife wouldn’t mind? “Oh yeah, she would let me. She lets me
race cars.”
When the call came from the prime minister last month he was on a carefree
tour of America’s racetracks with his wife Elspeth and their five children.
They had covered 22 states and were looking forward to more, when Drayson
threw the trip in for public office. The draw was clearly not money but the
prospect of a seat in cabinet - and the chance to preach his favourite
gospel. He’s on a mission to sell science to the nation, to persuade us it’s
sexy, all about “magic” and “mystery” rather than nerds with thick specs in
grubby lab coats.
“We all watched Lewis Hamilton win the world championship and it was
fantastic, but behind him as a driver are literally hundreds of race
engineers who design, build, run the car, who have a fantastically
interesting, glamorous life. We need to get kids and their parents to really
understand that if you study science, it widens your choices.”
It’s 3pm and he still hasn’t had lunch, but he doesn’t want to waste a minute
chomping sandwiches when he could be enthusing about science, God and the
universe. I ask if he thinks science should be used to weed out disease and
disability before birth.
“Um, it depends on the disability, but let me make it very personal,” he says.
“I was born blind in one eye. Now, if there had been a diagnostic test that
had told my parents before I was born that I was going to be born blind, it
would have presented them with a choice: ‘Do we have Paul?’
“If there was a diagnostic test that told me my unborn child would be born
with one eye, because of my experience I’d say: fine, they’re going to have
a great life. We need to be very careful about the way information like this
is used. There are some conditions where I would rightly say: that would be
such an awful quality of life for the child that you’d say no. But it’s a
very personal choice.”
Three years ago there was a ferocious debate about the use of reproductive
technologies after Joanna Jepson, the curate, exposed the late abortion of
foetuses with minor, treatable conditions such as cleft palate. Perhaps
Drayson has that in mind when he says: “I do think it’s right that the
government should regulate. The point is that we in a democratic way make
the judgments on behalf of the greater good, in terms of the impact on
society.”
Aha! So that’s why he’s in politics: scientists make the breakthroughs - and,
in his case, the money - but politicians get to decide how they’re used.
Over the years he has given at least £500,000 to the Labour party, the fruits
of the fortune he made setting up a vaccine company, PowderJect. A 2002
donation provoked a row when it transpired that his company had won a
lucrative government contract to supply smallpox vaccines, but a
parliamentary inquiry found no evidence of “improper activity”. He was
raised to the Lords by Tony Blair and first joined the government in 2005 as
minister for defence procurement - a job that he abandoned in November last
year. The official reason was his hunger for the racetrack, although it’s
rumoured that defence budget deficits played a key role, too.
Now that he’s back by special invitation, keener and more powerful than
before, will he be pushing for investment in so-called blue skies thinking -
apparently aimless exercises such as, in the words of Ian Gibson, the
biologist and Labour MP, “examining the number of hairs on a fly’s arse”?
The answer is yes.
“The whole area of science which is to do with discovery is very important.
Just doing research to understand the world can throw off, in an unexpected
way, the serendipity of science, which is also part of its magic,” he says.
By now aides are muttering about time being up, but Drayson would happily
spend all afternoon airing views on everything from animal testing (he’s a
staunch defender) to genetically modified (GM) foods (he speaks approvingly
of purple cancer-fighting tomatoes). “What we are starting to see happen
now, and it’s a good thing, is a discussion of the potential benefits [of
GM] in the context of the problems that the world faces.”
Hilary Benn, the environment minister, has spoken of the need to strengthen
food production in Britain to reduce our dependence on imports.
Controversially, Drayson believes that GM could help by improving crop
yields and keeping food prices down: “Only a few years ago we thought the UK
would be able to buy any food it required in the wider world market and we
didn’t have to have ‘food independence’. What we’ve seen is: it’s not as
easy as that. Pressures on food production mean we have to look again at the
productivity we have in the UK.”
He’s a strong believer in the technology of GM, claiming that, so far, there
have been “no issues . . . that should lead us to be concerned”.
If Frankenfoods do not worry him unduly, he’s definitely bothered by the abuse
of science in marketing, including campaigns that trade on what he calls
“irrational fears”.
“I remember being really struck by an advert that talked about aircraft,
saying ‘four engines better than two’. And I said to my wife, who’s not a
great flyer, ‘Actually, the evidence doesn’t say that’.”
Labour ministers are notoriously reluctant to talk about God but, given
Drayson’s brief, it seems fair to ask about his beliefs. Is he of the
Richard Dawkins “God delusion” school of thought? Absolutely not, it seems.
“I do believe in God. I think faith is a very strange thing. You don’t
necessarily believe in something just because you’ve got the evidence to
prove it,” he says.
Doesn’t that run counter to what most scientists say - that everything must be
evidence-based? “No!”
Now he’s warming to his theme, enthusing about a book called Blink by Malcolm
Gladwell, the Canadian author, about instinct and gut feeling.
“Gladwell’s book is about the ability of the human being to know something but
not know why they know it. It’s really fascinating. He gives lots of
examples of people who have demonstrated very clearly that they have good
instinct in their lives - for example, this fireman in America. He knew when
something bad was about to happen, when you need to leave the building. This
struck a chord with me because in my life there have been some things that
I’ve known and I don’t know why.”
Like a sixth sense, I suggest, half in jest. But Drayson is absolutely
serious: “Yes, like a sixth sense.”
Has he personally experienced this sense of knowing something’s going to
happen in advance? “Yes,” he replies matter-of-factly. “I think there’s a
lot we don’t understand about human capability.”
Most politicians would consider this sort of talk way too risky - fearing
ridicule in the debating chamber. But why should Drayson care? After all,
he’s a “volunteer” who can afford to say what he likes. And if it all goes
wrong, he can always disappear on another road trip.
