Quentin Letts from Westminster: Swathed in purple fake fur, this new Lib Dem MP may have wandered into the Commons from a Courmayeur chalet bar
Some people fear Artificial Intelligence. They fret about the lack of human touch, its robotic nature, the threat it may pose to our freedom.
Will AI rob us? Will its workings be transparent? Will it seize power and become tyrannous?
Three senior civil servants came to the Commons public accounts committee to discuss AI.
The trio were, to use an expression used by one of them, ‘top-of-the-shop level’. Their language was as codified and as tangled by acronyms as any computer’s JavaScript.
The main performer: Sarah Munby, permanent secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
A bustling, barging conversationalist. If you think that’s another way of saying she barely stopped gassing, you would not be wrong.
Ms Munby could have been one of those computer printers that acquires a mind of its own and, for hours, will disgorge yet more sheets of paper, the cogs and wheels and gear-teeth of its inner gubbins ceaselessly chattering and whirring.
You try to press the CANCEL button and nothing happens. You yank out its plug from the socket on the wall and, spookily, the reams of unwanted data just keep spooling forth. Welcome, as Rod Serling used to say, to the Twilight Zone.

Lib Dem MP Rachel Gilmour (pictured), a new arrival at Westminster, was swathed in a purple faux fur and wore her glasses atop her brow, Jackie Onassis-style

From left to right: Catherine Little, Sarah Munby and David Knott. The trio were, to use an expression used by one of them, ‘top-of-the-shop level’. Their language was as codified and as tangled by acronyms as any computer’s JavaScript

Ms Munby could have been one of those computer printers that acquires a mind of its own and, for hours, will disgorge yet more sheets of paper, the cogs and wheels and gear-teeth of its inner gubbins ceaselessly chattering and whirring
To one side of Robot Munby sat Cat Little, permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office and ‘chief operating officer’ of the civil service.
Linguistics professors previously revered jaunty Ms Little as the most natural, gifted gibberist of her day (gibberist, n., a person fluent in high, sustained gibberish). As this hearing unfolded it has to be conceded that in Ms Munby we had a contender for Ms Little’s crown.
The third of the trio was David Knott, chief technology officer for the Central Digital and Data Office, a new unit created, at no little cost, to cope with AI.
Mr Knott looked a little over-awed to be beside the verbal volcano known as Mount Munby. When he eventually spoke (it took him 40 minutes to screw up the courage) he proved a mumbler. Seemed terrified.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, was a tight, tautly-drawn Knott. Sitting behind him in the public seats (the press table again having been colonised by a claque of clerks), one could not hear everything he said.
Ms Munby had no problem with volume. Heaven knows what she was on about, mind you.
Square of jaw, flexing two farmyard forearms, she was soon barrelling on about action plans and interfaces, service transformation and the change agenda. We heard of suites, whole suites, tools, toolkits, organic growth, strategy and drive.
‘Music to our ears,’ said Rachel Gilmour (Lib Dem, Tiverton & Minehead).

Ms Little was one of three senior civil servants came to the Commons public accounts committee to discuss AI

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Con, North Cotswolds) rummaged in his own toolkit and said something about ‘frameworks for procurement’
Ms Gilmour, a new arrival at Westminster, was swathed in a purple faux fur and wore her glasses atop her brow, Jackie Onassis-style. I may be wrong but I’d say she had just wandered in from the sun-deck of a chalet bar at Courmayeur.
Ms Munby was by now hailing civil servants as ‘model-builders at one end of the funnel’. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Con, North Cotswolds) rummaged in his own toolkit and said something about ‘frameworks for procurement’.
Ms Munby effortlessly trumped him with ‘a very challenging procurement journey’. See what I mean? She’s good, this lady. ‘Commonality,’ she cried. ‘Piloting and scaling. Collective use cases. Digital roadmaps. Not ready for primetime.’
A delegation of Commonwealth parliamentarians was in attendance. Poor things, they must have wondered if Britain still spoke English.
Ms Little, chipping from the bunker, offered ‘senior leadership in commercial’ and ‘digital-data and innovation pathways’.
The galleries murmured admiration, even more so when she used ‘onboard’ as a verb and when she ‘pegged payframes’ and welcomed ‘a holistic package’.
The champion was not surrendering her title without a fight.
She boasted, furthermore, that she had just been to the global government summit, a blue-riband freebie organised in Singapore by that great, glistening yogi of gibberists, Gus O’Donnell.
Fear not, little flock, about AI being incomprehensible. It can’t be worse than Whitehall.