There is a question I get asked, in various formulations, by people who know me from my scientific career and find my entry into politics surprising. The question is usually something like: how do you reconcile the discipline of evidence-based thinking with the demands of a political world that runs largely on assertion, repetition, and tribal loyalty? It is a fair question. I have spent time thinking about how to answer it honestly.
The honest answer is that I do not think the reconciliation is as difficult as the question implies. Not because politics is secretly rational, it is not, but because the Conservative intellectual tradition, properly understood, is more compatible with scientific habits of thought than it is usually given credit for.
Let me say first what I mean by scientific thinking, because it is often misrepresented. It does not mean deference to experts, or to institutions that describe themselves as scientific. It does not mean assuming that consensus equals truth, since the history of science is largely a history of consensuses being revised. What it means, at its core, is a specific epistemic discipline: the willingness to form a hypothesis, to specify in advance what evidence would cause you to revise it, to seek out that evidence honestly rather than only the evidence that confirms your existing view, and to change your mind when the data demands it. It means being comfortable with uncertainty. And it means distinguishing between what a study actually shows and what it is being used to claim, which are very often different things.
These habits of thought are not uniquely scientific. They are habits that any serious thinker in any domain should aspire to. But they are particularly well-developed in scientific training, because the feedback loops are tighter. A clinical trial will tell you, eventually and with some statistical confidence, whether your drug works. Politics rarely offers that kind of clean verdict, which is partly why it is so easy for bad thinking to persist in it.
Now, why is this a Conservative rather than a technocratic or progressive value? The technocratic version of evidence-based policy, and it exists, is the view that complex social problems should be solved by credentialed experts who identify the optimal solution and implement it, bypassing messy political processes. That is not what I am arguing for. It is, in fact, close to what Hayek spent his career arguing against, and he was right.
My argument is different. The Conservative tradition, from Burke through Oakeshott to the best of modern Conservative thought, is built on scepticism about grand designs. It distrusts ideological blueprints precisely because they assume a level of knowledge that no planner actually has. It argues for institutions that embody accumulated practical wisdom rather than imposing theoretical models. It holds that human affairs are more complex than any single framework can capture, and that policies should be judged by their consequences rather than their intentions.
These are scientific instincts applied to politics. The Burke who wrote that the statesman ought to have a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve is not asking for stasis. He is asking for the kind of empirical humility that says: this is what we have built over generations, change it carefully and on the basis of evidence about what is actually wrong with it, not on the basis of what sounds better in the abstract.
What I hope to bring to Westminster is this disposition applied to a specific set of domains where I have direct expertise: healthcare policy, life sciences industrial strategy, and AI governance. In each of these areas, the political debate is plagued by positions held more firmly than the evidence warrants. The case for NHS reform is often undermined by advocates who overstate the evidence for specific interventions. The case against AI in clinical settings is often made by people who have not engaged with the validation literature. The case for or against specific drug approval processes is usually conducted without direct knowledge of how those processes actually work in practice.
I am not claiming that my expertise makes me right. Expertise can be wrong, and it must always be accountable to democratic legitimacy. What I am claiming is that the quality of the argument improves when the person making it has done the work. That is not a technocratic claim. It is a Conservative one: institutions and decisions should be grounded in knowledge of what actually exists, how things actually work, and what the evidence actually shows. Getting that right requires people in politics who are genuinely willing to be refuted. I try to be one of them.