Should Dyson be surprised at the state of affairs resulting from the decision to leave the EU, which he was so firmly in favor of? He believed that Brexit would make Britain such a brilliant place to do science and tech business, in fact, that heThen there is the entrepreneur's chumminess with Boris Johnson, who led the Brexit referendum campaign and later became prime minister on the promise of"getting Brexit done.
How then can Dyson have assumed Johnson was anything other than trustworthy? It was the bloviating political behemoth, after all, who set the tone during the post-referendum years when he allegedly quippedat the suggestion that a hard-line departure from the world's largest economic bloc was not the most commercially wise trajectory. It was a decision which arguably also deprived any science or tech startups of unrestricted access to one of the world's richest markets.
Dyson might be excused, though, for directing some his ire at the UK's current prime minister. It is Rishi Sunak who is responsible for sorting out the UK science and tech strategy since he wrested power from Liz Truss a lifetime – sorry, six months – ago.
It is at this point we might remind ourselves that Dyson's company doesn't just make vacuum cleaners that suck. It also makes blade-less cooling towers, just in case you need a tool for dealing with large quantities of hot air. ®