Our new Saudi partnership is a huge opportunity for UK science

I really hope you know what you are doing Mr Griffith, but I suspect not ("dizzying"??). Also, the word 'leverage' used as a verb is only really used as such by people who trying to pull the wool over your eyes about their interests.

I find it fascinating that a Conservative politician is hawking the unshackled research potential of a totalitarian state, when we are so often told that the free marketplace of ideas is the only true path to innovation. Are we going to have to add sexuality alongside the case for support on project proposals from those wanting to work in Saudi Arabia? Because they still routinely torture and kill homosexuals. Though I suppose somebody like Andrew Griffith must think of Riyadh as an idyll, with it's ban on trade unions and the routine murder of protesters. Surely a nation state with such a deep fear of free speech, free expression and free inquiry is the ultimate snowflake and will be resoundingly incapable of delivering quality world-leading discovery science? Or perhaps Mr Griffith is simply a shill who doesn't understand, nor care, about the future of UK science in any meaningful way.