Starting from Matt's in Clapham Junction — a work day at the Vauxhall office, then karting and bowling in Stratford tonight before heading home to Walton.
Britain is currently without a permanent prime minister in anything but name. Keir Starmer announced his resignation on 22 June after a brutal few months — dismal local election results in May, the resignation of Wes Streeting as health secretary, then defence secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns walking out over a defence-spending row in June, all against the backdrop of Reform UK's continued rise in the polls. Starmer stays on as caretaker PM while Labour picks a successor: nominations open 9 July and close a week later, and Andy Burnham — freshly installed as an MP after winning the Makerfield by-election — is the clear frontrunner, with Wes Streeting ruling himself out. The caretaker convention matters here: constitutionally Starmer is meant to confine himself to necessary business only, not new policy, which effectively freezes the government for a fortnight at a moment when it can least afford to look adrift. The case for reading this as healthy self-correction — a party recognising it was heading for electoral disaster and acting before an election forced the issue — is reasonable. The less charitable reading, and the one Reform UK will make loudly, is that a landslide majority has curdled into chaos in barely two years, which is its own electoral liability regardless of who wins the contest.
Whoever takes over inherits an economy under real strain, mostly for reasons outside Westminster's control. The Israel-Iran-US conflict that began in February has choked shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and pushed energy prices sharply higher — petrol up around 10% and diesel 20% within weeks of the strikes starting, with wholesale gas prices up roughly 75% at one point. The Bank of England held rates at 3.75% in June on a split 7-2 vote, with two members actually pushing for a hike, and the next decision lands 30 July. CPI inflation is at 2.8% but expected to climb as energy costs feed through — the OECD's pessimistic scenario has it reaching 4% this year, with UK growth crawling at just 0.7%. A recent US-Iran peace deal has taken some of the sharpest edges off the worst-case forecasts, but the direction of travel is still upward pressure on prices at the same time Labour is trying to install new leadership. That combination — a caretaker government and a tightening economic backdrop — is an awkward one for whoever ends up with the keys.
On the technology side, the government has been trying to look forward rather than firefight: an AI Hardware Plan aimed at building up domestic chip and semiconductor capability, and new "AI Growth Labs" letting firms trial AI-driven products directly with regulators before wider rollout. There's also a live consultation — responses due tomorrow, 3 July — on public attitudes to generative and agentic AI, which will likely shape how assertively the UK legislates versus the more permissive, wait-and-see approach it's taken so far relative to the EU. For anyone in SaaS or toys-adjacent tech, the regulatory direction of travel is still "enable first, restrict later" — worth watching whether that survives contact with a new Labour leader who may want a more interventionist framing to differentiate themselves.