Tonight the country changed its narrator. The rooms where it gathers after dark are still closing, three a week.

The pubs filled early tonight, the way they do when there is something to talk about. By the time the light finally went — and it goes late now, just past midsummer — the talk in most of them had drifted from Downing Street to the football, or to nothing in particular. A Prime Minister had resigned that morning. The country took the evening off from it, which is what evenings are for.

That is the thing the night has always done. It is the part of the day that does not belong to work: the few hours when the city stops producing anything and becomes a place to be rather than a place to earn. As work loosens its grip, those hours are supposed to grow more precious, not less. This paper's founding question — what we do when we no longer have to work — is answered, in part, every night, in rooms full of people doing nothing economically useful and meaning it.

The trouble is that the rooms are vanishing. Britain's late-night venues — the bars, the clubs, the places open past the point any spreadsheet can justify — have shrunk by close to a third since the pandemic, on the Night-Time Industries Association's own market monitor. That is nearly three net closures every week, sustained for six years. Late-night bars alone are going at around six a month. In April the business-rates relief that has kept many of them breathing falls away, replaced by a system the NTIA calls, not unfairly, a stealth tax on staying open after nine. Corsica Studios, one of London's most loved rooms, has already said it will close this spring.

So here is the power question hiding in tonight's quiet. As the working day shrinks and the off-hours become the prize — commercially, politically, in the plain sense of where a life is now actually lived — who is making sure there is anywhere left to spend them? For years the answer from Westminster has been a shrug. The night economy employs more than a million people and is treated as an afterthought, or a nuisance to be licensed and policed rather than kept alive.

There is one exception, and tonight it carries more weight than it did yesterday. The favourite to replace Keir Starmer is Andy Burnham, who as mayor of Greater Manchester appointed Britain's first night-time economy adviser and has spent years arguing — most recently at the industry's own summit this year — that the after-dark hours are real infrastructure, owed the same seriousness as a road or a railway line. Whether you read that as foresight or as a gimmick, it is the only political record on the subject that exists. The man most likely to inherit the country is the one who once asked who owns the night.

A new narrator saves not a single venue. The rates still rise in April, whoever holds the keys to Number 10. But the contest that opened this morning will, among everything else, decide how seriously the state takes the hours that are increasingly the only ones we can call our own. Watch that, once the noise of the leadership race dies down.

Why it matters here: if you live near a British city, the room you remember being young in may already be gone or going — the late-night sector is closing at more than twice the rate of hospitality as a whole, and the relief slowing it ends in April. The off-hours are becoming the most valuable time we have, exactly as the places to spend them together disappear.