We changed leader. We didn't change the subject.

Keir Starmer resigned on Monday morning, outside the same door so many have left by in a decade. By Wednesday the contest to replace him looked less like a contest than a coronation, with Andy Burnham almost certain to walk in. He is, of all of them, the one who actually built a skills system and bothered to govern work. And even he is running on the economy without once naming the biggest economic question we have: what happens to a job ladder that is losing its bottom rungs.

That isn't a complaint about one party. It's a complaint about the whole bench. A week that should have been about the future of work was about everything except.

Meanwhile, the thing itself kept proving the point. A fortnight ago Washington switched off the most powerful AI Britain could buy, and on Friday had to stand in front of Congress and explain why. I'll say the plain bit plainly, because we promise to: the models in question are the ones our own analysts run on. We report on our own supplier, and we tell you so. The lesson holds regardless — much of what now runs British work answers to another government, and we have no switch of our own.

So where did the question actually get answered this week? Where it usually does. In a World Cup that gave a leaderless country something to agree on. In a heatwave that quietly decided who got to rest. In a sixty-five-year-old's voice, rebuilt by a machine, asking what a human is worth.

I don't have the answer. I have the question, and a worry that the people about to lead us still haven't picked it up. Tell me what you'd put in that first speech. I'm reading.

— M.