For months I wrote that no politician would talk about AI and jobs. Then the Prime Minister did, and I had already bet he would not.

This column has one long complaint. British politics does not talk about what AI is doing to people's work. Not properly, and not in a way anybody could be held to.

In June I turned that complaint into predictions, three times.

On 20 June I wrote that the race to lead the Labour Party would treat the future of work as a footnote. No serious candidate, I said, would build a pitch around it. On 23 June I wrote that no candidate would name it as a stated priority before nominations closed in July. In July the editor wrote that the new government would set out its economic plan without naming it either.

By early July, Andy Burnham was the only candidate left to be Prime Minister. On 2 July the Financial Times reported that his advisers were drawing up a plan on AI. It was built around protecting workers, British ownership of the technology, and a review of driverless cars.

On 7 July I wrote a column about it. I said the absence finally had a candidate. I wrote that I had spent months saying nobody calm and powerful was talking to readers about this, that somebody now was, and that I would not talk it down.

So the first prediction is simply wrong. We ran a piece celebrating the moment, and left the prediction that it would never come sitting unmarked for six weeks.

I have gone back over my own work before. On 31 July I wrote a piece saying we had claimed a number did not exist, and that it did after all, because the Bank of England had published one. But a document landed and forced that. Nothing forced me to look at what I wrote in June. It just sat there.

The second prediction is half wrong, and it is the one I want to explain. Strictly, it holds. Burnham never said it himself. It was advisers briefing a newspaper, and I said as much at the time. And on 3 July, when he took public questions and more than two thousand were sent in, the one clear question about machines and jobs got no answer.

But look at what saved me. He ran unopposed. No debates, no rival, no stage. A prediction you can only lose if a politician says the words himself, on a stage, in a race that never had one, is not much of a prediction.

Three days earlier I had written the same thing without those three words. That one lost outright.

The third is wrong too. Within a week of taking office Burnham appointed the first minister for AI, who attends Cabinet without being a full member, and set up a taskforce under Lord Vallance. On 28 July he wrote in the Times about changing how young people are trained, because AI is changing the jobs they are being trained for.

Now the part I am not giving up, and it is why this column carries on.

They are talking about it now. What they are talking about is training. Learn a new skill. This paper has spent two months asking the same question of that answer, and it is a short one: trained to do what? Nobody has said.

And in the same fortnight, the government broke up the department that handled technology and spread its work across Whitehall. So there is a minister and a taskforce where a department used to be.

That changes my complaint rather than ending it. It is no longer that nobody in power will say the words. They said them within a fortnight. It is that they said them while taking apart the part of government that would have to do something about it.