Allegra Stratton: Did the UK's AI Race Just Get Harder?

The chancellor was on defiant form in her interview this morning with Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait. In part, Rachel Reeves was responding to a scoop from earlier this week by a reporting team including the Readout’s Ailbhe Rea that she’s looking at expanding airports in the UK. The story is still making feathers, and plane parts, fly in Westminster.

Reeves was engagingly pugnacious when she told John that with planning decisions, “the answer can’t always be no” — and said it with such gusto it felt like you were around the cabinet table watching her dress down her colleagues. These comments are being widely seen as confirmation that she is likely to back airport expansions, even if it means a fight with ministers and the Labour mayor of London — as well as the inevitable legal challenges.