UK inflation came in at 3.3% in March, a sharp acceleration from the previous month. The driver appears to be the Iran energy shock — a direct consequence of the conflict now in its seventh week. That’s well above the Bank’s 2% target and complicates the rate path considerably. Expect this to feature heavily when the MPC next meets.

On Iran, Trump extended the ceasefire on Tuesday after peace talks hit an impasse, but the situation deteriorated almost immediately — Iran attacked a container ship within hours of the announcement. The US has simultaneously moved a third carrier group and up to 10,000 elite troops to the Gulf, expected in position by end of month. Trump’s own language swung from “I expected to be bombing” to extending the truce pending an Iranian proposal. The energy market implications are obvious, and the 3.3% UK inflation print is partly a downstream effect of exactly this kind of instability.

The Economist is flagging global energy markets as being on the verge of a serious dislocation, with scenarios described as ranging from bad to awful. Worth reading in full if you haven’t.

Domestically, Starmer is having a difficult week. Olly Robbins, sacked last week as the Foreign Office’s top civil servant, appeared before a select committee yesterday and confirmed that officials had debated withholding Peter Mandelson’s vetting documents from parliament — documents which apparently showed the vetting agency did not believe Mandelson should receive clearance. Ministers and Labour MPs are visibly losing sympathy for the prime minister. None of this is immediately market-moving, but a government that looks politically weakened heading into a difficult inflation and spending environment is worth noting for anyone thinking about UK sovereign positioning.

On tech, Meta has confirmed it is recording employees’ mouse movements and keystrokes to train its AI models. The tool is internal for now, but the disclosure raises obvious questions about employee data rights that will land in European regulatory inboxes quickly.

SpaceX is reportedly working with Cursor — the AI coding assistant — and holds an option to acquire it for $60 billion. TechCrunch notes the strategic logic cuts both ways: neither Cursor nor Musk’s xAI has proprietary models competitive with Anthropic or OpenAI, and both are now facing those same companies as direct competitors in the developer tools market.

UK CPI for March is already out, but the next significant scheduled event is the Bank of England’s Catherine Mann speaking on Thursday.

Sources

BBC News, Al Jazeera, Guardian, FT, Politico, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, The Economist — 2026-04-22