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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

London was the main drag to UK productivity growth between 2019 and 2022, a trend that pushed the efficiency gap between the capital and the rest of the country to its lowest level on record.

Output per hour worked fell 2.7 per cent in London between 2019 and 2022, in contrast with a 2.5 per cent expansion across the UK over the four years, the Office for National Statistics said on Monday.

The decline left the capital 26.2 per cent more productive than the countrywide average, the smallest lead since comparable records began in 1998 and well below the 2007 peak of nearly 40 per cent.

The figures point to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the engine of the UK economy as well as the spreading of productivity growth more evenly across the country.

“It is unlikely that the next government will preside over rising living standards in the UK without London firing again,” said Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities think-tank.

UK productivity overall has largely stagnated since the financial crisis following decades of strong growth, a trend that has weighed on living standards and is known as Britain’s productivity puzzle.

Swinney said the trend for London “explains a large part of the UK’s wider productivity woes” as the capital led both the strong national growth seen before 2008 and its subsequent poor performance.

London is the UK’s largest and richest regional economy and a key source of revenues for public finances.

In the fiscal year to May 2023, Londoners paid £5,000 more in tax than they received in public spending, while Britons received £1,894 more than they put in the public coffers.

But recent revisions to GDP data showed the London economy underperformed the national average since 2019, in contrast with early estimates of higher growth in the capital.

London contracted more than the rest of the country during the pandemic, according to revised data, pointing to the hit from Covid-19 restrictions to activity and international travel.

Bart van Ark, managing director at the UK-based Productivity Institute, said London’s performance was “a concern and will need to be attended closely from the perspective of international competitiveness”.

But he added the narrowing gap between London and the rest of the country may suggest “the UK is finally beginning to move away from its one-engine model where only London and the South East are pulling the cart”.

ONS data showed that labour productivity since 2019 rose by 7.9 per cent in the North West and increased by 5.5 per cent in the South East.

The North West was 6.8 per cent less productive than the UK average in 2022, a smaller gap than the 11.3 per cent shortfall in 2019.

UK productivity figures are calculated using the ONS labour force survey, which has been affected by greater volatility since the pandemic because of a lower response rate.

Country singer George Strait just smashed another record in his chart-topping musical career.

On Saturday, the Texas native played the largest ticketed concert in U.S. history before a crowd of 110,905 fans, according to Billboard.

The performance at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field in College Station beat out the previous record held by the Grateful Dead, which jammed before 107,019 attendees during a 1977 show at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey.

Though Strait nabbed the record for the largest ticketed musical performance, there have been bigger crowds at some music festivals and free concerts held in the U.S., such as the 1986 performance by the New York Philharmonic in Central Park that drew an estimated 800,000 people.

And according to American Songwriter, perhaps the largest audience for a concert in history goes to the reputed 3.5 million fans who crammed onto Brazil’s Copacabana Beach in 1994 to hear Rod Stewart perform.

Strait is no stranger to setting records. The singer has the most No. 1 singles of any artist in any genre and is the only artist to boast a top 10 hit every year for three decades, Billboard reported.

According to Strait’s website, the country music star also holds more than 20 attendance records at music venues across the U.S.

Strait, whose new album Cowboys and Dreamers drops in September, will perform in Salt Lake City later this month, followed by concerts in Detroit and Chicago in July.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved the war cabinet he set up in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack following the resignation of two of its five members.

The body, headed by Netanyahu, has overseen Israel’s war in Gaza for the past eight months. However, its dissolution had been expected since the resignations last week of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two centrist politicians who joined Netanyahu’s coalition at the start of the war.

Following their departures, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich — ultranationalists whose positions have frequently drawn fierce criticism from Israel’s allies, including the US — had demanded to be admitted to the war cabinet.

But according to Israeli officials, Netanyahu will instead now hold meetings in smaller forums to discuss sensitive matters. The wider security cabinet, which includes Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, will also continue to deal with matters relating to the war, officials said.

Gantz and Eisenkot demanded the establishment of the war cabinet, which also included defence minister Yoav Gallant and strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer, as a condition of joining Netanyahu’s emergency government last year.

The arrangement was designed to sideline Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who have repeatedly demanded a more aggressive approach to the war in Gaza as well as the re-establishment of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian enclave.

They have also opposed concessions that would have allowed a deal to free the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.

While the entry of Gantz — a longtime rival of Netanyahu — into the war cabinet briefly brought a veneer of unity to Israeli politics, in recent months, he and Eisenkot have become increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

Gantz has accused the Israeli prime minister, who depends on Ben-Gvir’s and Smotrich’s parties for his majority in parliament, of allowing decisions relating to the war to be affected by narrow political calculations.

The tensions came to a head earlier this month when Gantz pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government and resigned from the war cabinet after Netanyahu ignored his demands for a series of policy shifts, including drawing up a plan for the aftermath of the war.

Eisenkot said he and Gantz left the government after the war cabinet was “infiltrated” by “ulterior motives and political considerations”, and described Ben-Gvir as “the alternate prime minister”.

Netanyahu’s office on Saturday accused the pair of lying, insisting the prime minister made decisions based only on Israel’s national security needs.