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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's daily politics podcast.

I'm Cindy U and I'm joined by Michael Simmons, our data editor.

Now Michael, today we've had some good news in inflation, at least from the sounds of things

from the government who've been singing and dancing about it all over social media and that's

the inflation falling down. Tell us about what the news is.

So the headline rate of inflation for July has come down to 6.8%. So that means that

prices are still rising but they're rising slower than they had been in previous months.

It's good news for Sunack because it's in line with the Bank of England targets which we've

talked about on this podcast before and those targets said that Sunack was going to meet his pledge

to half inflation by the end of the year. So it's looking good from the headline rate but if we

look further in the data there's some more worrying sounds. Yeah so that's core inflation isn't it?

Tell us about that. Yeah so core inflation is essentially where you strip out sort of external

factors. So that's things like energy prices and food prices that you could say these are caused

by the shock from the invasion of Ukraine, from the pandemic supply chain problems kind of feeding

through. So core inflation strips that out and it's more of kind of just a British part of inflation

and when we look at that that's basically stayed flat and this is going to worry people especially

the Bank of England to have to say interest rates because when kind of we had an inflationary

disease in the 70s it was core inflation that kind of stuck so the fact that core inflation

...