Keir Starmer resigned Monday. Within hours, the question burning through business owner WhatsApp groups had nothing to do with Westminster succession – it was far more personal. What does this development mean for my business?
Britain’s about to get its seventh prime minister in a decade. The Labour leadership race runs through July, with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the frontrunner, and the familiar churn of speculation about tax and spending has already kicked off. For anyone trying to run a company through it, the noise is immediate.
Matt Haycox thinks most owners are asking the wrong question entirely.
Haycox has put more than £1 billion into UK businesses. His inbox, he says, floods every time there’s a political upheaval. “My answer is usually the same. It means a lot less than you think, and the worrying itself is doing more damage than the politics ever will.”
The pause is the problem
The instinct, when news like this breaks, is to wait. Hold off on that hire. Sit on the funding application. See how things settle.
He’s seen that same pattern play out through Brexit, Covid, and the chaos of 2022, when there were three prime ministers in just a few months. “Waiting feels responsible. It feels like the grown-up thing to do,” Haycox says. “It isn’t. It’s just fear wearing a suit. The owners who freeze hand their best months to the ones who don’t.”
His challenge is blunt: show him the line in your accounts that actually moves the day Starmer walks out of Number 10. “There isn’t one. So why are you behaving like there is?”
A change of prime minister doesn’t determine whether your product solves a real problem. It doesn’t improve your margins or attract customers. None of that gets decided in Downing Street.
What you can actually move
So what should owners do this week? Haycox’s answer: separate the noise from the levers, then ignore the noise.
The levers are the same ones they’ve always been. Cash position. Funding access. Whether customers still want what you’re selling. “You can’t vote on the next prime minister and you can’t set the base rate,” he says. You can count your runway, sort your funding lines, and pick up the phone to your customers.
That sounds obvious. But uncertainty pulls attention away from exactly those things — owners spend the week reading political coverage instead of chasing the overdue invoice or the warm lead. The Office for National Statistics has consistently shown business investment intentions soften when political uncertainty spikes. The British Chambers of Commerce sees confidence dip around moments like this, almost on cue. Haycox argues that knowing the pattern is how you avoid getting swallowed by it.
Why the money tightens first
Here’s the practical case for acting now rather than later.
When the political picture clouds over, capital gets cautious. Lenders sharpen their criteria. Investors slow their decisions. The money doesn’t vanish — but it gets harder to reach, and fastest for the businesses that need it most.
“Here’s the trap,” Haycox says. “You wait for certainty before you sort your funding. But certainty is precisely when everyone else is asking too, and the lenders have already pulled their heads in.”
The advice runs counter to instinct: sort your funding access before you need it, while you can still negotiate without desperation. The principle is older than any government. Borrow when you can, not when you must.
The opportunity nobody wants to say out loud
His most contrarian take? A week like this is actually an opportunity. He knows that it makes people uncomfortable.
“Every wobble transfers market share,” he says. Some competitors will spend the next month paralysed – stopping marketing, stopping selling, and telling themselves they’re being prudent. “That’s a gift. While they’re hiding, you’re in front of their customers.”
He’s not dressing it up as fearlessness. The point isn’t to ignore risk. It’s to keep doing the basics while everyone else finds reasons not to. “You don’t need to be braver than the next guy. You just need to keep showing up while he doesn’t.”
The practical list
Ask for the specific version, and Haycox gets direct: know your real cash runway — not the optimistic number, the real one. Get funding lines in order while the door’s still open. Stay visible to customers, because they’re anxious too, and the business that keeps showing up looks like the safe bet. And stop refreshing the political coverage. None of it will chase the warm lead or file your accounts.
“A new prime minister is somebody else’s problem to manage,” he says. “Your problem is the same as it was last week. Build something people want, make the numbers work, and keep enough cash to carry on.”
Not the answer most owners want in a week full of headlines.
Probably the only one that pays.