The dam broke without warning on a quiet Sunday afternoon. After weeks of resisting party leaders, major donors and average voters urging President Joe Biden to forsake his re-election campaign, he finally acquiesced. He announced he would finish his current term but not seek a second and offered a fulsome endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, to become the Democratic nominee.

That quickly, the 2024 presidential campaign turned inside out. Donald Trump, fresh off accepting the Republican nomination but now deprived of his favourite punching bag, had to recalibrate his campaign, now certain to face a younger and more energising candidate, probably Harris. In her first 24 hours of campaigning, Harris raised $81 million, and the Associated Press said she had secured commitments from more than half the delegates she needed for a first-round nomination.

Biden’s momentous decision was a stunner only in that it happened just days after he insisted: “I’m in it to win it.” With senior Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, withholding any vote of confidence, and campaign donations drying up, Biden gave in to one opponent he might have beaten, Trump, and one he never could, age.

At 78, Trump is now the old guy in the race (three years younger than Biden) but unchanged from the divisive figure he ever was and now with a hard-right running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who cements MAGA world support but does little to expand it. 

As president, Harris would be many things Biden is not – female, black and South Asian by descent, a ceiling-breaker as vice president and a vital bridge to constituencies that were drifting away from Biden – blacks, Hispanics and especially young voters who felt no affinity to a pair of antique candidates. Now they could have someone slightly closer to their age group: Harris is 59. 

The Democrats’ nominating convention starts on 19 August in Chicago, but the major decisions that will determine the ticket will probably be made well before. Harris began right away seeking support from Biden delegates, Congressional Democrats and constituency group leaders, and soliciting dormant high-dollar donors.

Should she ascend, her choice for running mate will likely draw from a handful of governors, including Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, plus a senator, Mark Kelly of Arizona. Any combination is expected to unite Democrats in a way Biden no longer could. Suddenly, they have hope. Soon, a ticket, and to nervous Republicans, a race.

Alan Greenspan is best known as the nerdy New Yorker who chaired the Federal Reserve around the turn of the millennium. Back in the ’60s he was much cooler: both a musician and part of the tech avant garde, writing early computer software. Along with most of his contemporaries, he took pride in squeezing a few digits out of his code by not putting a “19” before the year. This was despite a programmer by the name of Bob Bemer having alerted the world in 1958 to what became known as “Y2K” – computers not being able to tell the difference between 1900 and 2000. To be fair to Greenspan, he was far from the only egghead-in-the-sand, and nobody did anything until the mid-’90s when Y2K spurned a $500 billion-or-so clean-up job. Still, there’s a kind of poetic justice in him having to spend New Year’s Eve 1999 at his desk, stressing about the possibility of markets going into meltdown.

For most of us, money was the least of our worries that night. More feared a rerun of 1983, when a Russian computer reported a US missile launch, and the world was only saved from nuclear oblivion because Soviet engineer Stanislav Petrov bet on a false alarm. It was easy enough to avoid being on a plane, which were all predicted to fall out of the sky on the stroke of midnight, but what about supermarkets running out of food? I knew we’d hit peak Y2K hysteria at home when my wife bought a huge sack of brussels sprouts from the local farmers’ market, “just in case”. The thought of being stuck in a bunker with nothing to eat but those stinky green globes almost had me making a break for the nearby US military base, in the hope that if a missile didn’t hit, at least a fighter jet might crash on top of me.

Of course, when global catastrophe was averted, most of us laughed off our fears and assumed the whole thing had been at best an overreaction, at worst a scam. But those on the inside saw it as a lucky escape, or even a rare example of successful global collaboration. One is the former software engineer, Ellen Ullman, author of Life in Code (2017). She’s been warning for years of the threat posed by our global system of interconnected software, all produced by different companies whose interfaces are “black boxes to one another”. Her words seemed pretty prescient last week when the world was struck by the largest-ever “blue screen of death” incident. A single dodgy cybersecurity update at Microsoft by a third-party provider saw aircraft grounded, banks knocked out and hospitals overwhelmed, from Canada to Australia, Nigeria to Ukraine. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of what could happen if there was a major malfunction. Back in 1999, when the world mood-music was very different under Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, the Americans and Russians set up an exchange programme to ensure communication didn’t break down when the clocks rolled over, even if computers did. These days, both sides are more likely to engage in deliberate cyber sabotage than cooperation. Y2K might have passed without incident, but it’s the updates we need to watch out for.

Is there anything more entitled than a posh shoplifter? I know, because I’ve done it – albeit at the end of my tether in an upmarket grocery chain after six attempts to swipe through a cheap item, to no avail, and looking around in vain for help. When I finally spotted a faraway shop assistant she was chatting to a pal and steadfastly ignoring the growing queue. I wouldn’t say I reasoned my response, because I was suffering a volcanic moment of supermarket rage, but under the lava of my wrath was a reflexive line of thinking: “This store is grossly overpriced and has replaced its once brilliant workforce with self-service machines. They don’t give a monkey’s about customer service, so I am going to show the same lack of loyalty to them.” This doesn’t justify my act, of course, but I know I’m not the only person who loses their sense of fair play and reason under such circumstances. 

So, I was fascinated to learn that Planet Organic, haven for eco-conscious yummy mummies, has seen a rise in privileged shoplifters alongside the “homeless types”. Theft now costs the store £900,000 a year and the chain’s security manager, Richard Fowler, said “posh totty” regular customers are a major part of the problem. He says their attitude runs: “Today I’m a little bit short of money, so I’m going to steal something.” I’ve never darkened PO’s doors, so am not qualified to say if his analysis is correct – though I’m intrigued to know the method. Are they shoving chamomile Teapigs down their Bella Freud cashmere joggers? Or just airily walking out, booty in hand? And it’s not just the bone-broth brigade – a skint artist friend in his sixties told me he nicks posh chocolate from time to time, in the cause of fuelling his creativity. 

None of this is new. There have long been well-heeled kleptomaniacs doing it for nothing other than the kicks. I was totally shocked, circa 1992, when an exceptionally kind, well-spoken, middle-aged female colleague confessed she was a bit light-fingered “whenever there’s a full moon” and had once absconded with a sofa from Heal’s. She and a friend had simply carried it out of the shop in broad daylight. But let me add a cautionary note. When her habitually law-abiding husband was informed of this audacious act, he found himself in a chemist where the pharmacist had disappeared and decided to walk out with a lip salve. Only to find a fellow customer hard on his heels, enacting a citizen’s arrest. He appeared before a magistrate, was publicly shamed and had to do community service. You are all duly warned.