After last week’s Starmer speech flop, Labour is still trying to spin its way out of the hole their over-zealous briefing dug them into. The weekend before the speech we were promised a week-long “policy blitz”; the day before the speech it was trailed Starmer would be setting out a new vision akin to the Beveridge report. In the end we got two policies – one the government introduced in 2012, and another from the Thatcherite CPS think tank. Guido’s now spotted the Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds resorting to describing the policy announcements as a “slow burner”:

“I mean I think we’re in a situation where quite understandably the news is dominated by exactly what will be happening with restrictions, I mean clearly we’ve had big announcements today and so there was a lot of focus on that, but I do think that a lot of what Keir said is quite kind of slow burner I suppose I would call it”

That adjective certainly isn’t what was trailed ahead of Sir Keir’s speech, though it is true that it has failed to set politics alight yet…