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Hello and welcome to coffeehouseare Shops, Dispectator's Daily Politics podcast. I'm Katie Balsland, joined by James Seyfe and Isabel Hardman. And we've had an announcement today on trains.

Isabel, this relates to the government's levelling up agenda and really we're seeing quite a lot of disappointment.

Can you talk us through what's been announced? Yeah, so this is the integrated rail plan,

which involves a number, as you say, of disappointments such as no eastern leg of HS2 and no northern

powerhouse rail, which is a sort of new transpenine route. There are,

if you talk to Conservative MPs in the north, a lot of them are very disappointed with this.

They feel that they were overpromised by Boris Johnson. They do understand the public spending

picture, which is that some of these promises would turn

out to be too expensive to deliver, which I think is a recurring thing with Boris Johnson.

But they also do say, well, there are some good things about this integrated rail plan.

Some journey times are going to be cut by, you know, around 15 minutes or something like that.

There are going to be some upgrades as well,

but it's, I wouldn't say it's even a mixed picture. It is generally quite a disappointing

picture, even for those who are willing to give Boris Johnson the benefit of the doubt. And I think

it shows a number of things. One is obviously that Boris Johnson is not in a good place with his party and it's not just

over second jobs. It's over a number of things. But also that the time of turning the taps on

with public spending is over and Rishi Sunak is prevailing more than perhaps Boris Johnson would

have imagined when he made these initial promises.

James, is this about the narrative or as Isisville said, it's just very hard to dress up in terms of how this has been scaled down?

So I think there's an interesting question here, which is we had the Northern papers earlier in the week, all saying, you know,

...