Hello and welcome to the Special Sat's Day edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Katie

Balls and I'm joined by Jane Sysife and Isva Hardman. Where is Labour and more specifically

where is Keir Starmer? With every day that goes by, something else seems to be going

wrong in terms of the incoming energy cap, the bills, the water shortage, and yet every

day what we tend to hear more is Liz Truss and Richie Sunack tearing trunks out of each

other than what Labour would do and all this. But when we agreed to do this podcast this

morning, I think right on cue, Keir Starmer tweeted, suggesting he might now say something

about the energy crisis, but why has he been so missing so far this summer?

Obviously it was our Coffee House Shots scheduled that prompted him to give the intervention

on the cost of living crisis. I think there are two reasons. One is that he has been

away and I think that probably has had an impact, although obviously all politicians

always say, I don't really take a holiday, I just go somewhere else and work from that

blah, blah, blah. But it is nice for them to get a rest, I suppose. The other is that

Labour, like the leadership candidates, have been waiting until the end of August when

it's a little bit clearer how much pressure is going to be on families as a result of

their energy bills. But that has not really worked in terms of the news cycle, which is

so often the case, the news cycle just moves faster. And there's been visible impatience

within Labour, not just from sort of, you know, backbench MPs and so on, but we've obviously

had Gordon Brown, who I think has written for or spoken to pretty much every single media

outlets now in the past week about his plans for energy bills and about the need to have

a grip on this crisis. And his lines have become more and more pointed as the week has

gone on. So he wrote in the Guardian yesterday that crises don't take holidays and nor do

...