Hello and welcome to Coffee House. I'm Tim Shipman, the political editor. And I'm James Heald,

the deputy political editor. And today we're going to be talking about the most important issue

for most voters, the cost of living. And we're talking as well about the European issue. Can

Labor get closer to Brussels without antagonising

its voter base? So, James, I think it was November of last year when the Prime Minister first said

that any time not spent talking about the cost of living was a minute wasted. I forget how many

minutes we've now wasted, but the PMs be out and about this morning trying to get that

back on the agenda. We've got war in Iran. We've got all these other issues percolating along.

But Prime Minister now, as a result of the war in Iran,

facing all these pressures on the cost of living, pressures on energy prices.

What's he been telling the Venetian today?

So today he called one of those emergency press conferences

talking about the war in Iran. I think dominating the backdrop to all of this is the kind of echoes of 2022. We had the war in Ukraine, led to a huge energy price spike as a result of that. And there was talk of a hundred billion energy package bailout at that time. It got watered down to 40 billion. And it does seem that the prime minister today has kind of eschewed big bang measures and has actually come up with quite a small package relatively, which is only 52 million in heating oil covered costs. Those are for rural communities might be affected by this. And inevitably, despite him wanting to talk today about Iran in terms of the impact domestically and cost living, most of the questions from the press have been dominated by foreign affairs and whether there's a riff with Trump. And really, these are two issues for Kirstama. Abroad, he's got to kind of manage those relationships at a time when Trump is flip-flopping on whether he wants the UK to be a closeout or not. And second, what is the kind of domestic blowback from all of this stuff, given, as we know, we've seen in recent years, that wars obviously, often come back to haunt us in terms of our energy, costs at the pumps and domestic pressures as well.

So let's just deal

with the international staff. we've seen in recent years that wars, overseas, often come back to haunt us in terms of our energy,

costs at the pumps and domestic pressures as well. So let's just deal with the international stuff very quickly. Was there anything new from the PM on relations with Trump or assets to the

Middle East, relationships with allies in the region? Did he say enough? Has he now got his

stories straight on that? It seemed now got his story straight on that?

He seemed to be relatively story straight, lots of dead batting getting as a sort of cricketing metaphors out today. But he was really just talking about the fact that nothing has changed. He wants to keep the UK out of this conflict. We're now entering week three. He's suggesting he's always been consistent throughout all of this. And really, He was just saying, you know, we're still friends of America,

but we don't want to get our own troops sucked in.

So no sign yet that we're

going to see any kind of ships there, not least, of course, because I think the concern around sending a battleship would be that it would draw away potentially from the high north in terms of those spheres, which Russia seems quite interested in. So at the moment, it's been fairly business as usual and not much in the way of news from this press conference.

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