Wallace and Gromit rolled out their pimped-up Gas Board in a word salad

RUNCORN, as anyone who has taken the train to Liverpool Lime Street knows, is a place pregnant with possibility. Hoping to suck up a little of the Mersey magic this week were none other than Wallace and Gromit.

Sorry, that should read Sir Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband.

The Energy Secretary and quondam Labour leader himself does genuinely look as if he might have been modelled by Aardman Animations. Less explored is the fact that Sir Keir has more than an air of Gromit, the terminally-disappointed, selfappointed brains of the operation plasticine dog, about him.

They were here to launch one of the flagship policies of the Labour manifesto: Great British Energy.

It’s a grandiose but faintly ridiculous title for a pimped-up Gas Board.

It sounds either like something a Bond villain would run or the sort of failing institution Kenneth Williams might manage in a lost Carry On film about the three-day week – Carry On Up The Picket. More likely, alas, given Labour’s current intellectual hinterland, they nabbed the title from the great moral evil of our time – The Great British Bake Off, which stalks our national life, infecting everything it touches with twee.

Wallace teed things off. He was tasked with describing what Great Bake Off Energy would actually do.

Instead, we got a world salad delivered through the nose: “We will deliver ambitions”, “we will act equal to the challenge”, “scaling up community energy through a local power plan”. It was the syntactical equivalent of sniffing glue. If you wanted to know whether, as promised time and time again, your energy bills will come down, hard cheese.

In lieu of actually useful information like where and when they intend to build new power plants, Ed was all about “ensuring a just transition for our oil and gas communities”. Who can tell what any of this permanent non-speak really means?

I suspect, actually, it means exactly what it sounds like: meaningless managerial voodoo. Speaking of which, it was over to Gromit, who began by revealing a little known fact about his father’s profession.

“As the media will know,” he announced, “my dad was a toolmaker”.

Two people in hi-vis jackets behind him shared a side-eyed glance.

They will presumably be neutralised by MI5 later today for mocking the background of our glorious leader.

He complained of inheriting the “worst set of circumstances since the Second World War” – worse than 2010, worse even than Labour’s 1974 inheritance which was swiftly followed by a visit to the IMF. For someone who says he’ll be getting on with the act of government, he does an awful lot of complaining about the last one. “When the Conservative Party cut investment...” he moaned, literally wagging his finger. Indeed, there is something of the non-conformist preacher about much of Starmer’s rhetoric.

He lamented “the rot of shortsightedness and self-service that has weakened the foundations of our country”. The fact that he has imported a speechwriter from that other master of nasal hectoring, Justin Welby, is beginning to show.

At times it was like an AI version of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

In the midst of the Slough of Despond, Wallace and Gromit appear to have dropped their election pledge to cut energy bills by £300.

When people are doing their best to say nothing, it normally suggests there’s something they’re keen to hide.

The gobbledygook was not, alas, limited to Runcorn. Over in the Commons, Joe Powell, one of Labour’s new legion of MPS, asked about upping “ambition in the implementation of the procurement act so we have the data, the skills and the digital tools to drive a more mission-driven and economically transformative procurement across the Government”.

There we go, Great British Energy bakers: your technical challenge for this week is to work out what the hell any of that means.