U-turn if you want to

Hacks so love a cliche that they have universally declared what Keir Starmer said yesterday to be a "U-turn", despite having no idea how much, or how little, the policy to restrict winter fuel payments will be tweaked.

This is what the prime minister actually said at PMQs: 

we want to ensure that as we go forward, more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments. As you would expect, Mr Speaker, we will only make decisions we can afford. That is why we will look at that as part of a fiscal event.

If you look at any sensible definition of  U-turn, it would involve reversing a policy or changing it so substantially that it can be seen no longer to be operative. But Starmer didn't actually say that anything would change, only that he wants to ensure that more people get the payments - a garbled mix of aspiration and certainty. And a decision will be sometime in the future "as part of a fiscal event". 

You are eligible for the winter fuel payments if you get certain means-tested benefits as ministers pointed out after restricting the payments. They launched a campaign to encourage people to apply for pension credit, which could be described (not by me) as seeking to ensure that more people will get the payments.

But I suspect that hacks were briefed in advance to interpret Starmer's statement as saying a lot more than he actually said, much like when Tony Blair didn't actually announce a review of Clause IV.

In an excellent piece in the Guardian, Labour MP Jon Trickett only says Starmer "indicated he may U-turn", which is about right.

The important point about all of this is that, if hacks use words that overstate what has happened they don't just con their readers in the short term, but devalue those words for when they might actually apply. 

The next time a government completely reverses a policy, hacks will have no way of stressing that it really is a U-turn.