Is Keir Starmer planning to sack Anneliese Dodds? Despite everything else going on in politics at the moment, that question crops up in almost every conversation I have around Westminster, months after initial speculation began. “Aw, Anneliese is so nice,” these conversations tend to start, with a slightly pitying tone – before the person, often a Labour colleague, proceeds to dissect her performance as shadow chancellor to date, usually lamenting that she isn’t communicating Labour’s vision. “She’s so smart, too,” they add. Dodds’s future is everybody’s favourite topic, a Westminster guilty pleasure. Cut-through is not necessarily a problem: George Osborne didn’t have it as shadow chancellor, nor did Philip Hammond as chancellor. The real weakness of Dodds’s shadow chancellorship is that this speculation has been allowed to continue. She should have put a stop to it months ago, whether by intervening herself, via her advisers, or through Starmer. His eventual crackdown was too soft and too late, and certainly hasn’t stopped the rumblings.