It was a Queen's speech without the Queen and, to be honest, it would have been a smidgen more exciting had Her Majesty been there. The much-vaunted draft legislative programme was meant to put Gordon Brown on the runway to a relaunch, but outside the confines of Westminster it is difficult to see how this bird could fly.

Mr Brown said he wanted to help first-time home buyers, start a savings scheme for the low-paid and give flexible working rights to parents.

All worthy aims, but there were no radical ideas in the mix and a fair number were, like Alistair Darling's last budget, lifted from opposition policy documents.

"Karaoke Conservatism" is what the Tories are calling it, accusing Mr Brown of singing from their song sheet. The Tories counted 12 ideas in 18 bills that were theirs first. The LibDems said he had "scraped the barrel", the SNP saw the cupboard was bare.

And the big ideas are not fuelled for take-off. On one key policy, £300m to help people on to the housing ladder, the Prime Minister gave the impression this was new money but in fact it comes from funds already allocated to the Department for Communities and Local Government.

This we discovered through some Scottish reverse engineering. If there were new money then some would probably come to Scotland too, a Barnett consequential, but there is not.

Similarly the Saving Gateway accounts, to encourage low earners to save, speaks of "matched" funding from the government which, most assume, means equal amounts. It transpires a number of pilot schemes, adding various percentages to savers' funds, are being tested before one is chosen.

This all has shades of Mr Brown announcing a couple of thousand troops coming home from Iraq last year when they were already here, or a bit like Alistair Darling's £120 giveaway one day being soaked up by a 3% inflation level the next.

What really electrified politics yesterday, sending fear coursing along Downing Street and a shudder through the nation, was the Governor of the Bank of England's recession warnings. The Chancellor and Mr Brown are relying on the economy to come good before an election so they can claim to be safe hands during the storm.

Mr Brown insisted "there is no lack of clarity about direction" but he is likely to be pulled hither and thither by his shipmates on the way to an election, especially if Crewe and Nantwich goes Tory.

Labour MPs were a little happier with the 10p tax row defused, but drowning men will clutch at anything. Some 1.1 million of the lowest-paid workers, earning up to £13,000, will still be worse off, some of them by £230 a year.

Wiser Labour heads realise the damage inflicted on the government will not be undone in a two-day parliamentary flourish. One Labour MP in the corridor said: "When you're in a boat that's sinking you don't just start rowing faster, first you stop to fix the hole and we've started on that work now."

Even if Labour manage to patch the hull there's a lot of choppy water between here and the electoral shore.