On Tuesday, the Daily Mail billed Andy Burnham for a shopping spree. We wrote about it. On Sunday, the Mail on Sunday looked at that frame, decided it tested well, and made it the front-page splash: "Burnham's big spree." When a metaphor performs, it gets a sequel. * Here's what's under the headline. The Tories are accusing the PM of planning a "tax bombshell" on working families and — this is the quote doing the heavy lifting — "writing cheques British people can't cash." Notice the quotation marks. Every scary phrase on that front page belongs to the opposition. The Mail's splash is a Conservative press release wearing the Mail's font. * Now, the actual news event this weekend: the government's devolution announcement, expected next week, which hands England's metropolitan mayors a share of income tax to spend on their own cities. You can like that policy or hate it, but a "spree" is when you buy things. This is changing whose card the money is on. Calling devolution a spree is like accusing someone of splurging because they moved money from one pocket to the other. * As for the "bombshell": there is no tax announcement. The PM's spokesperson calls the accusations "nonsense" and says every announced policy is "fully funded." So we have one side claiming invisible taxes and the other claiming invisible funding — symmetrical, unproven, and only one of them got the 72-point font. * And there's a receipts problem with the sequel. When the Mail first ran the spree frame on Tuesday, Bloomberg was simultaneously reporting that Burnham was scaling back and shelving some of those same pledges. The Mail on Sunday is now charging him a second time for a spree that was partly returned to the shop. That's not a bill. That's interest on a refund. * None of this means the pledges will add up — honeymoon governments announce faster than they cost things, and that deserves scrutiny. But scrutiny would be a costing. What ran on Sunday's front page was the other party's adjectives, twice-recycled. Watch the quotation marks: when the headline's scariest words are someone else's, the paper isn't reporting a bombshell. It's choosing whose words get the big font.