It’s time for some home truths, Rishi

I wonder how many people in the country are bitterly disappointed that Liz Truss pulled out of her exciting one-to-one interview with Nick Robinson? I can think of only two. First, of course, Nick Robinson. Nick was very much looking forward to it. His ideal assignment would be to interview himself for an entire afternoon, but failing that, Liz Truss would do just fine. The other, of course, is Rishi Sunak, who must have been hoping that Liz would dig herself another hole and carry on digging until she emerged somewhere near Maruia Springs, say, in New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

I suppose it is just about possible that some of Nick’s producers were also disappointed that Liz pulled out, given that they may have a horrifically stunted view of what people consider ‘interesting’. Back in the late 1990s, when I was editor of the Today programme, we interviewed candidates for the post of producer with the first question to them being: ‘If you could choose anyone from history to interview on Today, living or dead, real or fictional, who would you choose?’ One candidate replied, with great verve: ‘Alan Milburn!’ We did not appoint that candidate, but I assume they got a job on World at One.

Other than that, surely nobody. The entire country has become stupefied with boredom at the whole interminable saga and would rather, I suspect, never hear anything from either jabbering dwarf ever again. The Conservatives have got this whole process the wrong way around. There was insufficient time for the country to find out about the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat before they were unceremoniously evicted, and far too long given over to the performative gibberish spewed out on a daily basis subsequently by Sunak and Truss.

The only hope for the party is that Sunak, in a desperate, flailing attempt to capture the hearts of the Conservative activists, starts delivering a few home truths which in other times he would be too frit to address.