David Warburton surprised nobody in Westminster by standing down on Saturday, fourteen months after losing the Tory whip. For more than a year it’s been clear that a by-election was looming in Somerton and Frome. Yet you wouldn’t know it judging from the quality of the local Lib Dem candidate there, Sarah Dyke. She has given a car crash interview to the Guardian politics podcast – hardly the most challenging of outlets. Asked by the amiable John Harris about deprivation in the area she replied that she had drunk her coffee a bit too fast, before asking:
What do you want to know? Something that’s a subject I don’t know anything about … I mean there’s pockets of deprivation. I mean, what can we say on that really? … I don’t feel that I’m prepared at all for this, Ami [the Lib Dem press officer]. And it’s all getting a little bit above my station, sorry.
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