The fact that the request came in late on a Thursday afternoon should have aroused my suspicions. ‘Are you available?’ she asked.
This was a BBC producer asking me if I was free to appear on Any Questions the following day. I quickly ran through my commitments: pick up Caroline’s dry-cleaning, fix the lavatory seat in the upstairs loo, take Ludo to the doctor.
‘Of course I’m available,’ I said.
It wasn’t until I was introduced by Jonathan Dimbleby that I realised why they’d called me so late. ‘Toby Young has heroically stepped into the breach after Kelvin Mackenzie dropped out,’ he said.
It didn’t take long to realise why Kelvin had done a reverse ferret. The programme was being broadcast from Caroline Lucas’s constituency in Brighton. The last time I did Any Questions was in Liverpool, the city with the most workless households in the UK (31.9
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