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 per cent), and I didn’t think I’d ever face a more hostile audience than that. I was wrong.
The first question was about the eurozone crisis and I gave what I thought was an even-handed reply in which I praised Gordon Brown and Ed Balls for keeping us out of the euro, but also complimented George Osborne for putting in place a fiscal consolidation strategy that, so far, has stopped us being engulfed by the sovereign debt storm. I pointed out that if Labour had been re-elected it’s unlikely Britain would have retained its AAA credit rating and that, in turn, would have pushed up the cost of government borrowing to unmanageable levels.
I might as well have praised Osama bin Laden. Actually, this audience was so anti-establishment that that would have been greeted with polite applause. As it was, I was almost booed off the stage.
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