The hop by plane from Dublin to Liverpool is so swift that one barely has a moment to peruse the duty-free catalogue, but last week it was long enough to fear that the entire political landscape might have altered by the time one hit passport control. But Wednesday was a good evening, I discovered, to be arriving in a city that, if it has no time for the Tory party, has even less for Boris Johnson.
I was there to interview the writer and raconteur Fran Lebowitz on stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic. Did the quintessential New Yorker have any advice for persuading a politician keen to hold on to office that the writing was very much on the gold-wallpapered wall? She issued a firm caveat that UK politics was not her forte, but counselled caution in believing it was all over too precipitately.
