“If you’re still watching this, well done,” Penny Mordaunt told us in her closing statement of ITV’s leadership debate last night, in the tone of an impressed instructor on one of those hostile environment training courses for journalists. You’ve dealt well with the toenail-removal round. The whole event was, as Channel 4’s Friday outing portended, excruciating.
It feels absolutely bizarre, doesn’t it? This strange 40C fever dream we’re all having where we get a say in who will next run the country. Imagine! “I wish this debate had been a little more about all of you,” Mordaunt followed up, staring straight down the camera yesterday evening. To which the only response for those of us not in the 0.2% who get a vote in the Conservative leadership election was: “Who? Me?”.
