Half the battle in launching a new Sunday politics TV show is booking the right guests. You don’t want your opening programme to be interviews with Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood. So the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg pretty much nailed it by getting Liz Truss as the star attraction.
There was a small downside, mind. We are all obliged to pretend that Truss isn’t a certainty to become the new leader of the Tory party on Monday, so she is still umbilically linked with Rishi Sunak. Which meant that the show also had to find time for Ready for Rish! despite him being last week’s story.
Still, it was probably a trade off worth taking. In any case, come the end it would be the comedian Joe Lycett, one of a panel of three random commentators along with Cleo Watson, Boris Johnson’s former deputy chief of staff, and Emily Thornberry, who would be giving Kuenssberg sleepless nights.
The credits opened with Kuenssberg standing in front of what looked like a half-finished cartoon of Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and the Angel of the North, while promising this show was going to be different from all the others. It was going to be about conversation rather than confrontation. Er … some hope. This was a politics show after all. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. You can change the graphics and you can change the studio, but you still can’t make a politician answer a straight question.
Kuenssberg then joined the panel. What qualities did Truss and Sunak have, she asked. Watson declared that Sunak had a sweet tooth – a bit random, but OK – and that Truss had had a number of cabinet posts. Hardly insight. Thornberry shrugged and said Radon Liz was thick skinned. Lycett merely said that he had come to hear the truth. Which suggested he had come to the wrong place.
We then moved to two Ikea chairs and an Ikea table which formed the set for the main interview. “Can you believe that you’re going to be prime minister?” Kuenssberg asked Truss. A decent first question because it’s one that most people are asking themselves. The more we all get to see of her, the less competent she appears to be. Weirdly affectless, robotically monotone and scarcely even able to talk in joined-up sentences.
The cost of living crisis wasn’t a crisis, Radon Liz insisted. It was just a very serious thing. One that the UK was actually very well placed to deal with. I’d hate to think of the state we’d be in if Britain wasn’t so prepared. Listening to Truss you’d almost imagine spiralling energy bills were all part of the plan. And even though she had once said she wouldn’t be offering handouts, she would now be doing so after all within a week but couldn’t say what or how much. Partly because it would be wrong. But mainly because she didn’t know.
That was pretty much Truss’s highpoint of coherence. She went on to insist that cutting taxes was important because it was necessary to reward the most well-off in society; that it would be wrong for her to worry about inflation as that was the Bank of England’s problem; that she was waiting for the health secretary, whom she hadn’t yet appointed, to tell her what to do about the NHS. She even managed to imply that fracking would sort out the UK’s energy supplies this winter. She is an enigma of her own making. Either she’s a secret genius who is going to astonish us. Or she really isn’t that bright.
As the interview came to a close, you could hear applause coming from the panel. Though it soon became clear that all the clapping was coming from just one source. “I loved it,” enthused Lycett. “I feel thoroughly reassured.” “Really?” asked Kuenssberg. Of all the potential disasters she had feared, sarcasm clearly hadn’t been one of them.
Lycett just kept going. “She’s going to sort everything out!” he declared. By now Laura had realised that Lycett had gone rogue and was making a mental note to herself to tell the bookers not to get another comedian. Perhaps she should have settled for a house band instead. She moved on to a lightning newspaper review – every Sunday politics show has to have one of these – but Lycett still wasn’t done.
If he was a leftwing comedian, he said, he might conclude that Truss was just the backwash we’d been left with after 12 years of Tory governments. But he wasn’t leftwing! He was incredibly rightwing! And wasn’t it brilliant of Liz to ignore the predictions of all the economists who said the UK was heading for the worst economic crisis in decades.
“Er, yes,” said Kuenssberg, remembering she was supposed to be having a conversation. Could we talk about the Artemis space launch? Or the Foo Fighters benefit gig for Taylor Hawkins? Um, we could have done if anyone had shown the slightest interest in either subject. But everyone just shrugged. Space and drumming were all right they supposed. If you liked that sort of thing.
The rest of the show passed less eventfully with a moving interview with Olena Zelenska in Kyiv and then a polite if inconsequential eight-minute exchange with Sunak. Truss had got a full 20 minutes. It was as though Kuenssberg and Sunak both knew they were filling time. That there was no point discussing his plans as they were never going to happen. Though even an abject, beaten Rish! somehow seems more plausible than Truss. The Tory party members have played a sick joke on the rest of us.
“Please do come back on the show,” Kuenssberg said to Sunak. Though not any time too soon. She reluctantly turned to the panel for their verdict. “You might as well have got Peter Andre,” said Lycett. Turning the screw to the last. Harsh but fair.
