In what is clearly good news for her campaign but could be bad news for the country, Liz Truss apparently thrives on confrontation.
Twice last night’s Tory hustings were interrupted by protesters in the hall - and twice the Foreign Secretary was the hecklers’ target.
But if the interventions were aimed at throwing the leadership hopeful off her stiletto-heeled stride then they flopped.
Instead, backed by adoring party activists shouting: “Out! Out! Out!” as security guards bundled activists from environmental group Green New Deal Rising out of the Eastbourne auditorium, she milked the outbursts for all their worth.
Branding the demonstrators "infiltrators", Truss vowed to crack down on "militant trade unions" and "unfair protests".
"Can I just say a few words on the militant people who try and disrupt our country and who try and disrupt our democratic process and try and disrupt our essential services?” she said.
“I will make sure that militant activists such as Extinction Rebellion are not able to disrupt ordinary people who work hard and do the right thing and go into work.
"I will never ever, ever allow our democracy to be disrupted by unfair protests."
Leaving aside her understandable misidentification of which environmental group had heckled her, it’s fair to say the interventions only helped Truss, allowing her to tickle the tummies of the Tory base which, as last night’s hustings confirmed, remains enthralled by the Foreign Secretary seemingly destined for No10.
She warmed to her theme - right up until a Conservative member asked how she would balance the right-wing principles of protecting freedom of speech and the right to protest with her clampdown on, um, protests.
The unspoken answer? Cakeism, obviously.
Truss is also developing a worrying habit of peppering her stump speeches and responses to questions with the word “incredibly”: things are “incredibly important”; she takes issues “incredibly seriously”; situations are “incredibly important”.
For someone whose tax cut pledges stretch the bounds of credibility, she should probably try and eradicate the adverb from her campaign lexicon.
One almost felt sorry for her rival Rishi Sunak because no-one heckled him, denying him the chance to burnish his anti/pro-protest credentials.
By the end of the 105-minute Friday night sojourn in the Winter Gardens, he was talking about cryptocurrencies and blockchains, whatever they may be.
Should Sunak’s Downing Street tilt fail, with a vocabulary like that he would slip seamlessly back into Californian life.
