Well, that was…interesting. The BBC’s flagship political interview show, hosted first by Sir David Frost then by Andrew Marr, relaunched this morning under Laura Kuenssberg. On paper, she had it all sorted: she secured an interview with leadership frontrunner Liz Truss after she had pulled out of one with Nick Robinson just days before. It was a decent interview, as you’d expect from a former BBC political editor. It felt like the first interview of her premiership.
But it ended to the whooping of applause from a comedian, Joe Lycett, a member of the show’s three-person panel, who seemed to regard his own inclusion as a joke. ‘Really excited to be on this new version of Would I Lie To You,’ he had tweeted earlier – a signal of his plan to hijack the format, and send it up. He lost no time in doing so.
“Well done, Liz!” he shouted out as the Foreign Secretary left the chair. He proclaimed himself ‘very right wing,’ a joke that won’t be lost on his fans. Warming to his newly-invented persona, he declared Truss to be ‘saying exactly the right things’ and being ‘very reassuring’ with her energy promises. By then, Kuenssberg had worked out what was going on: Lycett had come to torpedo her show. ‘This is a serious point, Joe,’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m not being sarcastic,’ he replied, with a smile that said otherwise. ‘You’re reassured. I’m reassured.’ He then laid it on thick:
‘The haters will say that we’ve had 12 years of the Tories and we’re at the dregs of what they’ve got available. And that Liz Truss is the backwash of the available MPs.
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