Why political interviews matter

She’ll never do it. She’d have to be mad. Why take the risk? That’s what everyone said when I announced at the end of my BBC1 interview with Rishi Sunak that we were still hopeful that Liz Truss would also agree to a half-hour in-depth conversation in prime time. Well, guess what? She has agreed and will come into Broadcasting House just a week before most people expect her to move into No. 10. Too late to have any impact on the result, say the cynics. That ignores the fact that 10 to 15 per cent of the Tory selectorate will not, I’m told, vote until the last minute. More importantly, it ignores the tens of millions of people who have had no say in the choice of their next prime minister.

Politicians and their advisers fear that TV interviews have become what one described to me as ‘gotcha, gotcha, gotcha; clip, clip, clip; share, share, share’. They believe that click-hungry broadcasters are more interested in creating social media videos watched by millions than grown-up conversations watched by many fewer. I think they underestimate the public. Around two million people watched my interview with Sunak live. More than three million listen to the big 8.10 interviews on the Today programme. They want to see and hear their leaders questioned, challenged and tested about the decisions which shape their lives. Credit to Truss and Sunak for agreeing to just that.

During this campaign, Conservative writers have seemed shocked to discover that their assumptions – about, say, the value of low taxes or sound money; companies making profits or unions disrupting people’s lives – are not shared by millions of voters. Particularly by the young. Is it any wonder, when for years politicians have been programmed by their minders to speak in short pre-scripted, focus-group-tested soundbites rather than to make an argument as Margaret Thatcher did when she faced Robin Day or Brian Walden? All too often interviewees sound like political jukeboxes filled with tunes which they are eager to play again and again.