Things Can Only Get 24

The longest 45 minutes of my life was in 2015, interviewing a UKIP candidate to be MP for North Somerset, in front of an audience. Her very existence meant we could not have a panel interview as Dr Liam Fox would not sit on a panel with her. So we agreed that, on two successive Sunday afternoons, I would put questions, submitted by the audience, to each of the four candidates in turn.

Mrs UKIP was third of four. She owned up to me before the event, that she knew nothing. She wasn’t far wrong. There were no audience questions apart from one which was a set-up for her only rehearsed answer. Question after question I invented about local issues and national issues were greeted with platitudes or silence. By the end, her front-row fan-club desperately whispering answers to her, we had established that she thought our payments to the EU could be better used and she had told me how her party would use them several times over.

I have been asked to be a ‘paper candidate’ myself, once, for the SDP in Nottingham Council elections mid 1980s. I knew enough to say no. But soon it looks like Reform will be getting between 4 and 6 million votes for candidates who have no clue about anything. And you can’t get a political brain overnight.

I still have nightmares about that 45 minutes in Nailsea Methodist Church. The interview that followed with Dr Smooth was a joy by comparison. It wasn’t my job to probe but to read out audience questions and refer the answer to them. Afterwards he was kind enough to tell me I wasn’t as difficult as Jeremy Paxman. It took three months to get the picture of me shaking hands with him off his web-site. He’s now Sir Liam for services to, presumably, being sacked a lot. Hope he loses, but not to Reform. If we had transferable votes he wouldn’t be last.