Interviewer sat before interviewee like a cuckoo sharing a wren’s nest
LIFE at the top of politics was ‘tough’, Rishi Sunak and his interviewer kept agreeing. There were some horribly personal attacks. The pressure was ceaseless. Mr Sunak had only managed one week of family holiday in more than four years.
‘Tough, tough, tough,’ we kept being told. But the toughest thing of all? Though not stated explicitly, this was obvious. It was having to put up with Piers!
Sir Piers Morgan OMG, the great agitator for lockdown, had descended on 10 Downing Street for his annual tour of inspection.
He likes to keep the place under his purlieu and regularly ensure everything is to his satisfaction. ‘I’ve interviewed a lot of prime ministers in the last 25 years,’ vouchsafed the Talk TV maestro, casting a proprietorial eyebrow at the minimalist décor.
This consisted of white-upholstered seats, a bowl of Yorkshire roses on the coffee table and otherwise little clutter.
In Gordon Brown’s day that would have been because all the knick-knacks had been hurled at the wall. When Boris was in residence, you could barely move for discarded pizza boxes and chewed ballpoint pens. After Liz Truss’s departure, it must have felt like a Romanov mausoleum.
Now the private quarters at No10 are inoffensive, designed, durable enough for any spillages to be mopped up with a J-cloth and a squirt of Vanish. Just like Rishi himself.
If Piers addressed the PM with easy superiority this was marbled by an ounce or two of compassion. In Imperial Japan, Hideki Tojo may have adopted the same tone when making morale-boosting trips to kamikaze squadrons in the early days of 1945.
At the end of the almost hourlong interview there was some jesting about how they both looked forward to seeing each other in a year’s time in the same place. How they laughed! Cut to images of Zeros smashing into American warships.
The news highlight of this interview was probably Mr Sunak’s admission that he had failed in his pledge to cut NHS waiting lists. It would have been pointless to argue otherwise. ‘ Not good enough,’ conceded the PM. ‘We have not made progress on cutting waiting lists.’
His excuse was the strikes. In November, when there had been no strikes, waiting lists fell by almost 100,000, he argued.
Piers, after recounting a horror story of his mother being left in a hospital corridor after a heart attack, demanded free parking for all NHS staff.
WHY, he demanded with exasperation, was that not possible? Are all workers in other occupations (for instance, television production) given free parking?
Talk turned to Israel and its response to the October 7 terror attacks. ‘ Are you in a moral quandary, as I have been?’ asked Bishop Morgan.
Interviewer sat in front of interviewee like a cuckoo sharing a
nest with a wren. Morgan is a big lad, Mr Sunak less so. Piers leaned back with all the confidence that his important office in life has given him, quite the expansive homme du monde.
Mr Sunak clutched one of his kneecaps and adopted a beseeching, eager air.
Mind you, from time to time the camera caught him doing sideways eyes during his visitor’s sallies. These seemed to say ‘Piers is off on one again’.
One such unlikely suggestion from Morgan, on the face of it, was for every MP to be given a bodyguard, to protect them from crazies. Mr Sunak did not dismiss the suggestion out of hand.
‘There may well be an argument for that.’ Yet Rishi had faith in the charity and decency of the British public. ‘I think people are completely fair-minded,’ he averred, when he considered how his economic record would be judged.
Alongside the interview, in a rolling chat box, Talk TV viewers were giving their reactions.
Remarks ranged from ‘genocide Sunak’ to ‘eurgh’.
Equally, one viewer said ‘Rishi is the paprika in my korma’ and another ‘ I would rather have Sunak than Rodney Starmer’.
Rodney? It’s Sir Kei r ’ s second name.