Is that Tony Blair — or a scared rabbit?

Who will take the place of David Dimbleby in the Question Time chair? There can be few more gruelling roles. It is one of those swanky British posts, like chairman of the Booker Prize, that offers prestige in exchange for tedium.

While the rest of us have learned to edge away when we realise that bitter arguments about immigration, education and Brexit are about to break out, the chairman of Question Time is contractually obliged to stay put to the bitter end.

harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse once brilliantly satirised the show’s non-stop deluge of opinionated gibberish.

‘Firstly,’ said the first member of the audience, ‘if the bankers the bonuses the bankers the bonuses it’s disgusting and secondly if the Tories are really serious about it they’d tax the bankers the bonuses to 90 per cent. And if all the Eton Tories who went to harrow had gone to comprehensives then perhaps we’d still have the grammar schools actually.’

The politicians on Question Time may be a touch more succinct, but their diaries reveal how hamstrung they are by having to toe their party line.

‘I am on a hiding to nothing...’ wrote Alan Clark MP in his diary on November 18, 1986, facing the prospect of Question Time later that week. ‘Whatever I do they’ll get me. If I am grave and responsible they’ll say, “hasn’t he gone off?” If I’m jaunty and reckless, it’ll be, “There he goes again, another gaffe.”’

Even the most accomplished performers admit spending hours in nervous preparation.

In the run-up to the 1997 general election, Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary about setting off in a car with Tony Blair for Question Time. ‘I was playing interviewer. I said, “If you lose will you resign?” he did his rabbit look. “F***, what’s the answer to that?”’

Nor did the veteran Left-winger Tony Benn leave anything to chance. In 1993, he spent an entire afternoon identifying 28 likely questions, but in the end only four of them came up.

Though he was always mustard-keen on appearing a man of the people, Benn secretly shared the Enfield/Whitehouse view of the Question Time audience: ‘No structure to their thinking at all.’ Nevertheless, like most of those appearing on the programme, he was always overeager for their approval. Appearing on the show in 1991, he objected to the then chairman Peter Sissons introducing him with John Mortimer’s description as ‘a mad Marxist werewolf’. ‘I interrupted him. I said, “Look, that introduction was most offensive. You could have said I was 41 years in Parliament, 11 years in the Cabinet, Chairman of the Labour Party. You just dredged out all the old abuse.”’ At the end of this little speech, he recalled: ‘There was a tremendous round of applause.’ Clark was similarly besotted by audience approval. on an episode from Maidstone in 1999, David Dimbleby asked him: ‘Do you consider yourself a political role model?’ ‘“That’s for others to judge,” I said — and the entire audience clapped delightedly! I was buoyed up by my triumph!” ’ The only political diarist ever to have described his appearance on Question Time as a disaster was Chris Mullin, the fatally self-effacing Labour MP. ‘To Torquay to appear on Question Time,’ he began his entry for June 13, 2002. ‘The audience was mostly hostile. I was isolated, inept and failed to land a single punch. Nothing I said attracted more than the merest ripple of applause.’ Torquay was, he concluded: ‘A long way to go to be murdered in front of several million people.’

SO WHY do they do it? Why do they continue to put themselves through this fruitless torture? It’s certainly not for the money. In April 1993, Gyles Brandreth, the then Conservative MP for Chester, confided to his diary that he was ‘ridiculously nervous’ before Question Time.

Afterwards, he was asked to sign a piece of paper accepting a fee of £50.

‘I said, “It’s monstrous, you get four guests on the show for a total of £200. This is BBC1 prime time. We should be paid properly. What’s Mr Dimbleby on — a thousand, two thousand? Look, I’ll do it for a quarter of whatever he’s getting.”’

For the rest of us, I doubt any figure would ever be quite enough.