Sunak’s still uneasy as he swaps front bench for This Morning sofa
Atoxic working environment, the whiff of scandal, constant briefing and counter-briefing: This Morning should have been an environment where the leader of the Conservative Party felt right at home. But no, alas. The Prime Minister perched awkwardly on the ITV sofa – the combination of nerves, vain hope and enormous upholstery made him look like a child about to be adopted in a sentimental American film.
“We’ve had nearly all the prime ministers on this sofa,” declared Alison Hammond.
I must have missed the time Lord Liverpool was skewered during a phone-in about the Peterloo massacre but can just about remember Andrew Bonar Law helping Gino make a carbonara in the kitchen.
In Phil and Holly’s absence, Hammond and her co-presenter Craig Doyle had a bit of a “good cop, bad cop” thing going on.
Doyle brought up exact figures, migration targets: the Prime Minister bobbed up and down on the big cushion as he answered technically and boringly, while refusing to be drawn on specifics.
I suspect all this chimed with the sound of a million boiling kettles in the student bedsits and retirement homes of Britain.
More amusing was Alison Hammond’s counterfactual, where Suella Braverman did go on that speed awareness course and was hailed as a popular hero as a result.
“She’d be one of the people,” insisted Hammond, just like that scene in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean crosses the barricade into a citizen’s advice bureau and valiantly sits through a safer driving course.
The Prime Minister also had a go at playing the everyman. He confessed himself bad at DIY, and generously referred to This Morning’s daytime audience as “taxpayers”.
He smiled paternally through a row of flashing white teeth.
The old Blairite vocal tics were back too; every sentence began with “Look” and ended with a quizzical “Right?”
It was as if a mortgage advisor had broken into someone’s house and was now making them engage in small talk.
Next, a prerecorded video of an interrogative child was played at Mr Sunak, a further part of the This Morning’s hazing ritual.
At the end, the Prime Minister nodded awkwardly and then reminded us that, despite this, he was actually acquainted with children more generally because he had daughters himself.
The child inquisitor was a This Morning bridging device (essential in a programme which intended to span everything from an interview with a G7 leader to the best bio-lavatories to use while camping, in the course of the episode). Hammond and Sunak found common ground in talking about the Prime Minister’s unexpected love of Jilly Cooper novels (“the sexy bits”, proffered Hammond).
The Prime Minister excitedly rattled off some of his favourite titles: Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, Appassionata, all of those.”
In the event, the Prime Minister’s comfortably boring descent into the inanity of daytime TV didn’t shed much light on record migration, nor the Government’s alleged efforts to curb it.
Still, at least in Mr Sunak we now have a Prime Minister who only reads Jilly Cooper, as opposed to those who viewed her chronicles of sex-crazed narcissists as an instruction manual.