You'd swear there's nothing he won't do to get attention

It's at times like this that a nation can really pull together. Times like Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, swearing in front of Kate Garraway on Good Morning Britain, as happened yesterday. Quite the shocker, that.

- SEAN O'GRADY

True, as “TV moments” go, it is not up there with outspoken theatre critic Kenneth Tynan dropping the first “F-bomb” back in 1965, when he asked aloud “what, exactly, is wrong with the word ‘fuck’?”; or Beth and Margaret’s first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on Brookside in 1994.

They were watershed events in our island story. So too was when Jenrick, banging on about David Lammy, said at 6.49am: “Well, Kate, it’s very early in the morning and your viewers are still having their breakfast, but that, I’m afraid, if you’ll excuse my language, is total bullshit.”

Kate promptly issued a sincere expression of apology to her viewers, “on your behalf to children watching because we know they watch this programme”, and scolded Jenrick: “Please don’t swear again because you'll get us all into trouble.”

Context is all, and this sort of effing and jeffing at this hour of the day is simply not on. It is not the same as, say, a late-night showing of A Clockwork Orange – which Jenrick, true to form, would likely claim is now more like a documentary about the hellscape that is Starmer’s Britain.