A Disdain For The Truth... Remind You Of Anyone?

As Coleen Rooney might put it, the big revelation from the Sky News prime ministerial double-header was that the winner was... Rishi Sunak.

- Sean O'grady

Presenter Kay Burley declared, betraying nothing more or less than the media conventional wisdom, “I wasn’t expecting that”. Perhaps, on the day the Bank of England forecast a year-long recession and 13 per cent inflation, the Tory membership is starting to realise they probably need someone leading them who has a passing acquaintance with economic sense? I wonder.

Typically in this contest – and indeed in broken, backlog Britain more widely – the technology didn’t work, and instead of fancy digital voting, Burley had to ask for a show of hands at the end. Surprise! It was a bit of a Sunak landslide. Wisely, given the public taste for conspiracy theories, Burley asked the gallery to gather as many different camera angles of the vote as possible, as if the Sky vote would become as important and disputed a historical artefact as the Zapruder footage. Ironically, if the Sky technology had worked no one would have believed it, and claimed interference by Pyongyang.