Angry Amber v Dozy Diane: conscious meets unconscious on Marr | John Crace

Andrew Marr really, really didn’t want to politicise the Manchester terror attack. It was much too soon, feelings were still raw and families were grieving - or so he said. But, having both the home secretary and the shadow home secretary on his Sunday morning show, the topic was bound to come up.

First on was a rather sleepy looking Diane Abbott. Either she had had a very late night or she had accidentally swallowed a handful of horse tranquilisers as she could barely keep her eyes open. “People don’t seem to trust you to keep the country safe,” Marr observed, before prodding her to make sure she was actually awake. “Can you tell me why you think you would be a good home secretary?”

Dozy Diane struggled to engage her brain. She knew her synapses were somewhere close to hand; she just couldn’t get them to connect. Then it came to her. She had done some graduate work experience in the Home Office the best part of 40 years ago. Knowing where the toilets and the photocopiers were situated could save her valuable minutes on her first day in the department as home secretary.

This didn’t seem to have been the answer Marr was expecting, so he asked the question again. Her eyelids flickered briefly, suggesting signs of life. If not intelligent life. “I’ve also had over 30 years’ experience as a constituency MP,” Dozy Diane replied eventually. The best experience anyone could possibly need for being home secretary was to have no experience whatsoever.

Deciding he had no option other than to work with what he had, Marr then chose to probe Dozy Diane on her record as a constituency MP. “You once voted against al-Qaida being listed as a proscribed organisation,” he pointed out. That was because it was listed with 30 other organisations, some of which were only dissident groups. Marr then read out the list of groups, all of which had the word jihad in their names. Which ones were the dissidents? Easy. Some of the ones with jihad.

If this had been an audition for Home Secretary: The Apprentice, Marr would have called out “you’re fired” long ago. Instead he asked if she regretted her support for the IRA in the 1980s.

“I had a different hairstyle back then,” Dozy Diane replied, “I had an afro. But since then I’ve moved on. I’ve changed my views.”

It had been her hair that had made her support the IRA. She had always been against the IRA but her hair had forced her. Just like Hitler’s side-parting had made him invade Poland in 1939. If only Hitler had allowed himself to grow his rug out a bit and shaved the moustache, the whole history of the 20th century could have been different.

Amber Rudd only had to prove she was conscious to sound marginally more plausible and competent than Dozy Diane, and the home secretary was determined to take no chances of nodding off by perching on the very edge of her chair and keeping her back ramrod straight. Even then she didn’t get off to the best of starts, by suggesting that on her watch Britain had been prepared for the Manchester attack. The evidence suggests otherwise.

After that, Rudd tried to say as little as possible while sounding angry that Marr was trying to tease details about the various attempts to report the bomber to the authorities that had been published in every newspaper some days earlier. “I’m not going to be drawn on the operational details,” she said, snappily.

Marr tried again. Was Salman Abedi on an MI5 watch list? A look of panic crossed Angry Amber’s brow. Who was this Salman bloke? The name was vaguely familiar, but she just couldn’t place him. Nearly a week after the Manchester attack the home secretary was giving a brilliant impression of being entirely clueless about the bomber’s terrorist status. “The intelligence services are intelligence-led,” she said, thereby effectively dismissing herself as their boss.

Realising that her conscious was getting her into almost as much trouble as Dozy Diane’s unconscious, Angry Amber went full-out on the attack. The one thing that people had to remember was that however many people got killed by terrorist attacks under the Tories, hundreds more would die under a Labour government. However unsafe Britain was under the Tories, it would be even more unsafe under Labour. Vote Labour and prepare to die.

It was left to Happy Mondays singer Rowetta and the Manchester Camerata to end the show with the grace, dignity and delicacy of touch that the occasion demanded. Most people watching would have eyed up Dozy Diane and Angry Amber and concluded they didn’t particularly want either as home secretary.