'It's very clear': May disappeared into a dreamland of her own | John Crace

Dragging her heels on to the studio floor, the Supreme Leader finally got to the business end of the election. Taking questions from real people. And Jeremy Paxman. Not easy for someone who struggles to talk human. She had rehearsed at a rally in Twickenham earlier in the afternoon when she relaunched her campaign after the “dementia tax” meltdown, but it hadn’t gone well. She had just repeated the phrases “strong and stable” and “coalition of chaos” over and over again. Maybot 2.0 had sounded very much like Maybot 1.0.

“Happy birthday, Faisal,” the Supreme Leader said to Sky’s Faisal Islam who was compèring the audience debate. Backstage there was a huge cheer from her team. She had remembered her instructions on how to sound like an ordinary person. And then promptly forgot them.

Her first question came from Martin, a police officer, who wanted to know what she was doing about police cuts. “It’s very clear,” she said, before disappearing into a dreamland of her own. One where crime was changing and policing was changing and everything was changing apart from the Supreme Leader’s inability to give a direct answer.

By the time she stopped assembling words into random sentences, Martin appeared to have been rendered so comatose he couldn’t even remember what he had asked. Islam stepped in to help. Police numbers had decreased by 20,000 on her watch. The Supreme Leader’s mouth worked itself into a rictus smile. Better that than no smile at all. Just.

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the audience participation section. People asked her questions about the “dementia tax”, winter fuel payments, schools and the NHS and the Supreme Leader did her best to fill the 22 minutes with the deadest of dead air. She hadn’t changed her policy on anything because what was in the manifesto was never intended to be policy. It was just a series of vague talking points. And when sometime after the election she had decided what was best for everyone, she would let the country know.

This did not go down particularly well with some members of the audience. One man commented “total bollocks” while those who were still awake laughed out loud with existential despair. It was that or kill themselves. The Supreme Leader’s smile twisted into a silent scream. She wasn’t used to such lèse majesté.

When Jeremy Paxman had interviewed Jeremy Corbyn earlier in the evening, he had looked and behaved like a man hellbent on acting as a parody of himself. He had interrupted the Labour leader at every opportunity and turned what should have been forensic questioning into a TV turnoff. Someone had clearly had a word with him in the break and he did at least make an effort to let the Supreme Leader get a word in edgeways. Not necessarily to the viewers’ advantage as she continued to do her level best to say nothing at all.

“You’ve basically changed your mind about everything,” he concluded after listing all the U-turns the Maybot had made in the last few years. “An EU negotiator would conclude that you are a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire.” It was Paxman’s one telling intervention of the entire evening. The Supreme Leader narrowed her eyes into a death stare at the sound of more laughter. She then just went back to saying nothing at length until she could hear the studio manager call time.

“That went well,” the Supreme Leader said on the way home. By which she meant it hadn’t been the total disaster she had feared.

Corbyn was also reflecting on a decent night’s work. The audience had appreciated his warmth and empathy, they liked the sound of his policies and after days of being asked about the IRA, he had come up with an answer that sounded vaguely plausible. And being harangued by Paxman hadn’t been that bad. Other than for everyone at home. Paxman’s main complaint seemed to have been that he wasn’t giving a very good impression of being a Trot. And as that had been one of his main aims, it was job done.