Question Time tonight features a virtual audience drawn from Dover, home town of Clash drummer Topper Headon. But who should stay – and who should go? Here’s your guide to the panel…
Matt Hancock
Who? Health secretary
The increasingly less boy-faced health secretary ran for the Conservative leadership approximately 100 years ago – 2019 – with a vow to stop any suspension of Parliament (it “goes against everything those men who waded onto those beaches fought and died for”). Then lost, sold his soul to the Cummings/Johnson project and backed said suspension whole-heartedly. Having boasted he was well-prepared for a no-deal Brexit having become the world’s largest buyer of fridges, in March he found himself in charge of handling Britain’s response to a deadly global pandemic and has since looked like a haunted spoon.
David Lammy
Who? Shadow justice secretary
One of the 35 Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership in 2015 despite not wanting him to win, he went to atone by being one of the most vocal anti-Brexit voices on the backbenches. Yesterday tweeted out the BBC’s official pictures of who’s on tonight’s panel with the message “Is @MattHancock seriously giving me a death stare before @bbcquestiontime tomorrow?”, leading one person to weirdly respond: “My daughter in a full contact taekwondo competition quickly disposed of three opponents.” Said this week that Labour was “comparing notes” with the US Democratic Party after its electoral success.
Robin Shattock
Who? Professor of mucosal infection and immunity at Imperial College London
The scientist who led the British initiative to develop a vaccine for the disease at Imperial and who estimated in February that the vaccine for the disease would be available by early 2021, Shattock is this week’s Token Person Who Might Actually Know What They’re Talking About. A Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, he said this week that the UK needed “a toolbox as full as possible” of different vaccines and added that several may come on stream shortly. Which is all well and good – but what does he think about Lee, Dom, Carrie and Allegra?
Rosie Jones
Who? Comedian
Yorkshire-born comedian with cerebral palsy which allows her to use the opening line “As you can tell from my voice, I suffer from being northern”. A panel show regular – although usually alongside the likes of Tom Allen and Rob Beckett, not Professor Robin Shattock – she tweeted earlier this month: “I sometimes wish I had a name which carried weight and gravitas. You’re never going to go to a ‘Rosie’ for financial advice. Rosies are good for making traybakes and licking trees.” Created a minor controversy last year for a joke on The Last Leg about Greta Thunberg which is very much not for here, so Google it if you’re interested.
Merryn Somerset Webb
Who? Editor-in-chief of personal finance magazine MoneyWeek
A hardline Brexiteer who has said for no-deal to be a disaster “there would have to be extraordinary levels of incompetence”. Hmmm. An acolyte of the Leave movement’s ‘intellectual guru’ Daniel Hannan, Somerset Webb claims that she was turned into a Brexiteer after interviewing Nick Clegg in 2015. Has called for Nigel Farage to be elevated to the peerage, saying he is “obviously committed to his country” and “it would make sense that his views be represented in the House of Lords”. Tonight’s shoo-in for a fawning Express Online article on how she SHUT DOWN REMOANERS IN THE MOST EPIC WAY.
Question Time is on BBC One at 10.45pm tonight (12.05am (!) in Northern Ireland)