Ex-Newsnight presenter compared Liz Truss interviewers to Alan Partridge and it backfired

Liz Truss faced a series of interviews on regional BBC Radio shows on Thursday 29 September as she spoke to the media for the first time since the mini-budget was unveiled last week.

Things really didn’t go well for Truss, with the PM facing a series of challenging lines of questioning on the economic turmoil sparked by the announcement last week.

Not everyone saw the car crash interviews coming though.

Former Newsnight presenter Paul Mason criticised the people overseeing the round of interviews, and compared the local radio presenters to Alan Partridge.

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“It's OPERATION ROLLING PARTRIDGE!!! Liz Truss is going to hit BBC •local radio• stations this morning where a bunch of sleep-deprived non-expert presenters will throw her soft questions, while she dodges the heavy hitters,” Mason wrote.

He was met with criticism before the interviews took place, with social media users replying to his post on Twitter.

One wrote at the time: “Oh Paul this is really patronising. Some great journalists in BBC local radio who are quite capable of being as alert as you at 8am. The problem is the brevity of the slots, not the broadcasters. Do me a favour and talk to some and ask them about their rate per show, too.”

Journalist Jennifer Williams added: “Ooft. This tweet says more about you than it does local radio.”

And it turned out, Truss faced a series of challenging lines of questioning in a series of car crash interviews which proved you don’t need to be a journalist on the biggest platform to hold the PM to account.

The result was a series of incredibly awkward moments, which saw her confronted on the fallout from the disastrous mini-budget on Friday.

It comes after she was accused by former Bank of England governor Sir Mark Carney of “undercutting economic institutions” and “working at some cross-purposes” with the bank, after it was forced to make an emergency intervention in the gilt market to prevent a crisis in the UK’s major pension funds.

The International Monetary Fund hit out at Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts for the rich, warning that “large and untargeted fiscal packages” would “likely increase inequality” in Britain.

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