Labour MP Dawn Butler on PM yesterday, being asked how Labour will make Britain "fairer". Oh dear.

I'll freely admit that, until yesterday...

...the former Minster for Yoof under Gordon Brown hadn't actually impinged on my consciousness - but I'll be looking out for her from now on, because she's even more spectacularly clueless than Richard Burgon, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor (!!!!!!!!!). I thought that Burgon's car-crash interview with Channel 4's Cathy Newman in 2015, when he had recently been appointed as Shadow City Minister, was the worst I'd ever seen - but, for sheer ineptness, Ms. Butler's performance certainly comes close.

If you listen to the whole interview, it's obvious that, at one point, Eddie Mair is about to go totally ballistic - but then he moderates his tone and ends up addressing the woman as if she were a confused infant who has been found wandering alone in a supermarket, and he's trying to find out how she came to be there. Perhaps he suddenly realised he was interviewing someone who was either (a) a few sandwiches short of a full picnic, or (b) a cleaning lady who'd been ushered into the BBC studio by mistake. Or the programme editor had spoken sharply in his earpiece. Or maybe Mair could see the resulting "BBC interviewer accused of racism, sexism, and anti-Labour bias after car-crash interview" headlines unless he somehow managed to control his temper. 

In normal times, if a spokesperson fielded by a major political party had performed this badly, they'd have been banned from making any further media appearances before polling day. But Dawn popped up later on BBC2, as part of the Labour Party's nightly Progressive Alliance PPB, otherwise known as Newsnight. It doesn't actually seem possible, but Labour presumably just doesn't have anyone better to put up. The mind boggles.