Sarah Pochin’s car-crash interview

Less than a week after her ill-timed parliamentary question about a burqa ban caused Zia Yusuf’s resignation as Reform’s chairman, its newest MP Sarah Pochin has embarrassed herself and her party again with a car-crash display on the BBC’s Politics Live.

Pochin constantly interrupted and jabbed her finger at fellow panellists, leading Labour’s Sarah Owen to say that debating her was “like arguing with a teenager… You’ve literally talked over me every single time”.

Pochin’s worst moment of many came when she said that Reform could fund their wild spending plans – including up to £80billion in annual tax cuts – because “we’ve costed (that) scrapping net zero projects over the next five years will bring in £220 billion.” She was then told that the Institute for Government, which came up with the figure (actually £225 billion), says that the bulk of it is due to come from the private sector, not public funds, and therefore could not be part of government savings.

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Pochin was invited to admit that Reform’s numbers were wrong, and lapsed into a nonsensical rant. She said: “I’m not going to admit that at all – the point is that we are saying to you, ‘look at that area’. That’s an area of huge income. I can’t argue whether it’s “200 billion or not, but the point is it is a huge amount of money to come in. You can’t argue about these figures. The policy is clear.”

Pochin later suggested, inaccurately, that women wearing burqas were not allowed to speak to others in public and said that one reason for demanding a ban was that “we know that male terrorists put the burqa on as a form of disguise, although I’m not saying that happens all the time”.

They were more cringeworthy moments in a performance that would have had Pochin’s colleagues covering their own faces with their hands in embarrassment.