Steerpike

Ah the regional BBC round: the chance for any aspiring local reporter to make a name for themselves. Every year, in the run-up to Tory conference, the party leader must subject themselves to this ritual piñata, in which they face a barrage of quick-fire questions from journalists across the country. Last year it was Liz Truss's turn to face eight such grillings in under an hour, in which she was asked if she was 'ashamed' of her mini-Budget and accused of being a 'reverse Robin Hood'. This time Rishi Sunak didn't endure such a battering, though the PM would no doubt squirm if he listened back to his cross-examination on the future of high-speed rail. Appearing on BBC Manchester, Sunak repeatedly refused to answer questions on whether he will scrap the HS2 line to, er, Manchester.

The GB News row rumbles on, with its enemies seeing the perfect chance to call for its closure. A genuinely indefensible blunder from two of the channel's regulars, Laurence Fox and Dan Wootton, has seen both suspended. But questions are now being asked about the overall culture – and even whether it should be banned entirely. Adam Boulton, former political editor of Sky News, was on Newsnight last night saying that it’s time for GB News to be taken off air, even going so far as to compare the station to Russian state media: I have to say I think the complaints have piled up against GB News. I think there is a delicate and important broadcast ecology in this country.

The Lib Dem conference is still in full swing in Bournemouth and the party's long-suffering activists seem to have something of a spring in their step. After a triumphant local elections and a quartet of by-election victories, the party looks set to double their parliamentary contingent, come next year's contest. Lib Dem aspirations in the Blue Wall were demonstrated by leader Ed Davey's visit to a Winchester farm this morning to pose with various sheep in front of the assembled snappers. Talk about Have I Got Ewe for News... But not all has gone Davey's way. A big battle was waged over a motion to scrap the party's plan to scrap their existing housing target to try and attract new voters in the true-blue Tory shires.

What is Liz Truss's legacy? It's a question that will no doubt entertain future historians. But one thing they will never be able to take away from her is a place in the annals of Lib Dem history. As a former card-carrying member, Truss earned an entry in the party's infamous 'Glee Club' songbook – a collection of tunes sung on the last night of the Lib Dem annual conference. Her 1994 call to abolish the monarchy was subsequently immortalised in a song called 'The week we went to Brighton'.

It’s the first day of conference season and the Liberal Democrats are keen to make the most of it. This year their slogan is ‘For a fair deal’. But is renegotiating the Brexit deal really what they’re all about? Ahead of this weekend’s conference Sir Ed Davey was keen to put such talk to bed, claiming that rejoining the EU was ‘off the table’ and that his party wanted to instead focus on issues of greater concern to the public. Not all of his front bench seem to have got the message though. Speaking on the first day of the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Layla Moran told a fringe event: ‘We want to rejoin. We want, as part of it, to get back into the single market.

Just when we thought we had seen the last of John Bercow on our screens, the news has broken that the former speaker of the House of Commons is joining the line up of the US version of the hit game show The Traitors.  Currently being filmed in Scotland, the show will see Bercow join the likes of Love Island’s Ekin-Su and a whole host of other reality TV stars to be divvied up into ‘traitors’ and ‘faithfuls’. The traitors will have to kill off the faithfuls one by one to get to the hefty £205,000 cash prize, while the faithfuls do their best to root out the traitors at a nightly interrogation. Mr Steerpike is certain some of Bercow’s former colleagues in Westminster may have ideas about which team they’d like to see him on.

Big news from the media world. Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as Chairman of Fox and News Corp as of November, with his son Lachlan succeeding him as sole chair of both. Murdoch will assume the title of Chairman Emeritus of each company, after seven decades in the print and broadcast industries. The Sun king, aged 92, wrote in a note to employees that: Our companies are in robust health, as am I. We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years – I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them. But the battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense.

So there we have it. Rishi Sunak's big announcement this afternoon was, er, a not entirely unreasonable five-year delay in the ban on petrol cars and gas boilers. Snap polling suggests it has gone down well with the public, who back the measure by 50 to 34 per cent. But judging from some of the more extreme reactions on Twitter/X, you would think the Prime Minister's decision to bring the UK into line with the EU on a 2035 ban for internal combustion engines amounted to a massacre of the firstborn. Below are five of the more excitable responses to Sunak's announcement today... 'Totally evil' For calm and reasoned moderation, we can always depend on that bastion of common sense, Jolyon Maugham KC. His reaction to the PM's shift in policy?