One of the staples of my TV watching as a young child was the Mr Benn series. Based on books by the late David McKee, the titular character starts each episode by wandering into a costume shop where a mysterious shop keeper suggests an outfit and ushers him into a back room to change. Mr Benn then proceeds to have an adventure fitting to the costume and, once safely back in the shop, will keep a small momento as a reminder.

I seem to recall that it fuelled lots of dressing up games although, as a boy with an active imagination, I didn’t need much encouragement to do that. I wonder if another “Mr B”, the soon to be former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, used to watch it? He certainly seems to have done a lot of dressing up while fulfilling a role where you might traditionally have expected collar and tie to be the thing. We seen him having adventures as a policeman, a tank driver, a jet air craft pilot and many, many more. I think it lacks gravitas and is one of several reasons I’ve struggled to take him very seriously in his actual job (apart from serious harms I think his light acquaintance with facts and rules have done).

If Liz Truss does become the new Prime Minister, she has a background which suggests a similar predilection for ‘putting on appearances’. Richie Sunak, as far as I know, is less about the dressing up, one of several reasons why, for what little it is worth, I think he is the least bad choice of the pair of them. Whichever one wins though, I hope they knuckle down and take their job seriously. We need public servants in public office who look for more than magical shopkeepers to whistle up diverting photo opportunities to entertain themselves.