Nick Robinson: Liz Truss cancelled, but public want their leaders interviewed

Nick Robinson: "Broadcast interviews matter for the health of our democracy"

All those people who told me "She'll never do it. She'd have to be mad. Why would she take the risk?" turn out to have been right. That's what pretty much everyone said when BBC One announced that I would be doing interviews with both candidates to be our next prime minister.

Rishi Sunak agreed to an interview of around half-an-hour at the start of the Tory leadership campaign.

For weeks, Liz Truss, the bookies' and the pundits' favourite to be our next prime minister didn't say yes or no to our invitation to answer questions in the studio on the energy crisis, soaring inflation, warnings of a looming recession, long waits and backlogs in the NHS, her style of leadership and much more besides. Until, that is, she did agree to a date: tonight. Now she has changed her mind and cancelled the interview because, her team say, she is "too busy".

I've no doubt she is very, very busy. The campaign is not yet over. About 5,000 Conservative members are expected to be in the audience for the final hustings in London on Wednesday night. More importantly, however, with just a week until she is likely to move into No 10, Liz Truss will be busy working out what to do rather than simply what to say.

The prospect of soaring energy bills is already terrifying millions of people. They know, as Truss does, that the policies she has so far promised - a cut in national insurance and taking so-called "green levies" off gas and electricity bills - won't help all those who don't pay tax and don't run big businesses.

• WATCH: Nick Robinson's leadership interview with Rishi Sunak (UK only)

Her promise to focus on a "Conservative solution" to energy bills - tax cuts, not, what she calls, handouts - raises big questions about whether it will reach the people who need the money most and do so quickly enough to avoid real hardship in a few weeks' time.

Even Truss supporter and current chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has said that he's worried about those on quite good incomes as well as pensioners and those on benefits. People earning £40,000 a year and more will find household energy bills of thousands of pounds very hard to cope with.

I suspect - although can't know - that Truss has yet to finalise her plans and is reluctant to have that demonstrated on TV in front of an audience of millions. Fair enough. That's her choice.

The BBC doesn't believe it is entitled to interview those who govern or want to govern us. I'm all too aware of the huge pressure politicians, and their often very small teams, face. However, I do want to say why broadcast interviews matter for the health of our democracy. That may sound impossibly grand, so let me explain.

In this contest, tens of millions of people have had no say in the choice of their own leader. They want to see and hear their leaders questioned, challenged and tested.

That's all very well, politicians and their advisers shout as they read that last sentence. But they increasingly see TV and radio interviews as all risk and almost no opportunity.

High-vis jacket moment

One told me that these days click-hungry broadcasters collude with aggressive political campaigners in a process described as "gotcha, gotcha, gotcha; clip, clip, clip; share, share, share".

Remind them of the days when Margaret Thatcher relished pitting her wits against the likes of Robin Day or Brian Walden, and they accuse me of misty eyed nostalgia. Interviews are no longer, they say, about sitting for half-an-hour or more on a sofa and engaging in a grown-up conversation. What happens now, they claim, is that not as many people watch or listen to interviews live, while many view short excerpts on social media which are usually gaffes or grandstanding questions by preening interviewers.

Up to a point. About two million people watched my BBC One interview with Rishi Sunak. Some seven million listen to the big interviews on the Today programme. What they want to hear is an argument being made about what a leader can do to address the issues that shape their lives.

Hold on, say the spin doctors, you can see and hear Truss and Sunak every day on the news and in a series of Tory hustings. So, why the fuss about an interview?

Liz Truss questioned by Julia Hartley-Brewer at a hustings event

Short clips on the news are, all too often, simply a televised press release or the broadcast equivalent of a tweet. They are what the politician wants you to hear that day. To be clear, talking to a camera while holding up a fish in a market, or playing pool, or wearing a high-vis jacket on a building site, is valuable for folk like me when putting together a TV news package, but it ain't proper scrutiny or accountability.

Hustings are better but they are party events held with an audience exclusively made up of party members. Even though good journalists like Tom Newton Dunn, John Pienaar and Julia Hartley-Brewer have posed good and revealing questions, they would not pretend that what they did was the same as a half-hour sit-down interview in a studio.

Finally, the "experts" in political communication say "I know why you want to do an interview. I accept some voters might want it to. But what the hell is in it for us?"

Programmed in sound bites

Well, during this leadership campaign, Conservative writers have seemed shocked to discover that their assumptions - about, say, the value of low taxes or "sound money"; companies making profits or the need to not give in to strikes - are not shared by millions of voters. Particularly the young.

Is it any wonder when for years politicians have been programmed by their minders to speak in short pre-scripted focus group-tested sound bites? Mrs Thatcher used interviews to make an argument and to develop a narrative. Tony Blair did the same. In fact, all the most successful politicians have realised the value of people understanding their motivation - particularly when what they want to do is unpopular.

Democracy requires the consent of the people - even those who didn't vote for you or disagree with your policies. Good government requires accountability. Restoring trust in politics requires openness about how and why decisions have been reached. That is, in large part, the job of Parliament, not TV and radio interviewers like me.

However, what we do has a role to play too.

In recent years it's become fashionable to say that that sort of political dialogue is no longer possible. The in-depth political interview is dead, say some. Boris Johnson hated them. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn weren't much keener. I hope and believe they are wrong. That's why I look forward to an in-depth interview with our next prime minister - whether it's Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak.