Question Time 14th May 2026
The Panel:
Jenny Chapman (Labour)
Michael Gove (Conservative)
Danny Kruger (Reform UK)
Steve Wright (Fire Brigades Union)
Venue: Brecon London
It is a sun-filled spring day in the little town, cloudless and heaven blue, the cobbled streets silent and hunched in expectation. Bunting hangs about the shops, town clock and Welfare Hall. Torn from gilded dreams of bridesmaids’ gowns or bucking ranches and roaring seas, principality girls and boys line the streets holding red dragon flags. Listen and wait. Listen and wait.
Hushed, the babies are waiting too, and the farmers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewoman and the tidy wives. Horses, anthracite and statuesque, wait in the fields. Cows listen in the byers. You can hear the dew lifting and the hushed town breathing.
The mayor is in attendance. The town clerk, from a gravel bucket, cures the final high street pot hole with a confident pat of a ceremonial civic shovel. A pocessional salt slow musical wind of expectation moves in the streets, through the squat chapel, past Ocky the milkman’s loft. Pausing over Dai Bread’s bakery, it wafts from Cockle Street towards the four-ale Sailor’s Arms. Listen and wait. Listen and wait.
In the local tradition of neo-Romantic, symbolist surrealism, Puffins can hear the townspeople’s unspoken innermost thought: ‘Where the hell is Fiona Bruce?’
After apologising to Dylan Thomas, QT Review HQ is obliged to note that this week’s Question Time was billed as coming from the harmless Welsh town of Brecon (population 8,250). In breathless expectation, the May 5th edition of The Brecon & Radnor Express trumpeted: ‘BBC’s Question Time is coming to Brecon next week for a post-Senedd election special.’
The Powys County Times even published an application form to join the audience. Ominously directed to an eu. web address, the selection wallahs wondered of which ethnic group the Breconites belong to and how they voted in the EU referendum (of ten years ago).
However, in a move that would make any Welsh poet rage, rage, into a Thursday night, the (possible) Labour leadership election, grieving its way through one or two posh streets hundreds of miles away amongst the Islingtonians, takes precedence over the good men, grave men, wise men, drunkards and tidy wives that constitute the other 99.99% of the UK.
Moved to London, one wonders what’s the point, as, as ever, the panel will be metropolitan types parachuted into the provinces anyway? Not to worry. An odd London lineup, not involving any Labour leadership challengers or their proxies, begged the question why not just stick with Brecon?
Only one MP was present. Jenny Chapman is labelled by the BBC guff as Labour but is in the House of Lords. Michael Gove, labelled as Conservative, stepped down from the House of Commons at the last election. The one Member is Reform UK’s Danny Kruger, a suspicion being he’s there to field La Bruce’s now weekly Nigel Farage donations bouncer.
***
Question One: Tinged April wondered if a change in leadership would actually help or just be a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic?
Spectator editor, former Conservative cabinet minister and ‘architect of Brexit’, Michael Gove was first to declare. La Bruce began by reminding Michael he was a backstabber of PMs himself – which Gove ignored. He preferred to tell us that the plan has to change rather than the personalities. Any successor to Mr Starmer needs to lay out a case, to tell us what needs to change.
When prompted by the chair to choose a candidate in a thus far non-contest with no candidates, Mr Gove knifed Shabama Mahmood in the front with a Tory big beast endorsement topped with faint praise. The camera returned to April, who’d fallen asleep.
Jenny didn’t like these prime ministerial changes. And suggested Starmer should stay. I wonder why? Surrey-born Jenny Chapman, not her real name, Jennifer Smith, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, is a former MP of the aforementioned northern town, elevated to the peerage by, erm, Kier Starmer. Husband is Nick Smith, Member of Parliament for Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney and one of the 111 Labour MPs who earlier this week signed a letter of support for Kier Starmer.
Andy Burnham has made a move. Should the NEC let him stand? asked La Bruce. Nothing would have made 52-year-old Surrey-born Jenny stand down from her ‘home town’ of Darlo, she began. (Even if he is allowed, one muses, it would be sweet if the local party didn’t select him.)
Makerfield is a great place, continued Jenny, and she would be up there campaigning if there’s a bye-election to try to install Burnham into the interesting Josh Simons’ (Lord Simons of Makerfield’s?) possibly soon-to-be vacant seat.
Yes, interesting. Mr Josh’s credits include paying PR firm APCO £30k+ to investigate journalists (including their backgrounds and funding) who exposed Labour Together’s undeclared donations. Simons, a Labour Cabinet Office minister at the time and ex-director of Labour Together, was forced to resign in February of this year.
Simons was accused of contacting the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the spy agency GCHQ, and making false claims of a link between Times journalists, pro-Kremlin networks and Russian disinformation.
Mark Wright wanted a policy change too, at the conclusion of a timetable for Starmer’s leaving. The vote was for change two years ago, which hasn’t happened. The fire service has been ‘decimated’ by 14 years of Tory ‘cuts’. Perhaps it’s about priorities?
Besides – or perhaps instead of – spending money on putting out fires or saving cats from trees, the scarce resources go on pontificating that, ‘No one should be asked to prove the sex on their birth certificate to use a bathroom’. Meanwhile, the steering committee of their Disabled & Neurodivergent Members forum issues statements condemning (alleged) government cuts to welfare.
Rather than drive a big red engine at high speed beneath flashing lights, Pink Watch urges that ‘LGBT+ history is more important than ever ‘As Trump’s America turns back the clock.’
Burnham shouldn’t have been blocked in the first place. Wright blamed Blair, Mandelson, and McSweeney for the present difficulties, perhaps not realising that Burnham is being manipulated into a seat thanks to the sacrifice of an MP from the same clique.
Danny didn’t want a change as it would be a change to the Left because of the influence of the unions. Both main parties are split. The priority should be welfare savings channelled to defence. The income tax bill = the welfare bill. Kruger would prefer a general election.
Not quite his real name, Daniel Rayne Kruger was born in Westminster and educated at Eton College and the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. The 51-year-old’s mother is Dame Pru Leith, a restaurateur and prolific BBC presenter. His father was the late author Rayne Kruger. Saffers hailing from the Eastern Cape, the Leith-Kruger’s made their English home in Chastleton Glebe — a rambling stone house set within a 30-acre Gloucestershire garden, complete with a one-acre lake.
Remaining in the media bubble, Danny’s cousin Sam is the literary editor of Michael Gove’s Spectator. Penny Junor, of the Daily Express and BBC, is an in-law. Never having had a job, after Oxford, Danny drifted through a series of political non-positions before becoming the MP for Devizes in the 2019 general election. Having held the seat in the 2024 election, he defected to Reform UK two months later.
La Bruce turned to the posh London audience. Rather than farmers, tradesmen, cockle women and policemen, they resembled lanyard types. Few could afford a tie, jacket or razor blade. On a show of hands – in tune with the provinces – few wanted a sixth prime minister in seven years.
Next week’s programme comes from Dumfries, in striking distance of QT Review HQ. Should I apply for a speaking part in the audience? Or should we allow the Doonhamers the same sort of lucky escape that the good people of Brecon are most probably relieved about tonight?
© Always Worth Saying 2026
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file
