“I think I should talk less.” And yet, here we are….

She has, understandably, no wish to revisit the episode, but she seems to struggle, a bit, with her newfound media training-by-fire: her instinct seems to be to answer a question directly put; experience tells her it would probably be a bad idea, the two imperatives keep flashing across her face. Did she want the job very much? “I don’t really know. I didn’t expect to get it. I would have loved to do what I’m doing now, which is taking poetry into the science labs, going round college to college. I would have found the lectures daunting, but I would have enjoyed the challenge of them. So I don’t know – it became … I’d never been part of a campaign before, and other people …”

The day before she resigned she was having lunch with “some old friends, and one is an artist, and the other is an actor. And they were talking about their work, and it was so interesting. And I thought, ‘This is my life. I like talking about work, thinking about work, and where I am and what I’m doing.’”

Is there anything she regrets? “I think I should talk less.” She laughs. How about the emails? “Do we need to talk about this really?, because it’ll just be picked up by other papers. I mean, I wrote things in response to people who asked me about things. And I think that’s probably all I will say.”