Like the characters in Ripley and Saltburn, the perfectly well-to-do PM longs to be even better-to-do

Psychologically speaking, I feel I understood the last two prime ministers only as they were leaving us. With Liz Truss this might seem understandable, given she was in office for 10 minutes. Then again she had been around for years – yet it was only watching her final days, and then reading one illuminating political obituary, that I felt I got it. “I met Truss at university,” wrote Tanya Gold in Politico, “long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart.”

Ah, I see, I suddenly thought. Why had I not got it before? My surmises felt further confirmed reading Rory Stewart’s political memoir, when Truss asks how his weekend has been. “I explained that my father had died,” Stewart writes. “She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when the 25-year environment plan would be ready.” Was Truss being deliberately heartless? Or did she, in the moment, forget the learned thing to do in the situation, which didn’t come to her reflexively, as it might to most? Perhaps the same thing happened when she beat Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership contest and didn’t shake his hand.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Sunak’s interview about going without Sky TV as a child was the perfect warm-up act but Keir Starmer got a few laughs too

Well, there’s good news for Sacha Baron Cohen: The Brothers Grimsby is no longer the most excruciating thing set in Grimsby. Asked to name something that might endear him to the public, the exhausted-looking prime minister basically spent a long time gibbering “I like sweets.” As someone famously deprived of a Sky subscription as a child, Rishi Sunak would not have been able to watch this televised “leaders’ event” when he was growing up. The tragedy is that Sky News is now free, so these days he’d be able to watch himself get repeatedly laughed at by the audience. (Not that that was entirely plain sailing for Keir Starmer, who seemed surprised to find his trusty “my father was a toolmaker” line drawing a burst of jaded cackles too.)

Anyway: Starmer v Sunak. The challenger v the gaffer. They call Rishi Sunak the gaffer because he will do you a gaffe at least three times a day. In terms of TV spectacle and drama, last week’s debate between these two largely had the flavour of leafing through a wooden furniture catalogue, with each leading man occasionally outshone by his lectern. That said, I keep reading that what every single one of the British people crave is for politics to be really, really boring. In which case: sorry, Mr Bates vs the Post Office – you just lost the Bafta.

‘You’re with another man who’s box office,’ a journalist tells Farage, who will now have to push Anderson down a staircase

In the car park of Morrisons, Ashfield’s parliamentary candidate Lee Anderson is making Reform leader Nigel Farage sign a giant placard reading “SIGN HERE IF YOU WANT YOUR COUNTRY BACK”. Only then will Nigel be allowed to wang on about the adjacent statues commemorating the bodyline Ashes series. At least, I think those are the rules of whichever arcane election campaign game we’re playing today. Either way, a bronze Donald Bradman is facing local boy Harold Larwood outside the supermarket and, now Nigel has signed the card, he explains that Bradman “was the best of all time in any sport”. Possible. Then again, he was never going to say Ali.

To Kirkby in Ashfield, anyway. By the time he got here – the yard-arm, obviously – Farage had pulled out of his scheduled BBC leaders’ interview for Tuesday night (possibly related to Hitler; more on him later) and had two objects thrown at him by some utter idiot in Barnsley who is unlikely to open the bowling for England any time soon. No doubt he’ll throw some objects at himself once he works out that he’s probably given Nigel a poll boost.