And yes it’s true, I did say it. As someone tweeted…

Not many people can claim to have said that on their first day in a new job. Good work!

Hey ho. At least it gave people a laugh, I suppose. I thought I had rescued it and corrected myself having only said the ‘cu’ bit. But apparently not. Some might say that there was something going on in my subconscious because the interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury had not quite gone according to plan. I had to pre-record it this morning and we had intended to put it out as our main interview at 5pm, but that was scuppered by the Huhne/Pryce sentencing. In the end we broadcast it at 5.45 (you can hear some of it HERE)

But that wasn’t the problem. I walked into the studio and said hello to the Archbishop and his press officer. After the initial pleasantries I was suddenly told that there were to be no questions on the Bishops’ letter to the Sunday Telegraph on welfare cuts. “Not even one,” I asked. “No, we’ve said what we have got to say,” said His Grace. Now, put yourself in my position. What would you have done? Essentially there were three options…

  1. Agree to it
  2. Say no and refuse to conduct the interview
  3. Slip a question in anyway

Although it was not said directly, I was pretty sure that if I had taken option 3 they would have stopped the interview and walked out. Option 2 was a non-starter. This was my big interview in my first Drivetime show and I couldn’t risk it going wrong. So I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and agreed to it on the basis that there were plenty of other things to discuss. I have to say I have never had anyone impose conditions on an interview before, and if it had been a politician I’d have told them to sling their hook, or asked it anyway. But in thee circumstances I reckoned if I took that approach I wouldn’t only jeopardise LBC’s relationship with Lambeth Palace, but other stations in the Global Radio group too. So criticise me if you like for giving in, but would you really have done anything different? What I did do, after the interview was played out, was to explain why I hadn’t asked about welfare benefits. It was the least I could do.

But it seems that the Archbishop did indeed want to clarify his views on welfare reform. Here is his latest Blogpost

I was also told that the interview could only be 3-4 minutes. Sod that for a game of soldiers, I thought to myself. And to her credit the press officer kept quiet and didn’t try to intervene after four minutes. But after 11 and a half minutes I thought I’d better stop.

The rest of the programme was relatively incident free. We did a lot on the Huhne/Pryce case including a great interview with Jonathan Aitken who described his journey in a prison van through London after he had been jailed. And we had a great last hour with Skills Minister Matt Hancock where we had a phone in on apprenticeships. The switchboard was jammed and he really seemed to enjoy it. I tweeted a picture of him and said how he seemed to be enjoying himself. He retweeted it and then added the hashtag #twank. After my previous four letter faux pas I decided to refrain from passing comment..

UPDATE: Some kind soul has uploaded my moment of shame to Audioboo. If you really have to listen, it’s HERE