What Caroline Lucas has to say about Natalie Bennett's nightmare interview

At the end of the week in which her party leader, Natalie Bennett, had a public meltdown in an interview with LBC radio, Green party MP Caroline Lucas spoke to Cole Moreton in the Independent on Sunday about her reaction.

“All of us can have a bad day,” says Lucas, who won Brighton Pavilion at the last election and became the party’s first MP. She used to be leader but handed over to Natalie Bennett, who gave one of the worst political interviews of all time on Tuesday.

She undoubtedly had a bad day. It was excruciatingly embarrassing. She should have been on top of the figures and wasn’t, but we are human. These things do happen.

Bennett apologised almost immediately after her self-confessed “brain freeze” and Lucas is adamant that all politicians have bad days:

Ed Miliband famously forgot the deficit in his conference speech. Boris Johnson regularly forgets … everything! And he gets away with it. So I think a bit of proportion is useful. We had a very bad day on Tuesday, but that was one person, one day.

When asked why she stood down as leader of the party, Lucas explained:

We are serious about getting people elected. The calculation was that I would still have profile by being an MP. If someone else was able to build profile too with the name of leader, then our chances of getting more and broader coverage would be increased.

It has worked. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it were not for Tuesday.”

You can read the full interview here.

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