We've all been asked to do things we don't want to do sometimes. We've all come up with excuses to avoid certain responsibilities, be it through pulling a sickie at work (not us of course!) or pretending we are too busy.
But we daresay most of us have not sunk to the morally dubious depths of pretending that members of our family have died to get out of certain work events.
This, however, is just what Liz Truss allegedly did when she didn't want to appear on BBC Question Time when she was the justice minister.
On the Whitehall Sources podcast, Truss's former spad Kirsty Buchanan revealed all.
Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter
She said: "Liz Truss when I worked for her, she obviously didn't like the media so we used to spend quite a lot of time making up excuses and killing off minor members of her family so that she didn't have to go on Question Time... we ran out of excuses to go on Question Time so eventually we had to do it. I mean minor people like aunts and cousins and things. I'm not talking about major members of the family.
She said that when Truss eventually appeared on the politics show, it went pretty badly because she had to speak alongside a "long-term baiter of hers".
\u201c\u201cWe used to \u2018kill off\u2019 minor family members\u201d to keep Liz Truss off BBC Question Time.\n\nShe didn\u2019t like the media. So here\u2019s what advisers did:\u201d— Whitehall Sources (@Whitehall Sources) 1666161656
"She said to me, I don't care who is on the panel as long as it is not 'X' and I'm not going to tell you who 'X' is," she said.
"So we turn up at the Green Room and there is the one person, the one person she didn't want to go on the panel with, and she looked at me and if looks could kill... I don't know if they did it on purpose because he's a long-time baiter of hers."
Oh dear. And that was just when Truss was a minister. She is now, of course, the prime minister, and as such faces a lot more scrutiny from the media on loads of issues including the fractures in her party, her disastrous economic policies, and her inability to answer a question properly.
It might be time for some third cousins twice removed to take one for the team and kick the bucket, just to give her a break.
Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.