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Beth Rigby has revealed how she decided on a ‘narrative’ before questioning Labor and Tory leaders at the Sky News special – and how a morning jog almost ruined it.

Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak took turns for a 45-minute barbecue at Sky News’ battle for number 10 in Grimsby, with questions from a representative audience.

First to question both leaders was political editor Rigby, who lifted the lid on what it’s like to prepare, execute (and almost miss) the big event.

“Kay Burley said to me when I first got into television, ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’,” she told former Labor MP Margaret Hodge on Electoral dysfunction podcast.

“So I took those two mottos into this very intense interview preparation … you get a lot of information and you start trying to figure out what the narrative is that you want to tell.”

The secret, she said, is to look at everything and then “distill it” until you have a clear “narrative arc.”

“With Starmer, it was really — how can you trust this guy? That was the premise,” she said.

“But for Sunak, it was like, you said you had a clear plan, you said you would deliver… so what’s the Conservative record? But more importantly, what is your record?

“Because you were actually prime minister. You made five pledges and then there was the wider question of what the betrayals of the British people were about.’

But disaster almost struck before the event began.

“The night before, I woke up at five in the morning, wide awake,” she said, adding that she was “feeling the adrenaline.”

So he decided to go for a run.

“I just saw that I was coming to the end of the road. And I went to turn around and as I turned around, I almost ran into a moving car. So I almost got hit,” she explained.

Not the kind of car accident one would have expected that day.

Listen to the full podcast here:

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