The Conservative Party leadership contest took an unexpected turn on Tuesday night when the second TV debate between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss had to be abandoned after its host fainted live on air.
Kate McCann, TalkTV’s political editor, had just posed a question to Ms Truss when the incident occured midway through The Sun’s Showdown: The Fight for No.10.
The foreign secretary was discussing the necessity of standing up to Russian president Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine when a sudden loud crash was heard off-camera.
A visibly shocked Ms Truss put her hands to her face and gasped “Oh my god…” before stepping down from the podium to go to the presenter’s aid before the channel cut the feed.
The broadcast then briefly resumed, showing the two candidates talking to a small audience in the studio, although there was no sound.
TalkTV quicky apologised to viewers for not resuming the programme in a tweeted statement that read: “Kate McCann fainted on air tonight, and although she is fine, the medical advice was that we shouldn’t continue with the debate.
“We apologise to our viewers and listeners.”
Both candidates subsequently tweeted messages to Ms McCann wishing her well and pledging to return for a second attempt in future, the pair having clashed over their tax and spending plans, the cost of living crisis and the funding of the NHS before the debate was prematurely terminated.
Jordan Kiss, a member of the audience at TalkTV’s studio in Ealing, west London, told the Press Association: “We were honestly shocked by what happened and some of us were quite worried.
“The producers reassured us and told us that a paramedic was on scene and that he was giving Kate attention.”
The incident was not the first setback to hit the broadcast that evening: Ms McCann had been due to be joined on stage by The Sun’s political editor Harry Cole, only for him to test positive for Covid-19 earlier in the day.
That left the journalist to hold the fort alone.
Ms McCann is an experienced Westminster veteran who studied politics at Newcastle University between 2006 and 2009 and was previously at The Guardian and City AM before serving as political correspondent to The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and Sky News.
Ms McCann was highly commended at the Press Awards in 2017 for her exclusive on the Labour Party’s general election manifesto after it was leaked and, a year later, chaired the parliamentary Press Gallery, becoming only the second woman to do so in 200 years.
She joined Rupert Murdoch’s new channel in January, which began broadcasting on 25 April and counts Piers Morgan and Tom Newton Dunn among its star names
Explaining her decision to join TalkTV in an interview with The Press Gazette this spring, Ms McCann said she was attracted by the opportunity to “rip up all the rules and start again”, explaining that she had become disillusioned by the status quo of political reporting during the fractious Brexit years and over the course of the pandemic.
