Sir David Attenborough regularly battles it out with the Queen for the title of the county’s “most trusted person” – a fact he always puts down to a single cause.

“I have never done a commercial. Never. Ever,” he said in a newspaper interview in 2006. “If I have any quality on the screen, it’s that people believe that what I say is true. Or at least, they certainly believe that I believe it’s true. Once it’s known that you’ll say anything, you’re as dead as doorknob. You’ve lost everything.”

Something for, say, Liz Truss, Johnny Mercer, Matt Hancock, Rishi Sunak, Kit Malthouse and various others to consider, next time the phone rings and it’s Boris Campaign HQ offering a sensational opportunity to stand in for the great man on the Today programme or The Emma Barnett Show. Although it’s very much too late now.

It was almost troubling to see David Attenborough walking through the security doors and into one of the meeting rooms in the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday morning, to give evidence to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. For someone who’s spent several decades turning down opportunity after opportunity to go on air and not tell the truth, well, let’s just say the House of Commons isn’t his natural habitat.

Read more: Independent