Deputy prime minister David Lammy has been left humiliated after a disastrous GB News segment, which saw him branded a “big letdown”. Anchor Nana Akua was interviewing barrister Phillip Taylor live on the programme about Lammy’s proposition to televise terrorism and spying court cases, which she worried could inspire copycat crimes.

Akua said on the show: “I’m wondering how putting cameras in for spy cases, terrorism cases – I would have thought that would be the last case I would televise, just in case you end up with copycats or anything like this. I just don’t get it. What is David Lammy, in your view, trying to achieve?” Taylor responded with four words that would seal Lammy’s fate – “letting us all down”.

He said: “Well, David Lammy is doing what he normally does. That is, he is letting us all down. He’s been a great disappointment to many of us with what he’s done so far, and this concept now of televising just about everything, he’s just simply unacceptable.

“It’s important, I think, for the public to know what sentencing remarks are passed on defendants at the end of a trial. That’s important. But the idea of extending it to terrorism and to a whole range of areas is, to my mind, completely unacceptable and just not in the interests of anybody.

“These are matters that have to be dealt with by the courts, and I think it should just stay there and we should have a minimal amount of televised activity.”

Akua then said: “With the Crown Prosecution Service on its knees, literally, this is what he’s come up with? To put cameras into cases where, actually, you probably wouldn’t want the full thing televised.

“He’s not really given much of an idea about how much of it would be televised, but I just don’t understand what would be the benefit. What’s the value?”

Taylor explained: “The value is to save his political career, putting it bluntly, because as I said he’s been a big disappointment to us in the legal profession.

“But there again unfortunately, as you’ve seen, Mr Blair’s intervention this evening, we are in the same position again where the left and the right in the Labour Party are fighting it out.

“I think Mr Lammy is trying desperately hard now to push more of a left-wing agenda, which is very much against the conservative with a small C approach which most lawyers have.

“I think he’s been a big letdown, because he’s actually not doing what I think we all expected him to do, which is to show the gravitas of the role of Lord Chancellor and adopt that sort of approach.”