Following a far from quiet week in the world of politics, an evening in the audience of BBC Radio Four's Any Questions? promised to be an entertaining spectacle. The Cambridge Union played host to the radio predecessor of Question Time, where a chamber of both town and gown posed their current affair questions to the panel. 

The show has a near identical format to its television sibling; its host Jonathan Dimbleby is even brother of Question Time’s David Dimbleby. Answering the questions were Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng, the sociologist and political activist Dr Lisa McKenzie, former senior diplomat and Ambassador to the US Sir Nigel Sheinwald, and the Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry MP. 

Before the show went live the production team gave a behind-the-scenes insight into the programme. Over 68 years the format hasn’t changed; panellists do not see the questions beforehand and unlike Question Time the audience is not vetted. Although only ten questions are selected for the show we were given a best of the rest; favourites included: “My wife is attracted to Jeremy Hunt, what should I do?” and “Does Donald trump Brexit?”. As expected the spectre of Trump dominated much of the debate. 

The first question took a rather philosophical turn: “What is wrong with populism?”. It received an equally philosophical answer from McKenzie who in turn asked, “What is populism?” and questioned whether we should accept the media’s message that “a racist, right wing… campaign” is what should be deemed ‘popular’. 

Both Thornberry and Sheinwald took the question head on. The latter argued that the problem is when it turns into “demagoguery” and a “style of lies and dishonesty”. Similarly Thornberry pointed to the difficulty of giving “easy answers to complex questions” and denounced Trump as “deplorable” for “playing on people’s fears in relation to immigration”. 

Kwarteng sought to challenge this narrative, maintaining that it is easy to sit in Cambridge, “cloak ourselves in moral virtue and say that Donald Trump is a very bad man, but that doesn’t get to the heart of the problem”. Instead we need to deal with the fact he will become President and address the issues he’s raised. 

The audience continued to focus on Trump, with one member asking whether the election meant “the era of globalisation was in peril” and another if “it opened the door to better relations with Russia”. Thornberry highlighted that given a post-Brexit Britain’s reliance on the US as a trading partner, we ought to be “very worried” about Trump’s protectionism.

Sheinwald remained sceptical of Trump’s ability to curtail globalisation and questioned his diplomacy. The former ambassador argued that globalisation is a “fact of life” and so “Trump is going to have to change his position” on global trade. He also expressed “anxiety” that it is Trump’s “finger on the nuclear button”. 

More radically, McKenzie contended that globalisation was “a straw man” and that the “real problems are capitalism and unfair societies”. The LSE academic also claimed that irrelevant of personal relations “the top level of governments are always strangle-held by international companies and organisations”.

However, it was not Trump or the possibility of nuclear war that aroused the most debate, but a topic more apt given the setting of the Union. The final question asked whether no-platforming offensive views was “sanitising University campuses”. Strangely the anarchist and the Conservative had a brief convergence of views, with both McKenzie and Kwarteng disparaging no-platforming and hailing free-discussion. 

Drawing on her experience in the anti-fascist movement, McKenzie explained how no-platforming was originally used to stop the far-right from recruiting using public meetings. However, with the rise of social media “there is a platform for everybody” and she advised that if you disagree with someone “take their argument down”, giving Nick Griffin’s dismantling on Question Time as an example. This was welcomed by the chamber and received the loudest applause of the evening.  In the shows’ final seconds Dimbleby asked the chamber if anyone was sympathetic to the view of no-platforming; only a couple of lonely hands went up amongst the crowd. 

I left the Union musing that as the world around us seems to be going a little mad, at least the panel shows will be entertaining.