If Boris was hoping for a quieter day after yesterday’s drama, he was hopelessly misguided. Breakfastime brought two more resignations – Laura Trott as a Transport PPS and Will Quince the Children’s minister – taking the total of quitters up to 12. Awkwardly both happened while the new Chancellor was live on air. Nick Robinson enjoyed breaking the news…

Unfortunately for The Today Programme, neither resignee had the courtesy to go on the show and make the announcement live on air, given – thanks to Health Minister Maria Caulfield – we know the programme has been actively trying to stitch up on air resignations for maximum impact.

Late last night Caulfield received a message from a name some long-time co-conspirators might recognise: Tom Smithard. Smithard, a Today producer has been asking round ministers to see whether they’d be willing to announce their resignations live on the show.

Tweeting out the message screenshot Caulfield accused the BBC of playing “one big game”.

This is far from the first embarrassing communique from Smithard that Guido’s reported on. Back in 2015 Smithard was working for – unsurprisingly – LibDem HQ under the pompously titled job of “Parliamentary Campaigns & Intelligence Analyst”. During his time in the job he strangely emailed Lynton Crosby to ask whether – following his successful advice to the Tories about how to clobber the LibDems at the election – they’d be willing to “unlock some of the secrets of your targeting strategy, polling work, ground campaigning” – a request the LibDems admitted to Guido was somewhat naive. For now the Today programme will have to cope with watching resignation play out from the sidelines – not everyone can be TalkTV…