Sketch: On ITV's This Morning, Theresa May continued her tireless work to get degree-less people into No 10

A less modest Prime Minister might have been inclined to mention their own tireless efforts to improve access to No 10 for those without degrees, most notably a chap called Jeremy Corbyn

Theresa May was meant to be on ITV’s This Morning with Holly and Phillip to talk about making life fairer for students. So it was nothing if not fitting that her late arrival forced producers to fill time by dispatching a man in a cow outfit to knock on a random pensioner’s door and give her five grand in cash.

In any event, the Prime Minister had already been upstaged by this point by I’m A Celebrity! winner Georgia “Toff” Toffolo bravely baring all in her battle with cystic acne.

It was to be her first appearance on the This Morning sofa since becoming Prime Minister, so we must assume there is someone in No 10 who has identified monochrome-barneted former dreamcoat wearer Phillip Schofield as the gateway to the nation’s youth.

But if the plan really was to capture the just-rolled-out-of-bed undergraduate market, Theresa May frankly should have arrived on time, and not handed the precious 11.10am slot to Pat from “secret location” and the cow with the briefcase full of twenty quid notes.

Back to the matter at hand. The Prime Minister appears to have decided that the higher education policy that has come to pass during the previous eight years in which she has been either Home Secretary or Prime Minister is unfair and needs a rethink.

And to prove she is serious she has launched a year-long review, the conclusions of which are already all but decided, and will not come anywhere near close to abolishing tuition fees as Jeremy Corbyn has promised to, and had he not done none of this would be happening.

Looking only mildly more startled to be on live TV than the pensioner who’d opened her front door to a TV crew and a bipedal Holstein Friesian half an hour before, the Prime Minister gave Holly and Phillip the same precooked spiel she’d emailed out last night and would be saying at a speech in Derbyshire two hours later. She recognises that “many young people, their parents and grandparents have serious concerns” about “aspects of the current system” – the principal one being the massive sums of money involved in getting a degree that is highly likely to turn out to be worthless. That even student fees policy can be delivered through the prism of grandparental concern is revealing of the strange psychological space our Prime Minister inhabits.

She wants to end the stigma of vocational training, which she says is too often seen “as something for other people’s children”, which if you have no trace of ever having stepped outside Oxford-educated Conservative Party social circles is probably true, but if you’re at home watching Holly and Phillip at noon on a Monday dare I say possibly isn’t.

She faced three difficult questions from Holly and Phillip. One, on whether she ever “enjoyed a takeaway”, she flat out refused to answer.

A second, on whether she was “enjoying the job”, she replied, “yes,” then paused, grimaced, and said “yes” again. As everyone knows, the more times you say “yes” in reply to a yes or no question, the more clear it becomes you are telling the truth.

On the toughest one of all, it’s arguable Schofers should have done his homework. Could you be Prime Minister without going to university?

May reached out and found the closest available rock. “John Major! John Major never went to university!” Indeed he did not.

And nor did Winston Churchill, Disraeli and the Duke of Wellington who unarmed as they were with degrees from Oxford were unable to, say, lose their parliamentary majority by accident, take their country out of the EU by accident, or bomb Iraq if not by accident then for reasons that remain a touch unclear.

Still, to give Theresa May credit, a less modest Prime Minister might have been inclined to mention their own tireless efforts to improve access to No 10 for those without degrees, which, should Jeremy Corbyn get another chance at a general election, might well be her defining legacy.