There were two shambles in Devizes on Friday night – the one in the Market Place and another which was the pig’s ear that was made of the first question time held by the town’s MP with his constituents.

If you know anything about how to stage a public Q&A, you have to feel sorry for Danny Kruger, the Conservative Member for Devizes, as this was a perfect study in how to do it badly.

For starters, it very much assists the flow and understanding of such an occasion if one can hear what questions are being asked.

But the Assembly Room at the town hall with its high and chandeliered ceilings was built as a ballroom for dancing, not as an ideal venue for a political forum.

Consequently, its acoustics are rubbish and quite a number of the 100 people assembled to “ask Danny anything”, as the organisers had promoted the event, frequently were yelling “speak up” to questioners seemingly muttering into their anoraks from the floor.

It was precisely to overcome the problem of speaking to and listening to a large group of people that Thomas Edison invented the microphone in 1877 and the organisers of Danny’s hour-long session with his electorate had realised that.

So two microphones were provided, one for Danny and another for the questioners, and large speakers had been arranged to enable all to hear what was been said.

But did Danny use the mike? No, his strong, confident and articulate voice, honed recently at many of his fine and thoughtful speeches in the Commons, does not need it.

But others did, we really needed to hear what on earth they were murmuring and had Danny’s allies – which I presume must include the Devizes Conservatives Association – organised this event correctly, the microphones and speakers would have been utilised.

Also, the way you properly stage a Q&A, whether it be a press conference or a public meeting, is this: you have an MC who introduces the speaker, and thanks him at the end, and who selects questioners from the floor. This ensures order and, as I say, a flow.

But Danny dispensed with such formality. You could tell from his unannounced arrival, when he simply walked in without introduction, casually dressed in black jeans-like trousers and a blue jacket which looked like it had shrunk in the wash, that this was going to be a laid-back do, less of the gravitas of an audience with one’s Member of Parliament and more like meeting your old mucker Dan The Man down at The Dolphin.

Consequently, instead of the floor being commanded by constituents who may have asked questions of local importance like the progress of the town’s bid to have a railway station, the controversial proposed development off Hillworth Road, the other Shambles and the need for more jobs, we endured 45 minutes of the hour taken up by questions like was Boris Johnson a Putin puppet, were Ministers shielding Russian oligarchs and other intellectual inanity - suggestions which Danny rebuffed with passion and destroyed with ease.

It was a shame that so many of those who had seemingly come to just rock the political boat were given their head because Danny Kruger is clearly an astute, erudite and intelligent speaker and he has a budding statesmanship to him which, coupled with his evident Christian decency, marks him as a potential Prime Minister one day.

He has an honest air about him, an openness that is commendable and attractive.

More’s the pity, then, that this occasion, which could have been an early indication of what I suspect will be a long political career of greatness for the ex-Etonian was allowed to be nothing of the sort.